Ahead-looking: Unreal Engine 5 is taxing on PC and console {hardware}, particularly with its Lumen ray tracing characteristic. A brand new Witcher 4 tech demo utilizing UE 5.6 showcases improved efficiency with out compromising visible high quality. CD Projekt Crimson emphasised that the footage is not remaining, as the sport continues to be no less than two years away.
A spotlight of this week’s State of Unreal occasion was a brand new tech demo of The Witcher 4 showcasing cutting-edge real-time rendering and animations. Epic Video games and CD Projekt Crimson say Unreal Engine 5.6, now out there to builders, can ship that degree of element and ray tracing at 60 frames per second on even modest {hardware}.
The clip opens with a presenter controlling the sport’s new protagonist, Ciri, driving a horse by dense woods and throughout a stream to showcase new Unreal Engine instruments. Optimizations to mega geometry, animation, and different methods remove visible flaws with out heavy hits to efficiency.
Unreal’s polygon-per-pixel geometry system, Nanite, now helps foliage, rendering dense forests with out seen pop-in. It may procedurally rearrange a restricted variety of small tree elements right into a convincingly pure forest. Distant vegetation is simplified into cubes smaller than a pixel, letting artists add as a lot element as wanted with out sacrificing graphics or body charges.
Procedural animations and machine studying – based mostly character deformation enhance movement mixing. The tech demo exhibits Ciri and her horse turning and galloping with seamless transitions. Later, CD Projekt spawns about 300 easily animated characters in a city sq., leaving loads of processing headroom for gameplay logic.
Optimizations to ray tracing and static scene streaming ship additional efficiency beneficial properties. Epic says ray tracing now runs twice as quick because it did in Unreal Engine 5’s preliminary launch. Updates to character rendering and animation pipelines also needs to streamline recreation growth.
CD Projekt claimed that the demo ran at 60 frames per second on a normal PlayStation 5 however clarified it is not gameplay footage from The Witcher 4. The corporate’s assertion suggests the clip is extra of a goal render meant to showcase new potentialities on consoles and mid-range PCs.
CD Projekt plans to launch The Witcher 4 no sooner than 2027, so the ultimate recreation could look fairly completely different from the State of Unreal footage. The studio has a historical past of main shifts between demo and launch. Critics accused CDPR of downgrading The Witcher 3’s graphics after its 2015 launch appeared much less spectacular than a 2013 trailer. Nonetheless, Cyberpunk 2077’s 2020 PC launch featured noticeable enhancements over footage from two years earlier. We’re occupied with seeing how carefully The Witcher 4 matches this week’s demo.
