After an announcement last month, Nvidia has just released the full presentation video regarding the future of Path Tracing. There are many details on the implementation of RTX Geometry technology in The Witcher 4.
Nvidia announced a new iteration of its RTX Geometry technology last March. The first version was introduced in 2025 with Blackwell graphics cards (RTX 50) and aimed to significantly increase the geometric complexity of real-time scenes while saving video memory.
If it shined with the different environments ofAlan Wake 2this is the only title to be able to benefit from it until now with another game from the Remedy studio, FBC : Firebreak.
The GDC announcement was about the much awaited The Witcher 4which will take advantage of a new version of RTX Geometry to generate several million objects per scene, particularly in the dense forests of the game.
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Nvidia has released the full video presentation of the technology and we know a little more about how it works, but also about the performance of The Witcher 4 étonnamment.
1 million trees in the forest of The Witcher 4
Martin Stich, director of engineering at Nvidia, details in the conference the precise statistics of the demo presented a few weeks ago and they are dizzying. The scene presented had an area of approximately 25 km2 and contained nearly 60 million plants from 200 different species. Overall, around 1 million trees are rendered in real time. Path Tracing is obviously part of the pixel-perfect control of the light by the developers.
Stich insisted that no texture or object streaming features were used in the scene while each tree was modeled by CD Projekt Red.jusqu’à l’épine près“. We are far from the few tens of thousands of objects ofAlan Wake 2more The Witcher 4 is a game on a completely different scale.
The most interesting part is about the game performance by enabling the feature. On a GeForce RTX 5090 in 4K with DLSS set to Quality mode (internal definition of 1440p), the game runs at around 80 FPS. On an RTX 4070, players can expect to reach 60 FPS with the same DLSS settings. According to the engineer, 12 GB of video memory is required for this demo. In this scenario, it is Path Tracing that dictates the overall performance of the game, followed by DLSS and Ray Reconstruction.
A first promising indicator for The Witcher 4Â ?
This is the first time we have a glimpse of the performance of The Witcher 4 while the game is not expected for several years. We know that CD Projekt Red has made the transition to Unreal Engine 5 and is even taking the opportunity to improve the engine by implementing its own technologies.
Given the complexity of this demo, 80 FPS in 4K and DLSS Quality is a first encouraging indicator of the game’s performance. As a comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 on our RTX 5090 with the same settings runs at around 60 FPS in Path Tracing. We certainly remain in the case of a technical demo, but to present an infinitely more geometrically complex scene.
CD Projekt Red seems to want to exceed technical standards again with The Witcher 4which is expected to be released in 2028 at the latest.
