Short answer: CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games presented a technology showcase set in The Witcher 4’s world at State of Unreal 2025 on June 3, 2025. It follows Ciri through Kovir and demonstrated open-world streaming, dense foliage, animation, deformation and digital-human tools. Epic said the prepared demonstration ran at 60 frames per second with ray tracing on a base PlayStation 5. It was not a public playable build, a complete gameplay slice or a promise that the finished RPG will look or perform identically.
What the demo actually was
The presentation was created by CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games as a showcase for Unreal Engine 5 technology, with an emphasis on the large-scale open-world problems that The Witcher 4 must solve. CDPR describes it as a technology demo set in the game’s world rather than The Witcher 4 itself or conventional gameplay footage. The clearest official qualification appears in CDPR’s development account: the footage was made to debut the technology collaboration.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition (Xbox Series X) | $25.85 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Xbox One | $16.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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The Witcher 3 Game of the Year Edition (Xbox One) | $22.38 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition - Xbox One | $24.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 5 |
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The Witcher 3 III Wild Hunt Xbox One Game | $15.99 | Buy on Amazon |
In the sequence, Ciri pursues a monster contract through Kovir, a region confirmed for the new game. Viewers see the settlement of Valdrest, wilderness travel, thick vegetation, crowds, animated characters and a monster encounter. These scenes use project-related assets and systems, but they should be read as purpose-built demonstration material, not as a final quest or a representative sample of every part of the finished RPG.
Epic’s event recap records the hardware claim: the presentation ran on a base PlayStation 5 at 60 fps with ray tracing. That describes this controlled demonstration, not a final console specification or a universal frame-rate guarantee.
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- PLAY AS A HIGHLY TRAINED MONSTER SLAYER FOR HIRE: Trained from early childhood and mutated to gain superhuman skills, strength, and reflexes, witchers are a counterbalance to the monster-infested world in which they live.
- Gruesomely destroy foes as a professional monster hunter armed with a range of upgradeable weapons, mutating potions, and combat magic.
- Hunt down a wide variety of exotic monsters, from savage beasts prowling mountain passes to cunning supernatural predators lurking in the shadowy back alleys of densely populated cities. Invest your rewards to upgrade your weaponry and buy custom armor, or spend them on horse races, card games, fist fighting, and other pleasures life brings.
- EXPLORE A MORALLY AMBIGUOUS FANTASY OPEN WORLD: Built for endless adventure, the massive open world of The Witcher sets new standards in terms of size, depth, and complexity. Traverse a fantastical open world: explore forgotten ruins, caves, and shipwrecks, trade with merchants and dwarven smiths in cities, and hunt across the open plains, mountains, and seas. Deal with treasonous generals, devious witches, and corrupt royalty to provide dark and dangerous services. Make choices that go beyond good & evil, and face their far-reaching consequences.
- TRACK DOWN THE CHILD OF PROPHECY: Take on the most important contract of your life: to track down the child of prophecy, the key to saving or destroying this world. In times of war, chase down the child of prophecy, a living weapon foretold by ancient elven legends. Struggle against ferocious rulers, spirits of the wilds, and even a threat from beyond the veil – all hell-bent on controlling this world. Define your destiny in a world that may not be worth saving.
CD PROJEKT RED’s announcement and Epic’s State of Unreal recap provide the setting and technical context.
