The Witcher 4 Tech Demo Reveals Massive CD Projekt Red Graphic Goals

During GDC 2026, NVIDIA held a presentation on path tracing and took the opportunity to detail RTX Mega Geometry, a new system focused on rendering foliage. More importantly, they revealed a highly anticipated upcoming title that will utilize this technology: The Witcher 4.

A few weeks after the event, NVIDIA finally shared the full video of the presentation, revealing just how ambitious CD Projekt Red’s next project truly is.

Toss a Coin to Your Millions of Polygons

By taking a deep dive into the hour-long video presentation, you can notice that there is a tech demo provided by CD Projekt Red hidden in plain sight, which showcases three tree assets that are seemingly pulled straight from The Witcher 4.

According to NVIDIA, the demonstration was built around some pretty impressive numbers: a massive outdoor scene featuring roughly 60 million plants, approximately 1 million trees, and over 200 different plant species across a 5×5 km map.

They go on to explain that with RTX Mega Geometry, the foliage is modeled as geometry down to the level of individual pine needles, with no alpha cards used in the base assets. And some of the larger trees even exceed 10 million polygons! Furthermore, everything is uniquely animated and features fully dynamic path-traced lighting with pixel-perfect shadows. To put it simply, it looks incredibly realistic and impressive.

In case the technical jargon is a bit much, you can check out the impressive results for yourself at this link. However, keep in mind that this is a technical demonstration and represents a product still in development, meaning it is not the final version.

NVIDIA also explained the “technical magic” behind these ultra-realistic trees we can see in the tech demo, revealing that the high polygon count is achieved by instancing small sub-objects called “twigs.”

Much like the Nanite foliage system in Unreal Engine, a single large tree is composed of a dozen unique twig models repeated thousands of times. So, in order to keep performance smooth, these twigs are rigidly attached to a skeleton for animation rather than using complex vertex-skinning, which allows for realistic movements without the massive processing overhead typically required for such density.

To manage this without crushing the system’s memory, engineers developed a specialized multi-stage Level of Detail (LOD) system. Unlike traditional methods that reduce visual quality at a distance, this system focuses on merging these thousands of individual instances into fewer, larger blocks as the player moves away, keeping the geometric complexity virtually the same. And by utilizing Opacity Micro-Maps (OMMs), a feature of the RTX 40-series and beyond, the engine can handle the complex lighting and transparency of millions of leaves with pixel-perfect accuracy, ensuring The Witcher 4 looks detailed regardless of scale.

For those wondering about the horsepower needed to run this, the NVIDIA demonstration ran at around 80 FPS at 4K on a GeForce RTX 5090, and at 58 FPS at 1440p on a GeForce RTX 4070. As the owner of a “humble” RTX 5060 myself, it’s a relief to see NVIDIA hinting at optimizations designed to make this tech work on hardware that isn't strictly ultra-high-end. It gives us mere mortals some hope that we won't need a supercomputer just to appreciate a well-rendered pine needle in the next Witcher adventure.