Arguably the highlight of Epic’s State of Unreal keynote was the opening: a sprawling technical demo that showed just how good The Witcher 4 looks in Unreal Engine 5. It showcased a bustling market in a port city, a beautiful forest landscape, and a horse that looked and acted like, well, a horse. Even more impressive was the fact that the demo was running at 60 frames per second on a base model PlayStation 5. According to Julius Girbig, a senior technical animator at Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, the choice of hardware for the demo was very intentional.
“Everyone has the idea of how fast a PS5 is and what kinds of games it can run,” he tells The Verge. “That’s why we specifically wanted to go that route of: let’s start with the consoles, let’s show how much we can optimize this engine together with Epic and make it work on current gen, instead of running it on some high-end hardware.”
Now, to be clear, the UE5 demo is not actually a slice of the final game. Girbig describes it as “a demonstration of the tools that we are currently building that will eventually power The Witcher 4,” and something that “does show the style and direction that we’re going for, and the fidelity …