Feature-by-feature: what viewers saw and when it was available
| Technology | Role in the showcase | UE5.6 status | Important qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Geometry Streaming | Accelerates loading of large quantities of immutable static world geometry during traversal. | Experimental plugin available with UE5.6. | It addresses static scenery; animation, AI, physics, shaders and other systems retain separate costs. |
| Nanite Foliage | Supports dense, detailed trees, leaves, grass and other overlapping natural geometry. | Shown with the demo, but slated for general introduction in UE5.7. | Nanite does not make foliage free: shading, shadows, animation, memory and ray-tracing work still matter. |
| Unreal Animation Framework | Provides an engine-first workflow for authoring and running complex animation systems. | Part of the UE5.6 animation push. | It improves production and runtime tooling; it does not by itself determine game design or responsiveness. |
| ML Deformer | Improves deformation such as muscle and skin movement beyond a basic skeletal result. | Featured in the UE5.6 technology context. | It is a deformation tool, not an AI system controlling the whole game. |
| Smart Objects | Supports interactions between characters and usable elements in the world. | Referenced among the demonstrated systems. | Seeing an interaction system does not establish the final game’s quest or AI behavior. |
| MetaHuman 5.6 workflows | Digital-human creation and camera- or audio-driven animation capabilities. | MetaHuman left Early Access and became integrated into Unreal Engine 5.6. | Official material does not establish that Ciri is an unmodified stock MetaHuman. |
| RealityScan | Captured realistic natural objects used as source material for environmental assets. | Content-production workflow used by CDPR. | Scans still require cleanup, materials, optimization, collision, art direction and testing. |
Fast Geometry Streaming: the open-world loading problem
Fast Geometry Streaming is an experimental UE5.6 plugin aimed at bringing large amounts of unchanging static geometry into memory more quickly. For an open-world game, that can help scenery appear as the player moves through the environment, reducing the pressure on conventional streaming approaches.
It is not a rendering system and does not make every asset cheap to load. Storage bandwidth, memory budgets, CPU/GPU synchronization and asset organization still determine whether traversal is smooth. Gameplay objects, characters, animation, physics, AI and shader compilation have their own workloads. Epic continued improving the plugin in UE5.8, which shows that it remained an evolving technology rather than a finished one-time solution. See the UE5.6 overview, UE5.6 release notes and UE5.8 announcement.
Nanite Foliage: why the forest detail mattered
Traditional foliage commonly depends on cards, aggressive level-of-detail changes and carefully limited visibility. Nanite Foliage is intended to make much denser geometric vegetation practical by using Nanite-based representations for trees, leaves, grass and related natural elements.
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- In the past he has raised and overthrown monarchs, battled legendary monsters and saved the lives of many. Now Geralt embarks on his most personal quest to save his loved ones and protect the world from an ancient threat.
- The story is drawn based on player decisions. Each action will have consequences which change the story and the game world. NPCs, communities, monsters and locations all change, based on player choice.
- The Witcher 3 is standalone adventure, easily entered into by new players. Witcher fans will find subtle references to their adventures, but these elements are not necessary to enjoy the game fully.
- A breathtaking cinematic introduction demonstrating the game background - this puts players immediately in the know about the situation in the war-ravaged Northern Kingdoms and the background story of the main character.
- Unique atmosphere, memorable characters and gritty dialog - the game world has its own unique feel. It is a classic dark fantasy tale that will appeal to fans of all kinds of fantasy stories.
The version detail is easy to misstate. Epic showcased Nanite Foliage alongside the demo, but said it was slated for UE5.7 rather than generally released as a UE5.6 feature. UE5.7 later introduced it as an experimental system built around Nanite Voxels, Nanite Assemblies and Nanite Skinning.
That can improve scalability and reduce some of the compromises used for dense forests, but it does not remove GPU shading, shadows, wind animation, collision, memory or ray-tracing costs. Foliage remains a complete content-and-rendering problem, not a single switch.
Animation, deformation and crowds
UE5.6’s broader direction was an engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need to shuttle work repeatedly between Unreal and external digital-content-creation software. The showcase connected that workflow to Unreal Animation Framework, Smart Objects, ML Deformer and populated scenes.
ML Deformer is particularly relevant to characters such as Ciri and the people around her: it can reproduce learned deformation behavior for muscle, skin and similar motion that a simple skeletal setup cannot capture cleanly. Smart Objects provide a way to describe interactions with world elements, while the animation framework supplies production and runtime infrastructure. None of those demonstrations establishes the final combat system, crowd AI or quest logic.
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- Play as a Highly Trained Monster Slayer for Hire
- Trained from early childhood and mutated to have superhuman skills, strength, and reflexes, witchers are a socially ostracized counterbalance to the monster-infested world in which they live.
- Gruesomely destroy foes as a professional monster hunter armed with a range of upgradeable weapons, mutating potions, and combat magic.
- Hunt down a wide variety of exotic monsters, from savage beasts prowling mountain passes to cunning supernatural predators lurking in the shadowy back alleys of densely populated cities.
