The Witcher IV – Cinematic Tech Demo Showcases PS5 Performance at State of Unreal 2025

CD Projekt RED has revealed a new cinematic trailer and technical showcase for The Witcher IV during the State of Unreal 2025 presentation, offering fans a fresh look at the next chapter in the saga—running live on a base PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled.

The real-time tech demo, created in collaboration with Epic Games, follows protagonist Ciri on a monster contract through the untamed wilderness of Kovir, a region never before seen in the games. The presentation transitions from rugged mountains and forests to the bustling port city of Valdrest, illustrating not just narrative scope but also the engine’s open-world capabilities.

CD Projekt RED is using Unreal Engine 5 to build The Witcher IV, as part of its ongoing partnership with Epic Games. This demo, part of Unreal Fest 2025, highlights next-gen features like the Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage, MetaHuman AI crowd scaling, and FastGeo Streaming—all running smoothly at 60 FPS on console hardware.

Notably, all technologies shown are being actively developed with Epic Games and will become available to Unreal developers starting with Unreal Engine 5.6. According to CD Projekt RED’s co-CEO Michal Nowakowski, the demo marks a milestone in development, but much more is still to come.

“We started our partnership with Epic Games to push open-world game technology forward,” Nowakowski said. “To show this early look at the work we’ve been doing using Unreal Engine on PlayStation 5 is a significant milestone—and a testament to the great cooperation between our teams.”

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney added that CDPR is the ideal partner to help evolve UE5’s world-building features and bring them to the wider dev community.

The Witcher IV is currently in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. A release date has yet to be announced.