The Witcher 3 Mod Addresses RTX Performance Issues Ahead Of Official Patch

thegamer.com:

The Witcher 3's current-gen update was a bit of a mess. Update 4.01 fixed a lot of the stability issues introduced in 4.0, but problems remain. CD Projekt Red has confirmed more 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