Dark Souls 3 Mod Adds Path Tracing, Surpassing Elden Ring’s Ray Tracing

Path tracing is arriving in Dark Souls 3 through a community mod, bringing a level of visual fidelity that surpasses official ray tracing features in FromSoftware's other titles. This update matters because it allows players to experience modern lighting techniques in a classic game, provided they have the necessary hardware. The modder Ganaboy is developing the DS Lighting Engine to implement these changes.

Community modder Ganaboy details hardware requirements for the visual update

The DS Lighting Engine mod targets specific locations within the game, including the High Wall of Lothric and Firelink Shrine. Ganaboy is currently working on a new version of this tool to support path tracing. This software modification requires NVIDIA DLSS upscaling to function properly on supported hardware.

Ganaboy states that the geometry density in Dark Souls 3 is ten times greater than in Dark Souls 2. The modder expects system requirements to be similar to the Dark Souls 2 Low End (DS2LE) version. All graphics cards that supported DS2LE will also support this new Dark Souls 3 mod.

The mod supports all NVIDIA RTX 20 and 30 series GPUs. Users may need to adjust upscaling settings, potentially moving from Quality mode to Balanced mode if they used Quality in DS2LE. FromSoftware's Elden Ring used ray-traced ambient occlusion and shadows, which the article notes pales in comparison to the modded path tracing.

A release date for the new version of the mod has not been confirmed. The modder provided these details in a video description while discussing the technical requirements. Ganaboy has not yet confirmed a release date for the updated mod.