The Witcher 3’s current-gen update was a bit of a mess.Update 4.01fixed a lot of the stability issues introduced in 4.0, but problems remain. CD Projekt Red has confirmedmore fixes are coming to both PC and current-gen consoles, but 4.01 took over a month to arrive, so Witcher fans are likely going to have to deal with generally worse performance and some weird ray-tracing bugs for a little while yet.
Or maybe not. The Improved Ray Traced Shadows mod from creator Rob Jessop fixed at least one of the issues Witcher 3’s current-gen glow-up generated, and that’s shadow pop-in from the game’s new ray-tracing feature.
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“This mod greatly reduces tree shadow glitches by increasing the distance at which ray-traced trees update (higher distance needed near dawn and dusk),” Jessop writes in the mod description. “It has some performance cost, and there are different configs to choose from to trade-off between performance/quality. Ultra mode also reduces shadow pop-in of other objects, not just trees, but that wasn’t such a big problem.”
Jessop also has a pretty great explanation for just what the heck shadow pop-in is and why it happens in Witcher 3. “Shadow pop-in occurs with default settings because trees are only added to the BVH (ray tracing’s view of the world**) when they are within 20.0 meters. This is fine at noon, but at dawn or dusk shadows can easily reach 50 meters from the tree and shadows only appear or only start animating when you’re already on top of them. By increasing the distance we reduce pop-in to the point where you should never notice it.”
Obviously, this mod does nothing if you don’t have ray tracing enabled, and there are some tradeoffs to installing this mod. Jessop estimates that dialing the mod up to its ultra setting results in roughly 10 percent fewer frames, with their RTX 3080 Ti and Ryzen 9 rig only putting out roughly 44 fps. That’s not bad, but it’s not exactly great either.
The moral of the story is don’t install this mod unless you’ve got a pretty powerful gaming rig to back it up. You can download Improved Ray Traced Shadows over on Nexus Modshere.
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