Dark Souls 3 gets an impressive visual update thanks to a fan-made Dark Souls 3 lighting engine mod. The enthusiast added full-fledged path tracing to the game and also demonstrated the work of NVIDIA DLSS 5 in a new version of the project. The result is lighting, shadows, and materials that have been changed so significantly that some scenes already resemble modern official remakes.
This update looks particularly impressive in the Calvary Woods location. Path tracing can calculate lighting in more detail, and DLSS 5 uses neural rendering to further process the image. In this case, the technique is used before scaling the resolution, which allows you to get improved images without causing significant performance degradation.
Mod developers have added over 80% of the entire game to BVH. Although the geometry size is around ten times larger than previous Dark Souls 2 mods, the final version of this mod should be around 3-4 GB. NRD-SH is used for image cleanup – according to the author, it provides comparable quality to ray reconstruction, but has lower requirements on RTX 20 and 30 graphics cards.
The “Dark Souls 3” lighting engine is expected to be released before the end of 2026.
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