The Witcher 4 looks unreal on base PS5

Driftwood
Wednesday, June 4, 2025 | 7:45 AM
5 comments

PS5 Xbox Series X PC

Deprived of an Internet connection due to some intervention on the fiber network of my neighborhood, an unfortunate situation which could last for a while, I almost missed the “presentation” of The Witcher 4 at the State of Unreal event, which was supposed to showcase the incredible qualities of the engine. Despite all the staging, with a CDProjekt RED developer and his DualSense in hand, the technical demo presented was not a real gameplay sequence, but we were nonetheless perplexed by the promises made. Supposedly running on a standard PlayStation 5, the game's image quality, level of detail and fluidity have never been seen before in a Unreal Engine 5 game (open world or not), even on a €3,000-plus PC. So let's be frank: we don't believe for a second that we'll be able to enjoy this level of quality on today's machines, unless some incredible sleight of hand or astonishing optimizations have been made to UE5, even more so as the released games running on UE5 are still struggling to convince on consoles. There is of course the possible exception of Hellblade 2, but it only runs at 30 fps on Xbox Series X and offers a very linear experience. The animation work alone in the clips we see in this technical demo seems like science fiction to us. Can you imagine The Witcher 4 surpassing GTA 6 in every possible way from a technical standpoint? Does it seem plausible to you?

Ajus

Commented on 2025-06-04 10:36:45

Thank you, Driftwood! I've been waiting for this material to appear here. If you'll ever have a chance to get it in "Gamersyde quality" (TM) , then I'll be happy as hell to check it.

On the other hand, bearing in mind the hype about Cyberpunk 2077 when it was announced, I acknowledge that this is only a tech demo and although it looks stunning when running on a PS5, I'll wait for the final product to be available. Something tells me, that it will not look so stunning at the time of release. But well.. let's wait and see. I'm having high hopes, but it's safe to have a bit of scepticism as well.

In reply to

Rozin

Commented on 2025-06-04 22:02:51 In reply to Ajus

Digital Foundry got its raw 4K footage (well, behind their patreon subscription ofcourse)

phillipstuerzl

Commented on 2025-06-05 02:08:39 In reply to Rozin

Posted by Rozin

It's still not the raw footage unfortunately. Higher quality than YouTube though.

dc_coder_84

Commented on 2025-06-05 16:41:21

The Rage engine and the Unreal engine have both their own strengths. So for example GTA shines with hair rendering, fluid simulation and RT whereas Unreal shines with virtualized geometry aka Nanite. Both engines are superb technical efforts.