Forward-looking: Unreal Engine 5 is taxing on PC and console hardware, especially with its Lumen ray tracing feature. A new Witcher 4 tech demo using UE 5.6 showcases improved performance without compromising visual quality. CD Projekt Red emphasized that the footage isn’t final, as the game is still at least two years away.

A highlight of this week’s State of Unreal event was a new tech demo of The Witcher 4 showcasing cutting-edge real-time rendering and animations. Epic Games and CD Projekt Red say Unreal Engine 5.6, now available to developers, can deliver that level of detail and ray tracing at 60 frames per second on even modest hardware.

The clip opens with a presenter controlling the game’s new protagonist, Ciri, riding a horse through dense woods and across a stream to showcase new Unreal Engine tools. Optimizations to mega geometry, animation, and other systems eliminate visual flaws without heavy hits to performance.

Unreal’s polygon-per-pixel geometry system, Nanite, now supports foliage, rendering dense forests without visible pop-in. It can procedurally rearrange a limited number of small tree components into a convincingly natural forest. Distant vegetation is simplified into cubes smaller than a pixel, letting artists add as much detail as needed without sacrificing graphics or frame rates.

Procedural animations and machine learning – based character deformation improve motion blending. The tech demo shows Ciri and her horse turning and galloping with seamless transitions. Later, CD Projekt spawns about 300 smoothly animated characters in a town square, leaving plenty of processing headroom for gameplay logic.

Optimizations to ray tracing and static scene streaming deliver further performance gains. Epic says ray tracing now runs twice as fast as it did in Unreal Engine 5’s initial release. Updates to character rendering and animation pipelines should also streamline game development.

CD Projekt claimed that the demo ran at 60 frames per second on a standard PlayStation 5 but clarified it’s not gameplay footage from The Witcher 4. The company’s statement suggests the clip is more of a target render meant to showcase new possibilities on consoles and mid-range PCs.

CD Projekt plans to launch The Witcher 4 no earlier than 2027, so the final game may look quite different from the State of Unreal footage. The studio has a history of major shifts between demo and release. Critics accused CDPR of downgrading The Witcher 3’s graphics after its 2015 release looked less impressive than a 2013 trailer. However, Cyberpunk 2077’s 2020 PC launch featured noticeable improvements over footage from two years earlier. We’re interested in seeing how closely The Witcher 4 matches this week’s demo.