Update | Witcher 4 tech demo shows stunning 60 FPS gameplay with ray tracing on base PS5

CD Projekt Red has told Eurogamer that the tech demo is not representative of the final game, but a showcase of the tools they are using. "This tech demo runs at 60fps on PS5, and that's the performance we're aiming for in The Witcher 4. It's still too early to confirm exact specs for every platform, but we're working closely with Epic to create an open-world experience that's both beautiful to look at and smooth to play."

We've also embedded a 14-minute video uploaded by the official The Witcher YouTube channel below.

Original article continues as follows:

The State of Unreal 2025 livestream ended recently and CD Projekt Red, along with Epic, gave fans a first look at the Witcher 4 as part of the Unreal Engine 5.6 tech demo. The game was running on the base PS5 at 60 FPS and it looked incredible. Witcher 4 will follow Ciri, a monster hunter trained by Geralt, the protagonist of Witcher 3. The tech demo shows of some of the technologies used in the game, made possible by Unreal Engine.

The hour and a half long presentation brought just under 10 minutes of Witcher 4 footage (starts at 33:52) where the developers showed off the game running on the base PS5 at 60 FPS with ray tracing. It starts off with Ciri moving through some mountainous region to reach her horse which seamlessly switches from gameplay to cutscene and back. To make the physical interactions between Ciri and the horse feel more natural, the team has used multi character motion matching and root motion movement allowing for realistic mounting mechanics and animations, as well as realistic horse movements.

There are machine learned deformations that showcase muscular level movements under the skin textures for realistic visuals, without a major performance hit.

The footage then shows off the environments with nanite geometry and nanite foliage. To allow for dense foliage without eating up too much memory, the team has ditched the card approach and used nanite to model every leaf and pine needle, using an adaptive voxel representation nanite.

Switching back to gameplay, Ciri reaches a town where she walks through crowds showing interactions with NPCs and a living, reactive world around her. Some mission details as well as new locations were teased as well.

The game looks stunning, to say the least, and the fact that it is running on the base PS5 at this quality is great news for PlayStation gamers. Naturally, the PS5 Pro will be able to achieve even greater performance in Witcher 4. For now, there is no release date for the game but seeing as how it is positioned for the current gen consoles, the release may be sooner than expected.