The Witcher 3 Geralt screenshot

The Witcher 3 looks gorgeous in 4K with Reshade Ray Tracing/Path Tracing


YouTube’s ‘hodilton’ has shared a video, showing The Witcher 3 with Pascal Gilcher’s new alpha Reshade mod that adds path tracing/ray tracing GIobal Illumination effects to every DX9, DX10 and DX11 game.

Contrary to other videos we shared, The Witcher 3 is a newer title and we are really impressed by the visual improvement that this Reshade brings to it. As we’ve already said, there are some graphical glithes/issues with this alpha version of Reshade, however the visual improvement can be easily noticed.

There are also some limitations to this ray tracing/path tracing workaround. Given its  post processing shader nature, the Reshade is only using depth information available in screen space in order to provide these “path tracing” effects. Furthermore, the Reshade  does not know the light direction which may lead to some really bizarre scenes.

What this ultimately means is that this Reshade is not as perfect as NVIDIA’s real-time ray tracing techniques (or DXR if you prefer). On the other hand, it’s also not as demanding as real-time ray tracing and runs on every GPU, something that will definitely please a lot of gamers.

Still, we believe that this new version of Reshade can significantly improve the image quality of older titles, and we hope that Pascal Gilcher will further tweak it in order to resolve some of the aforementioned issues.

Last but not least, we’ve also included below a video showing this Reshade being used in Grand Theft Auto 5. We’ve shared a similar video in our previous story, however this one better illustrates the improvements that this Reshade brings to the table.

Enjoy!

The Witcher 3 - 2019 - RAY TRACING - Marty McFly's RT Shader - 4k

Grand Theft Auto V Ray tracing Global Illumination Demo