Dark Souls 3 Path Tracing Mod Pushes FromSoftware Visuals Beyond Elden Ring

Dark Souls 3 is receiving a major visual overhaul from modder Ganaboy, who is developing a new version of the DS Lighting Engine with real time path tracing support. Early footage already shows significant changes to lighting, shadows, indirect illumination, and atmosphere across the High Wall of Lothric and Firelink Shrine, giving FromSoftware's 2016 action RPG a dramatically more modern presentation.

The project follows Ganaboy's work on the Dark Souls 2 Lighting Engine, which now replaces much of the original rendering pipeline with path tracing, dynamic shadows, improved shading, volumetric fog, and additional rendering upgrades. We previously looked at the results in Dark Souls 2 with path tracing, where the overhaul demonstrated how much modern lighting techniques can transform FromSoftware's older environments without changing their underlying art direction.

Dark Souls 3 presents a considerably heavier challenge. According to Ganaboy, its geometry is approximately 10 times more complex than Dark Souls 2, although the developer expects hardware requirements to remain relatively close to the existing DS2 Lighting Engine implementation. RTX 20 and RTX 30 series graphics cards are expected to remain supported, but players may need to use more aggressive upscaling settings. For example, a system capable of running Dark Souls 2 using Quality upscaling may need to move to Balanced mode in Dark Souls 3.

"DS3 Geometry is 10X of DS2."
— Quote by: Ganaboy

The comparison with Elden Ring is particularly interesting because FromSoftware officially introduced ray tracing to the game through update 1.09 in March 2023 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC. Bandai Namco also warned that enabling the feature could reduce resolution and frame rate, with its recommended PC specification targeting 1080p with High ray tracing using an RTX 3070 Ti or Radeon RX 6900 XT.

Elden Ring's implementation remains much more limited than the full lighting reconstruction being attempted with Dark Souls 3. Path tracing calculates substantially more light interaction across a scene, allowing indirect illumination, shadows, and environmental lighting to respond more naturally. The tradeoff is significantly greater GPU demand, making technologies such as DLSS and FSR particularly important for keeping performance playable.

There is currently no confirmed release date for the Dark Souls 3 version of DS Lighting Engine. The footage remains work in progress, and some areas still appear excessively dark, but the project is already demonstrating how effectively FromSoftware's art direction can benefit from a modern lighting pipeline.

Dark Souls 3 does not need new textures or completely rebuilt environments to look dramatically different. Lighting alone changes how its architecture, armor, fire, fog, and darker interiors are presented. That makes this project particularly interesting because it preserves the original visual identity while modernizing the technology underneath it.

Elden Ring showed that FromSoftware is willing to experiment with ray tracing, but Ganaboy's work highlights how much further the studio could eventually push lighting in future Souls titles if full path tracing becomes practical on mainstream gaming hardware.

Would you replay Dark Souls 3 with full path tracing, and should FromSoftware target similar technology in its future games?