NVIDIA teases The Witcher 4 path-traced foliage, says no new hardware is required
NVIDIA used its GDC talk on path tracing to confirm that its new foliage rendering system is coming to The Witcher 4 . During the presentation, which ws finally published, NVIDIA says the technology is meant for real game engines, not just a demo, and added that CD Projekt Red provided the tree assets used in the showcase.
The demo itself was built around a large outdoor scene with about 60 million plants, roughly 1 million trees, and more than 200 plant species across a 5×5 km map. NVIDIA said the foliage is modeled as geometry down to individual pine needles, with no alpha cards in the base assets, while some larger trees exceed 10 million polygons.
In other words, this is just a demo of a forest, and has very little to do with the actual Witcher 4 UE5 demo we saw earlier. In fact, both demos are not representative of the final game, which is celalry mentioned multiple times.
Source: NVIDIA
On performance, the slide shown during the talk lists 80 FPS for RTX 5090 at 1440p upscaled to 4K, and 58 FPS for RTX 4070 at 960p upscaled to 1440p . NVIDIA described those numbers as about 80 to 90 FPS on RTX 5090 with DLSS Ray Reconstruction in Quality mode, and almost 60 FPS at 1440p on RTX 4070. And keep in mind, this just a tech demo, not even a game, and it’s work-in-progress numbers from current state.
Even though I have never finished a Witcher game, I can safely say none of them feature spacecrafts (not sure about the giant crab):
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA also said the demo fits on a 12GB graphics card. According to the talk, the application tracks about 5GB of memory for buffers and data structures, while Windows reports closer to 9GB once driver-related allocations and DLSS are included. The company added that the partitioned top-level acceleration structure uses about 900MB plus scratch memory.
They also pointed out that ray tracing is getting close to raster in terms of performance (about 1 to 1.5 ms difference on RTX 5090) and at this point it is fair to question how much sense rasterization still makes going forward. I just hope they don’t assume everyone has RTX 5090.
Source: NVIDIA via Wccftech
