The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered Path Tracing & DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction Update Out Now

This September there’s been several new multi-million selling, DLSS 4.5-enhanced games, and numerous game updates adding DLSS 4.5 to fan favorites. As we approach October, the rate of new releases shows no signs of slowing, and there are even more DLSS updates for your library of games, improving your experiences.

Just now, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered has gone live, adding path tracing, DLSS 4.5 and a raft of other enhancements to the super popular game via a free update.

ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE Advance Access began earlier today, welcoming fighter pilots back to the classic franchise, now enhanced with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and DLAA.

Tomorrow, AION 2 Advance Access begins, giving eager gamers immediate access to the sequel to the multi-million selling MMO, with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation.

Thursday sees the Early Access release of the highly anticipated Gears of War: E-Day, featuring ray tracing, RTX Mega Geometry, and DLSS 4.5.

And in the time since our last roundup article, SILENT HILL: Townfall and HOT WHEELS™ Infinite Rush have launched with DLSS Super Resolution. And the continually-upgraded Enlisted has added path tracing and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction.

For further details about all of these DLSS 4.5 new games and updates, read on.

CD PROJEKT RED’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the best-selling and highest-rated role-playing games of all time. Now, a free update for the game has upgraded and enhanced gameplay and graphics, renaming the beloved title The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered.

On PC, NVIDIA and CD PROJEKT RED have once again collaborated closely to add a raft of transformative technologies, enabling The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered to take full advantage of today’s powerful GPUs.

Our partnership began during the development of 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, helping craft an immersive and spectacular world with PC-exclusive additions like the lauded HBAO+, and NVIDIA HairWorks, which pioneered realistic videogame hair rendering.

The collaboration continued for the release of the 2022 Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Next-Gen Update that added ray tracing and DLSS, amongst other enhancements and additions. And now, having created Cyberpunk 2077’s immersive path tracing technology in partnership with CD PROJEKT RED, we’re bringing its amazing technology, and more, to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered. Additionally, every upgrade will also be applied to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Songs of the Past, a new expansion launching in 2027.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Next-Gen Update was built on a hybrid DirectX 11-DirectX 12 renderer, adding NVIDIA RTX Global Illumination, ray-traced ambient occlusion, ray-traced shadows, and ray-traced reflections.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered is exclusively DirectX 12, greatly optimizing performance, enabling more efficient rendering, and allowing for the addition of newer, improved technology.

In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, ray tracing is far more performant, and improved, with more precise lighting, sharper and more accurate reflections, and more.

However, gamers wanting the definitive experience in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered should now activate path tracing, taking fidelity, detail and immersion to new heights.

Path tracing unifies all aspects of lighting and rendering into one system, rather than using a mix of ray-traced and rasterized effects. By rendering all elements of lighting together, with far more rays and multiple light bounces, the interplay between light, shadow and special effects can be accurately rendered, resulting in a more cohesive image.

Put another way, ray tracing focuses on improving certain aspects of a scene, be that its reflections or shadows, while path tracing improves everything.

Bounced rays inherit the color of surfaces they hit, transmitting that color to neighboring surfaces that they subsequently strike. Reflections precisely mirror their surroundings. Areas unaffected by direct sunlight are more realistically rendered by ambient and bounced lighting. Water can refract light. And indoor areas are dramatically enhanced by calculating the lighting of candles, torches and special effects.

To further optimize the performance of path tracing in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, players with GeForce RTX 40 Series and 50 Series GPUs will also benefit from the addition of Shader Execution Reorder (SER), which notably improves performance when path tracing.

Back in the 2010s, fur and hair in games was created by adding polygon strips and transparent textures to a character, and though this was a simple and performant technique, the result appeared completely static and visually uninteresting. With additional layers and some basic animation, quality and realism could be improved greatly, but dynamic movement and accurate shading remained impossible.

The solution: NVIDIA HairWorks, which added up to 115,000 DirectX 11, tessellated hair strands to characters, each reacting realistically to movement and external forces. This use of individual hairs and layers enabled dynamic lighting to permeate throughout each strand and layer, for hairs to be accurately shadowed, and for deeper layers to be self-shadowed by other hairs, improving image quality further still.

