The Witcher 4's RTX Mega Geometry Foliage Demo Ran at 4K@80FPS (with DLSS Quality) on a 5090

Key Points:

• At GDC 2026, NVIDIA and CD Projekt RED showcased a demo of The Witcher 4 using NVIDIA's RTX Mega Geometry technology to path trace highly detailed forests with over 60 million plants and 1 million trees on a 5×5 km terrain, all held in memory without streaming.
• The demo features fully dynamic path-traced lighting and pixel-perfect shadows on massive geometry, including trees with over 10 million polygons each, modeled down to individual pine needles without using alpha maps or cards.
• NVIDIA's Mega Geometry system uses a multi-stage level-of-detail (LOD) approach that merges sub-meshes into fewer instances at distance to manage memory, leveraging Opacity Micro-Maps (OMMs) for efficient rendering without reducing geometric complexity.
• Performance figures from the demo indicate around 80 FPS at 4K (upscaled) on an RTX 5090 and 58 FPS at 1440p on an RTX 4070, with most processing power devoted to a two-bounce path tracer and DLSS handling upscaling and denoising.
• The Witcher 4, expected to launch in 2027, will feature this technology, though potential delays in NVIDIA's RTX 6000 Series GPUs might mean playing the game on current hardware; CD Projekt RED has already demonstrated a ray-traced version running at 60 FPS on a base PlayStation 5.