It's not often that a tech demo for a video game engine can capture the imagination, but when you make your demo the first proper look at one of the most highly-anticipated games in the world, it sure helps. CD Projekt Red just teamed up with Epic Games to give an ambitious demo of its work on Unreal Engine 5.6, set in the world of The Witcher 4.
That's a game we've known is coming for a while, and one that has had a stunning teaser trailer already, but seeing it in motion (albeit in a demo, not a true open-world scenario) is pretty staggering. The demo boasts some stunning visuals, and backs it up with one astonishing boast – that the whole thing is running on a base PlayStation 5, at 60fps.
This console generation has had some excellent titles to offer up, but in many cases you've had a choice between a performance mode at 60fps and a quality mode at 30fps. Upgrade to a PS5 Pro and you might sidestep that issue, but it's still the case that millions of gamers haven't been getting visuals like those in the demo on their base PS5 or Xbox Series X.
The demo features unbelievably dense forests and scenery, but also a populous village full of detailed characters that all render extremely credibly – easily eclipsing what we've seen from games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in recent months (which is itself quite a looker).
We get to see our main character Ciri's horse in the game, which will be called Kelpie and seems far more detailed and realistic than Roach was in The Witcher 3. We also see glimpses of a Manticore, one of many monsters that will doubtless populate the game, like its predecessor.
What's really mind-blowing throughout is the quality of lighting, powered by ray-traced global illumination, which is increasingly proving itself as the best part of next-gen gaming. Still, other games that use it to amazing effect, like Assassin's Creed: Shadows, haven't been able to do so at 60fps on base PS5 hardware.
It's important to remember that this is just a tech demo, one which CD Projekt Red's engineers mention is a closed environment rather than part of its true open world. This means you basically shouldn't bet the house on getting 60fps performance with these visuals when the game eventually comes out.
For one thing, it doesn't have an announced release date at all, and could well end up coming out on the PlayStation 6 as well as the current console. If it does release on PS5, it might look this good but at a lower frame rate, to allow for the increased amount of space that it'll need to render and load in one go.
All of which makes me pleased that I've got an Nvidia 5070 Ti to fall back on – phenomenally expensive as it might be to build or buy a top gaming PC, the likelihood is that this hardware will get way closer to being able to run the visuals on show in this demo than any console in a real-world scenario.
With that said, if CD Projekt Red can deliver on the promise of this tech demo and release a full game that can perform like this on ageing hardware, it'll be a brilliant thing – either way, it'll be interesting to see how close it can get.
