The Witcher 3 DLSS 3 mod gives ray tracing a huge performance boost

With the new The Witcher 3 Next Generation update now released, a modder has done some digging to unlock better Nvidia DLSS 3.0 features.

A Witcher 3 mod has been released on Nexus Mods, which unlocks Nvidia’s new frame generation technology. The Witcher 3’s newest update brought with it upgraded visuals, as well as ray tracing and supersampling.

With the update, developers CD Projekt Red have obviously embedded files while they work on official solutions for Nvidia’s new technology.

Frame generation allows for Nvidia’s DLSS software to essentially look ahead and create a frame from the game before it has happened. In doing so, it means less work needs to be done by the hardware, boosting performance.

You’ll need a beefy GPU

The mod, which will require an RTX 40-series GPU, like the 4090 or 4080, is a simple file swap. In the notes, the modder said that they have simply swapped out an older 1.0 file for the latest 1.3 version, though it took some digging.

Frame generation was included in the next-gen patch, but as pointed out by user RickTheDope, this should improve what is currently available.

While DLSS 2.0 and 3.0 can help mitigate framerate drops, supersampling can only go so far. However, frame generation is designed to assist with this, but isn’t currently available across most games.

The Witcher 3 was released back in 2015 and still continues to see a massive audience on Steam, Good Old Games, and consoles. CD Projekt Red followed it up with Cyberpunk 2077, which has been used frequently in various promotional materials for Nvidia’s latest GPUs.

As both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 run on similar engines, it makes sense that the technology from Nvidia would run similarly on both games.

In our reviews and tests, we managed to achieve massive framerates while using it. It’s a genuinely great piece of software, that’s unfortunately locked behind the current generation of cards.