The Witcher 4 Tech: Unreal Engine 5, the Tech Demo and 60 fps

On March 21, 2022, CD PROJEKT RED announced not just a new Witcher game but also a change of technology: the new saga is being built on Unreal Engine 5. The studio had used its own REDengine since The Witcher 2 (2011). The collaboration with Epic Games is set up as a “multi-year strategic partnership” and, according to the press release, covers not only licensing but also the technical development of Unreal Engine 5 and, where relevant, future versions. The main goal is to tailor the engine for open worlds, starting with the next Witcher game.

CTO Paweł Zawodny explained that CDPR used to spend a lot of energy evolving REDengine for every new game. The partnership is meant to make development more predictable and efficient. In September 2026, Michał Nowakowski pushed back against the common assumption that the switch was about Cyberpunk 2077’s technical problems: “the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.” The company’s dream was never to make technology, he said. According to Nowakowski, CDPR is the only studio besides Epic itself that works inside the engine’s “black box.”

A supposed 15-year term for the deal is not backed up – the press release says nothing about it. To see what REDengine achieved in Cyberpunk 2077, visit our Cyberpunk 2077 section.

On June 3, 2025, Epic opened its State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest Orlando with The Witcher 4 tech demo – live on stage. Ciri rides her mare Kelpie through the rugged mountains and dense forests of Kovir to the bustling port town of Valdrest, in the middle of a dangerous monster contract. Kovir is more than a backdrop: according to CDPR, the region makes its very first appearance in the video game series in The Witcher 4.

The demo ran on a base PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second; Epic adds “with raytracing.” CDPR says the features shown will be supported on all platforms the game launches on. Unreal Engine 5.6 came out the same day, making some of the tools available to all developers.

In the PlayStation Blog, Sebastian Kalemba describes a scene many people remember: in the market, Ciri bumps into a man carrying a crate of apples. He loses his footing, the apples roll down the hill and trigger unscripted chain reactions – children run to steal one, pigs look for an early lunch. The demo also features a manticore. You can watch the full tech demo on our trailers page.

CD PROJEKT RED, Epic and the PlayStation Blog name six building blocks:

• Unreal Animation Framework: makes large numbers of characters move naturally in busy scenes. Kalemba’s example is the band on the stage in Valdrest, which allows far more characters on screen at once.
• Nanite Foliage: fills forests and fields with dense vegetation, such as trees with individual branches swaying in the wind. Epic released the system as an experimental feature in Unreal Engine 5.7 on November 12, 2025.
• MetaHuman and Mass AI: realistic people in large crowds. According to Kalemba, the data-driven Mass system manages thousands of agents at minimal performance cost.
• FastGeo Streaming: loads static geometry quickly so the world appears smoothly. CDPR developed it together with Epic; in Unreal Engine 5.6 it ships as the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin.
• ML Deformer: lets Kelpie’s muscles move and flex accurately without costing much processing power.
• Chaos Cloth: the cloth simulation Epic highlights in the video description – visible in the demo on people’s clothing, for example.

Epic has published talks on several of these topics, including “The Road to 60 fps in The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo” and sessions on streaming, animation, foliage and runtime procedural generation. They are aimed at developers and show how much work went into the demo.

CD PROJEKT RED repeats it at every opportunity: the demo shows technology, not the finished game. On thewitcher.com it says “Keep in mind this isn’t gameplay of The Witcher 4 itself,” and a spokesperson told GameSpot it is “a first look at the cutting-edge technology powering The Witcher 4 – but not The Witcher 4 itself.” Jan Hermanowicz, engineering and production manager, explicitly tied this to a lesson from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch: “We’re not calling this gameplay, we’re not pretending that this is the actual game.”

In his Digital Foundry interview, Charles Tremblay, VP of Technology, was open about the gaps: the full gameplay loop was not implemented, there was no combat and many things did not work yet. Still, the demo shows where the team wants to take The Witcher 4.

CDPR later hinted at how much of it will carry over. Its H1 2025 call said the goal is not simply to make another game with Unreal Engine but to explore new possibilities in immersion, interactivity and world-building. In March 2026, Nowakowski said most new team members are helping to scale up the solutions from the tech demo “across the entire game.”

On earlier games, CD PROJEKT RED developed for PC first and then scaled the technology down for consoles. For The Witcher 4, the team is reversing that order. Tremblay said in June 2025 that the studio had “so many problems in the past” and wanted “more of a console first development” this time. The stated goal is 60 frames per second instead of 30 – but it is not a promise: “It’s too early to say if we manage to nail it.”

Tremblay sees the biggest hurdle on the Xbox Series S, where 60 fps will “definitely be extremely challenging,” and the team had barely worked on that console at the time. How far the visuals could scale beyond PS5 on high-end PCs was discussed in the interview – but there are no commitments.

In August 2026, Nowakowski said the current build runs on every target platform: “You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it’s going to run.” On the half-year call on September 2, 2026, he added that this does not mean the game already has all of its content. Which platforms are confirmed is covered under platforms.

At the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2026, NVIDIA announced that it is working with CD PROJEKT RED to integrate a new foliage system based on RTX Mega Geometry into The Witcher 4. It adds its own level-of-detail system for plants and updates scenes selectively, saving memory and processing time. Rendering engineer Cezary Bella says it will bring “fully path traced forests.” Which graphics cards this applies to, and whether there will be path tracing like in Cyberpunk 2077, has not been announced.

NVIDIA has worked with the team for some time: according to CDPR, the December 2024 reveal trailer was pre-rendered on a then-unannounced GeForce RTX graphics card. After CES 2025, outlets reported that NVIDIA named the RTX 5090; we only have that second-hand. Performance figures for specific cards in the GDC demo that circulate online do not come from NVIDIA or CDPR.

After the switch, some fans worried that The Witcher 4 would look like many other Unreal games. Nowakowski disagrees: “we’re not going to be.” The studio will stand out, the game should still feel like a CDPR game, and the technology under the hood will ultimately be “irrelevant” from a fan’s point of view. Julius Girbig, senior technical animator, said after the demo that nothing was lost in the transition – an engine is essentially just a toolbox.

The work on characters has changed considerably. According to animation director Maciej Pietras, the tech demo was the first time CDPR used performance capture, recording face, voice and body at the same time. In Witcher 3, facial animation was still done by hand with keyframes, and lip sync in dialogue was generated from the voice-over. For The Witcher 4, Pietras considers performance capture a must-have: players should not just hear Ciri’s emotions but see them on her face. The team describes its direction as “stylized realism.” How this affects the feel of play is covered under gameplay.

In late February 2026, several sites reported that The Witcher 4 would be shown at Unreal Fest in June 2026. That was a misunderstanding from the AnsweRED Podcast: Pietras meant the 2025 demo, and CDPR clarified this in early March. Unreal Fest in Chicago (June 16 to 18, 2026) brought Unreal Engine 5.8, and, according to reports, Epic also announced Unreal Engine 6 – The Witcher 4 did not appear in the keynote.

CD PROJEKT RED has not said whether The Witcher 4 will move to Unreal Engine 6. All we know is that the 2022 partnership explicitly allows for future versions of the engine. We will add new technical details here with a date.