Dark Souls 3 Mod Shows Off Path-Traced Firelink and Lothric Wall Footage

Ganaboy has not announced a release date, while the test footage uses 1440p DLSS Quality with an RTX 5080.

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Armored Dark Souls III knight overlooking a ruined castle beneath a golden, smoky sky

Dark Souls III could soon receive one of its most ambitious visual upgrades yet. Modder Ganaboy is developing a new version of the DS Lighting Engine Mod that adds real-time path tracing, and two videos now show the project running in Firelink and at Lothric Wall.

The work is still unfinished, but the current footage already shows how much the lighting system can change the look of the game. Ganaboy previously released DS2LightingEngine for Dark Souls 2, bringing real-time path tracing to that game. The upcoming Dark Souls III version is built around the same general idea, with the newer project handling the third game’s more demanding geometry.

Firelink and Lothric Wall in the current build

The first clip focuses on Firelink, while the second captures Lothric Wall with path tracing enabled. Both videos use a system with a Ryzen 3600 processor, 16 GB of memory, and an RTX 5080. The footage runs at 1440p with DLSS set to Quality, alongside NRD Reblur and NRD Sigma for the player’s torch lighting.

The RTX 5080 in the test was limited to 250W and completed the rendering workload in 10ms. The technical notes also estimate that Dark Souls III has ten times the geometry of Dark Souls 2, so performance demands should be close to those of DS2LightingEngine. Cards supported by the earlier mod are expected to work with the DS3 version as well, including RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs, although some systems may need a higher upscaling setting.

There is no release window for the path-tracing mod yet. For now, these clips offer an early look at what Ganaboy is building, rather than a finished version ready for download.

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Dark Souls III is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. Released in March 2016, it is the fourth entry in the Souls series and the final instalment in the Dark Souls trilogy. Set in the decaying kingdom of Lothric, players take on the role of the "Ashen One," an undead warrior tasked with rekindling the First Flame to prevent the world from falling into darkness.

The game features challenging combat, intricate level design, and a deep, lore-rich narrative.