During 2025’s Unreal Fest Orlando, developer CD Projekt Red has shown a tech demo for The Witcher 4, giving us our first glimpse at the upcoming RPG’s sprawling world while delving deeper into the technology that powers it.
The studio has moved away from its proprietary REDEngine, partnering instead with Epic and using Unreal Engine 5 for its next entry in the series. Going by the tech demo, the decision might just pay off.
The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo
The video runs for roughly 14 minutes, starting with a sequence focused on a merchant and his personal guard traveling in a carriage. Close-ups and dark cramped environments show off the game’s rather impressive facial animations and lighting solutions before introducing a deeply unsettling manticore.
Following the introductory sequence, Cinematic Director Kajetan Kapuscinski plays through the remainder of the demo, controlling Ciri as the camera occasionally drifts away to showcase specific pieces of tech.
Unreal Engine 5 allows the game to more realistically emulate musculature – as seen during a sequence in which Ciri rides Kelpie, her trusty horse – while rendering dense, detailed foliage as well as numerous crowds without bringing the hardware of the base PS5 to its knees.
The Witcher 4’s tech demo is gorgeous but, perhaps more impressively, it runs at a steady 60 FPS, with raytracing enabled, on the standard version of Sony’s console.
Another interesting detail is tied to the location Ciri explores, which happens to be Kovir, a place the series has yet to visit. Aside from the “dense forests and wild nature” that it seems to offer in spades, its architecture appears to be quite different from that of the places we’ve seen in the past.
You can check out The Witcher 4’s tech demo for yourself below, but it is worth keeping in mind that, as the developer tells VGC, it shows off a chunk of the game’s world but is not “The Witcher 4 itself.”
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