For The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we worked closely with CD PROJEKT RED throughout the game's development, adding HairWorks to Geralt's hair styles and beards, to the mane of Roach, to the manes of other horses, and to over three dozen monsters. Out in the open world, this significant undertaking resulted in the addition of HairWorks to the majority of Geralt's animal and supernatural assailants, creating immersive scenes and encounters for the duration of the 100-hour action RPG.

HairWorks pioneered realistic hair rendering, and now, a decade later, multi-platform games are shipping with performant real-time hair effects as standard.

With the addition of path tracing to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, our team has added Linear-Swept Spheres (LSS) path-traced hair rendering for Geralt and all HairWorks-enhanced NPCs and enemies on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, which introduced support for LSS primitives via their fourth generation Ray Tracing Cores.

Ray tracing and path tracing hair is particularly demanding, however. Each strand of hair is composed of tessellated triangles, and with there being so many hairs creating the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) builds for ray tracing becomes computationally expensive, while memory usage balloons.

Linear-Swept Spheres (LSS) uses spheres and tubes instead of triangles, combining them to create realistic appearing hair during gameplay. These enable performant path-traced strand-based hair rendering, and greatly reduce the amount of geometry necessary to render strands of hair, reducing memory consumption.

With Linear-Swept Spheres rendering enabled, path-traced light can fully permeate the layers of hair on Geralt, enemies and NPCs, allowing for even better shadowing, self-shadowing, and ambient occlusion shadowing, further improving image quality for the duration of the game.

The 2022 Next-Gen Update added DLSS Super Resolution and 2X Frame Generation to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. For the new Remastered update, we’ve collaborated with CD PROJEKT RED to bring the entire DLSS 4.5 suite to the game, dramatically improving image quality, and accelerating performance.

Dynamic Multi Frame Generation allows for up to 6X Frame Generation on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, dynamically adjusting the Frame Generation multiplier to hit a user-selected frame rate, or your V-SYNC ON frame rate cap, optimizing performance and PC latency as you play.

Frame Generation on GeForce RTX 50 and GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs gets a new, improved AI model with superior image quality and lower latency.

Super Resolution’s newest second generation transformer AI models deliver transformative improvements to image clarity, fidelity and stability, while DLAA leverages our first generation model for a balance between performance and image quality (you can override this behavior via NVIDIA app if you want the highest level of quality possible).

And Ray Reconstruction, with its brand new second generation transformer AI model, ensures the fidelity, clarity and accuracy of path-traced and ray-traced effects are at their absolute best. For players accustomed to the Next Gen Update, DLSS Ray Reconstruction and the new ray tracing improvements radically enhance the appearance of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, with those improvements being cranked to 11 by stepping up to path tracing.

Enabling The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Remastered’s path tracing and Ultra+ preset automatically activates DLSS Ray Reconstruction on GeForce RTX GPUs, enhancing the fidelity of path tracing and accelerating frame rates with its unified Super Resolution AI model.

Using DLSS 4.5 6X Multi Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction, GeForce RTX 5090 owners will receive the definitive The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered experience, with Ultra+ path-traced settings at up to 385 frames per second, while GeForce RTX 5080 frame rates accelerate up to 245 FPS, perfect for maximizing the capabilities of 240Hz 4K OLEDs.

At 2560x1440, GeForce RTX 5090 owners can experience Ultra+ path-traced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered gameplay at up to 420 frames per second thanks to DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, and the other technologies accelerating and optimizing path-traced performance in the background. On the GeForce RTX 5080, frame rates run up to 320 FPS, and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti frame rates up to 269 FPS.

At 1920x1080, our suite of RTX technologies enable GeForce RTX gamers to play Ultra+ path-traced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered at up to 430 frames per second. On the GeForce RTX 5080, frame rates exceed 410 FPS, on the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, 380 FPS, the GeForce RTX 5070, 320 FPS, and the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, 235 FPS.

Beyond the transformative updates, upgrades and additions mentioned above, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered packs in even more good stuff for new and returning players.

For the graphics, select textures have been improved to increase detail, subsurface scattering has been introduced for more realistic skin rendering, an updated shading renderer has been introduced, tone mapping has been revamped, HDR has been updated, new Sign visual effects have been added, and more.

And on the gameplay side, the skill tree has been completely revamped, transmogrification has been added, combat and horse riding has been improved, monster AI has been updated, animations have been improved, looting has been reworked, new combat finishers have been added, the quest log and UI have been improved, the Photo Mode has been expanded, on-screen tutorials have been modernized, and there are new accessibility features.

