Overview
In March 2026, NVIDIA and CD Projekt Red presented a tech demo at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) showcasing RTX Mega Geometry foliage technology running in The Witcher IV's engine. This was the third major public demonstration of the game's technology, following the Game Awards 2024 cinematic trailer and the State of Unreal 2025 tech demo.
What Was Shown
The demo focused on the natural environment rather than characters or towns. It showcased dense forests, mountain valleys, and grasslands rendered with an unprecedented level of geometric detail. The vegetation was not painted on as flat billboard textures (the standard approach in most games) but modeled as actual 3D geometry.
Individual pine needles, leaf clusters, and branch structures were rendered as polygonal geometry. This was made possible by NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry technology, which allows GPUs to efficiently process extremely high polygon counts that would be impractical with traditional rendering pipelines.
Technical Specifications
Metric | Value |
|---|---|
Total plants | Approximately 60 million |
Total trees | Approximately 1 million |
Plant species | Over 200 distinct species |
Map area covered | 5 x 5 kilometers |
Maximum polygons per tree | Over 10 million |
Engine version | Unreal Engine 5.6 |
Performance
The demo was benchmarked on two NVIDIA GPUs to demonstrate performance scaling across hardware tiers.
GPU | Resolution | Upscaling | Framerate |
|---|---|---|---|
NVIDIA RTX 5090 | 4K (3840x2160) | DLSS Quality | Approximately 80 FPS |
NVIDIA RTX 4070 | 1440p (2560x1440) | DLSS Quality | Approximately 58 FPS |
Both configurations used NVIDIA DLSS 4 with the Quality preset. The RTX 5090 result demonstrates that the game can run at high framerates even at 4K with extreme foliage density. The RTX 4070 result shows that mid-range hardware from the previous GPU generation can still deliver playable performance at 1440p.
Significance
The GDC 2026 demo complemented the State of Unreal 2025 demo in important ways. Where the 2025 demo focused on character animation, town environments, and creature combat, the 2026 demo addressed the natural world. For an open-world game set in the wild northern kingdom of Kovir, dense forests and rugged terrain are a core part of the experience. The demo showed that these environments can be rendered with a level of detail previously only seen in pre-rendered cinematics.
CDPR VP and Global Art Director Jakub Knapik described the foliage rendering as part of the studio's commitment to making the world feel tangible and grounded. The ability to render individual pine needles as geometry rather than textures contributes to a sense of physical presence in forest environments.