Next-gen Nvidia GPU makes cameo alongside The Witcher 4 announcement

The Game Awards kicked off spectacularly with CD Projekt Red showing off The Witcher 4. Unfortunately, the game does not have a release date, and is unlikely to see the time of day until at least 2026. A six-minute cinematic trailer, while bereft of gameplay, showed off the game's protagonist. It is none other than Ciri, Geralt's daughter.

This tacitly suggests The Witcher 4 happens sometime after the events of The Witcher 3 and Geralt is likely to make a cameo. However, the eagle-eyed among us spotted one detail that lingered on the screen only for a few seconds. A small piece of text at the bottom of the screen read, "Cinematic trailer pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on an Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU".

This tells us two things. One: Nvidia's next-gen graphics cards are already out there in the wild, indicating they're close to launch, further lending credence to a CES 2025 reveal. Second, The Witcher 4 will be very graphics-heavy and almost require a next-gen GPU to run properly. Of course, the will have been out for a while by then, and competing offerings from AMD and Intel should also be out and about. Whether or not current-gen consoles can handle it remains to be seen.