All of this will be released for free today as part of Remastered, and will be carried over to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt —Songs of the Past next year.

For the best experience when playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, we recommend installing our most recent GeForce Game Ready Driver from the NVIDIA app or our website, as it specifically includes support for today’s massive game upgrade.

If already own The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered, but are away from home and your GeForce RTX PC or laptop, or simply don’t have a GeForce RTX system capable of playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Remastered with path tracing, DLSS 4.5, and all of the other enhancements, you can still experience the game at its very best by streaming it from the cloud to nearly any device with an Ultimate GeForce NOW membership. Learn more here.

Experience the horror and brutality of Emergence Day. Fourteen years before the original Gears of War, join Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago in a gripping origin-story campaign as the Locust Horde first erupt from below, igniting a desperate fight for survival. Then, rally your squad and fight on in multiplayer with a reimagination of Gears’ iconic PvE mode, Horde Siege, or go head-to-head with a refined Versus PvP.

Built from the ground up with Unreal Engine 5 and DirectX 12, Gears of War: E-Day delivers unprecedented graphical fidelity by leveraging the engine’s latest technologies. MegaLights powers  performant rendering of ray-traced shadows from up to 100 light sources, while Lumen enables ray-traced global illumination lighting and ambient occlusion shading. And other new engine advancements enable real-time destruction, widescale use of volumetric effects and particles, and larger, more explosive set pieces. Combined, these technologies deliver players the most technically ambitious and visceral Gears of War entry to date.

Thanks to a technical partnership with Gears of War: E-Day developer The Coalition, GeForce RTX gamers can activate a suite of features to accelerate and further enhance Gears of War: E-Day, delivering the definitive PC experience:

DLSS Super Resolution and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation will multiply frame rates, whilst simultaneously increasing image quality.

NVIDIA Reflex will reduce PC latency, making gameplay even more responsive, and possibly giving you a competitive edge in Versus.

And the Ray Tracing cores found in all GeForce RTX GPUs will accelerate the rendering of Unreal Engine 5.8’s Lumen and MegaLights ray tracing technologies.

Additionally, to further increase fidelity and player immersion, Gears of War E-Day leverages Unreal Engine’s Nanite to increase object detail and fidelity by up to 100X in comparison to Gears 5. On GeForce RTX PCs, NVIDIA RTX Mega Geometry is utilized to enable accurate ray tracing of Nanite geometry for the very first time, elevating image quality. Objects will be more detailed, reflections will be more accurate, and extra ray-traced shadows and ambient occlusion shadowing will be rendered. Learn more here.

Altogether, all GeForce RTX players will be able to experience Gears of War: E-Day with higher frame rates, higher levels of image quality, and with even more responsive controls, giving them the ultimate Gears of War: E-Day PC experience when Early Access begins on October 1st, and when the full release follows on October 6th.

AION 2 is a next-generation MMORPG developed by NC, reimagining the original AION universe with a fresh approach. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, AION 2 delivers a highly immersive fantasy experience with high-end graphics, gameplay enhancements, new movement and fighting mechanics that incorporate gliding and flying, making large-scale and open-field battles more dynamic and exciting.

Having launched late last year in Korea and Taiwan, AION 2 will launch globally on September 30th for buyers of the game’s Founder’s Pack, followed by a full free-to-play release on October 5th.

When the global version is released on September 30th, AION 2 will include support for DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation, enabling the highest levels of image quality and performance on all GeForce RTX GPUs.

In Darkflow Software and Gaijin Entertainment's Enlisted, each player commands a squad of AI-controlled soldiers in battle, switching freely between them as needed, giving battles massive scale and period-accurate intensity. This MMO squad based shooter recreates the key battles at all fronts of WW2, with hundreds of soldiers, tanks and aircraft taking part in each battle. Travel around the world, battling with and against four nations, using over 350 vehicles and items, and taking control of 16 different soldier classes. Participate in developer-made missions, load those made by other players, or create your own using an in-game editor.

In April, Enlisted added support for DLSS Ray Reconstruction, greatly enhancing the game’s expanded array of ray-traced effects. A newly-released update upgrades the game’s tech once more, adding DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, 6X Multi Frame Generation, Opacity Micromaps, ray-traced bullet tracers, and Path-Traced Global Illumination (PTGI) lighting, further improving image quality and immersion:

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Path-Traced Global Illumination introduces physically correct ambient lighting to all opaque objects on-screen, bouncing up to 3 times for indirect lighting, enabling the accurate illumination of indoor locations and game elements not directly lit by the sun.

