Revision 4

Overview

In March 2026, NVIDIA and CD Projekt Red presented a tech demo at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) showing 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

Performance

The demo was benchmarked on two NVIDIA GPUs to demonstrate performance scaling across hardware tiers.

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 focus on 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.

Alongside the foliage demo, CDPR confirmed that The Witcher IV will support real-time path tracing on PC, layered on top of the RTX Mega Geometry rendering. The path tracer used in the demo is a two-bounce setup; most of the frame budget is devoted to it. The demo footage was originally presented at GDC in March 2026 and was made publicly available via NVIDIA's official channel in April 2026. The scene contains no NPCs, animals, or game logic; it is a pre-release rendering showcase rather than a representation of the final game's quality.

Looking Ahead: Unreal Fest 2026

CD Projekt Red has confirmed an additional showing of The Witcher IV at Unreal Fest 2026, scheduled for June 16 through 18 in Chicago. The studio described it as a joint debut with Epic Games, with new in-engine footage and additional technical detail expected. As with the GDC 2026 foliage demo, the Unreal Fest material is intended as a development showcase rather than a slice of final game content, and CDPR has cautioned that the final game may differ in look and scope from any pre-release demo.