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Inside The Witcher 4 tech demo: the CD Projekt Red and Epic interview
Alex Battaglia interviews tech leaders at CDPR and Epic about the Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 demo. How can it run at 60fps on PS5 and how was it developed?
To find out, Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia took a trip to CDPR's offices in Warsaw and spoke to key figures at CD Projekt Red - including Charles Tremblay, VP of technology; Jakub Knapik, VP of art and global art director; Kajetan Kapuscinski, cinematic director; Jan Hermanowicz, engineering production manager - as well as Kevin Örtegren, lead rendering programmer at Epic Games. On the CPU, there's been a ton of work on optimising away a lot of the cost on the critical path of the render thread: multi-threading things, removing all sync points we don't need, allowing all types of primitives to actually time slice... On the GPU, tracing costs need to be kept low, so having good proxies and streaming in the right amount of stuff in the vicinity... making this work out of the box is core to that 60fps. Lighting-wise, it's regular directional light, with improvements to the foliage shading model, on the indirect side, we have a simplified representation which is static for performance reasons, so it scales up.
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