- Invest your rewards to upgrade your weaponry and buy custom armor, or spend them on horse races, card games, fist fighting and other pleasures life brings.
MetaHuman 5.6 and RealityScan
MetaHuman workflows
MetaHuman 5.6 left Early Access and became integrated into Unreal Engine. Epic highlighted in-engine character creation, body-shape blending and sculpting, expanded scan data, animation from a wider range of cameras, and audio-driven animation with head movement and mood controls. Updated licensing also permitted use in other engines and creative software under revised terms, subject to the applicable license.
These are digital-human workflows, not proof that Ciri is a stock MetaHuman. The official showcase material does not establish that the protagonist was used without substantial custom work.
Details are documented in Epic’s MetaHuman 5.6 release.
Scanned natural assets
CDPR said it used RealityScan to capture natural objects for the demo. Photogrammetry can provide realistic source material for rocks, plants, terrain and similar assets, but a scan is only the beginning. Artists still need to clean geometry, build materials, create collision, optimize meshes, organize streaming and test the result on target hardware.
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- If you buy this game, you will receive a free next-gen update on December 14th!
- Play as a highly trained monster slayer for hire.
- Built for endless adventure, the massive open world of The Witcher sets new standards in terms of size, depth and complexity.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Game of the Year edition brings together the base game and all the additional content released to date.
What the 60-fps PlayStation 5 claim proves
It proves that this prepared presentation was shown at 60 fps with ray tracing on a base PS5, according to Epic. It does not reveal the output resolution, whether dynamic resolution or temporal reconstruction was used, or whether that result applies to every scene.
- It is not evidence of native 4K output.
- It is not evidence of a locked 60 fps in the finished game.
- It says nothing definitive about combat, dense city scenes, interiors or long play sessions.
- It does not establish performance on Xbox Series consoles or PC.
- It does not specify final graphics modes or settings.
A conference demo can receive highly targeted optimization and use a carefully selected route. The final RPG will combine streaming with gameplay, AI, save systems, inventory, quests and much larger content demands.
What this means for The Witcher 4
The showcase indicates the technical direction of CDPR’s collaboration with Epic: more seamless traversal, denser natural environments, busier settlements and higher-fidelity character motion on current-generation hardware. It also shows that open-world performance is being treated as a combined data, rendering, animation and content-production problem.
Unreal Engine supplies tools and foundations; it does not determine the final game alone. CDPR’s engineering, assets, art direction, quest design, optimization and platform decisions will decide how those tools appear in the shipped RPG.
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- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt- Xbox One. Bonus Edition
What remains unknown
- Release date: the demo does not announce one.
- Final visuals: no official material here guarantees that every model, camera move, effect or scene layout will ship unchanged.
- Performance profile: there is no final resolution, graphics-mode specification or all-scenarios frame-rate commitment.
- Gameplay systems: the footage does not demonstrate the complete combat, AI, progression, inventory or save systems.
- Scope: a shown monster contract is not confirmed as a final quest in the same form.
CDPR staff cautioned that the finished RPG is not guaranteed to use the showcased material unchanged. GamesRadar’s report records that distinction, while PC Gamer’s coverage adds developer context about the collaboration.
UE5.6 to UE5.8: the version timeline
- June 3, 2025: UE5.6 and the CDPR/Epic technology demo were presented at State of Unreal 2025.
- UE5.6: Fast Geometry Streaming was available as an experimental plugin, and MetaHuman 5.6 was integrated into the engine.
- Demo period: Nanite Foliage was shown, but Epic described it as slated for a later release.
- UE5.7: Epic introduced Nanite Foliage as an experimental geometry-rendering system.
- UE5.8: Epic reported further improvements to Fast Geometry Streaming.
- September 2026 context: UE5.6 is now a prior major engine version, so the demo should be understood as a dated 2025 milestone rather than a description of the latest Unreal release.
Read Epic’s later announcements for UE5.7 and UE5.8.
The bottom line
The Witcher 4 tech demo is best understood as evidence of a technical direction, not a release build. It shows CDPR and Epic working toward larger streamed worlds, denser foliage and more capable animation on current hardware. The 60-fps ray-traced PS5 result is meaningful for that prepared showcase, while the final game’s resolution, performance, content and visual match remain unconfirmed.
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