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Light propagation is already included in Darkflow Software’s global illumination implementation, however they told us that it relies on signed distance fields (SDF) for tracing, which cannot correctly capture all the details of scene geometry. Path-Traced Global Illumination sidesteps that issue by having access to the full scene in the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), enabling accurate lighting of all game elements.

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Path-Traced Global Illumination and DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction shipped as part of the "Off-Road Patrol" update, which introduced well-known World War 2-era off-road vehicles, such as the Willys and Kubelwagen, a new Driver soldier class for players to use and level, as well as a new bomber, new gun variant, and even more content. For full details, check out the Enlisted development blog, and to play Enlisted for free, download via the official website or Steam.

Simon Ordell is called back to the island of St. Amelia to ‘put things right’, encountering a town lying quiet beneath a heavy fog, seemingly abandoned but not at rest in Konami’s newly-released SILENT HILL: Townfall.

Experienced entirely in first person, Simon must explore, evade, and survive using a limited set of weapons and tools, including the CRTV, a pocket television used to tune into unstable signals in this psychological horror game set against the cold, isolated backdrop of a remote island in Scotland, 1996.

GeForce RTX gamers playing SILENT HILL: Townfall can activate DLSS Super Resolution to accelerate frame rates, ensuring the critically-acclaimed title runs at its absolute best. And via the NVIDIA app, users can upgrade to DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, further enhancing image quality.

Developed by Bandai Namco Aces Inc., ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE is the first mainline franchise entry in seven years, promising to elevate the flight shooting franchise to new heights, harnessing the power of Unreal Engine 5 and proprietary technology to create an ultra-realistic aerial thrill ride.

Returning to the series’ legendary fictitious setting, Strangereal is now a world at war, with the Federation of Central Usea (FCU) occupied and its military shattered. With the prospect of war for survival as the only option, players enter the cockpit in the role of an ace pilot in an emotionally charged story of identity and duty, fighting for the survival of their homeland.

Online, players can participate and compete in PvE and PvPvE modes, with additional Scramble missions pitting a team of four against a formidable NPC rival air squad, and Emergency Sortie missions bringing together eight players to tackle iconic colossal weapons and bosses from the ACE COMBAT franchise. And limited time PvP events will also make an appearance, including 4v4 team battles and 8-player free-for-all deathmatches, putting players’ dogfighting skills to the test.

Advance Access to ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE begins today for buyers of the Deluxe Edition, followed by a general release on October 2nd. PC players with GeForce RTX GPUs can enhance image quality and accelerate performance using DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, or max out fidelity with DLAA.

Milestone’s HOT WHEELS™ Infinite Rush expands the fun beyond the iconic orange tracks, immersing players in a toy-scale world designed for exploration and high-speed racing fun. Players can race, explore, collect, customize, and create as they shape their own adventure across four islands packed with races and free-roaming activities.

With more than 150 vehicles available at launch, ranging from iconic Hot Wheels™ Originals to legendary real-world automotive brands, players can expand their garage by completing races, taking on special events, and defeating the racing crews across the islands as they compete to earn the Rush Master title.

Creativity extends beyond the garage thanks to the Track Builder, which allows players to design unique routes that blend with the game world. The adaptive ground-snapping system lets track modules follow the terrain, while action markers add virtual opponents and define their behaviour, including racing lines, acceleration, and braking points. With creations shareable across supported platforms, the Track Builder offers endless opportunities for players to create, share, and compete with the wider community.

HOT WHEELS™ Infinite Rush also features multiplayer options, with full cross-play* support for online challenges and local split-screen for up to four players, giving players multiple ways to compete across competitive modes, leaderboards, and asynchronous challenges.

HOT WHEELS™ Infinite Rush is available now, with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution available to super speed your frame rates on all GeForce RTX GPUs.

*Nintendo Switch 2 excluded from cross-play

There are even more DLSS integrations arriving soon for a whole host of games. Return regularly for a rundown of the next DLSS and RTX titles, and head here to see the full list of over 1,000 RTX-enhanced games and apps, along with a list of all games and apps with verified support for NVIDIA app’s DLSS overrides.