After an announcement last month, Nvidia has released a complete video presentation about the future of Path Tracing. The video includes many details about the implementation of RTX Geometry technology in The Witcher 4.
Nvidia announced a new iteration for its RTX Geometry technology last March. The first version was introduced in 2025 with the Blackwell graphics cards (RTX 50), aiming to significantly increase geometric complexity in real-time scenes while saving video memory.
While it shone with different environments in Alan Wake 2, it was the only title that could benefit from it until now with another game from the Remedy studio, FBC: Firebreak.
The GDC announcement focused on the highly anticipated The Witcher 4, which will leverage a new version of RTX Geometry to generate millions of objects per scene, particularly in the game’s dense forests.
Nvidia has published the full presentation video of the technology, revealing more about its operation and the performance of The Witcher 4 surprisingly.
Martin Stich, Nvidia’s director of engineering, detailed the precise statistics of the demo presented a few weeks ago. The scene displayed an area of about 25 km2 and contained over 60 million plants from 200 different species, with approximately 1 million trees rendered in real-time. Path Tracing is crucial for developers to control lighting to the pixel level.
Stich emphasized that no streaming of textures or objects functionality was used in the scene, and each tree was meticulously modeled by CD Projekt Red “down to the smallest detail.” The Witcher 4, with its scale, surpasses the few tens of thousands of objects in Alan Wake 2.
The most intriguing part concerns the game’s performance when activating the feature. On a GeForce RTX 5090 in 4K with DLSS set to Quality mode (internal resolution of 1440p), the game runs at around 80 FPS. On a RTX 4070, players can reach close to 60 FPS with the same DLSS settings. According to the engineer, 12 GB of video memory are required for this demo. Path Tracing dictates the overall game performance in this scenario, followed by DLSS and Ray Reconstruction.
A promising first hint for The Witcher 4?
It’s the first time we get a glimpse of The Witcher 4‘s performance, although the game is not expected for several years. CD Projekt Red has transitioned to Unreal Engine 5 and is improving the engine by implementing its own technologies.
Considering the complexity of this demo, achieving 80 FPS in 4K with DLSS Quality is an encouraging first indicator of the game’s performance. For comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 on our RTX 5090 with the same settings runs at around 60 FPS with Path Tracing. It’s still a technical demo, but it presents a geometrically more complex scene.
CD Projekt Red seems determined to surpass technical standards again with The Witcher 4, slated for release no later than 2028.
