NVIDIA showcases ray tracing and ultra-detailed vegetation in The Witcher 4

At GDC 2026, NVIDIA unveiled its latest ray tracing technology and a new system for rendering vegetation, designed for the upcoming game The Witcher 4.

NVIDIA representatives emphasized that the technology runs on real game engines, not just in a presentation. Developers from CD Projekt Red provided highly detailed tree models used in the demo.

A massive open map with millions of plants

The demo scene covered a 5 km² area and included roughly 60 million vegetation objects. This included about 1 million trees and over 200 different plant species.

RTX Mega Geometry technology allows trees to be rendered with incredible detail, down to individual pine needles. Some large trees consist of over 10 million polygons, and the base assets do not use alpha maps.

Performance across different GPUs

According to NVIDIA, the demo achieved the following FPS:

• RTX 5090: approximately 80 FPS at 1440p with upscaling to 4K
• RTX 4070: about 58 FPS at 960p with upscaling to 1440p

These figures reflect technical demonstration performance, not the final game. Using DLSS Ray Reconstruction in Quality mode, the RTX 5090 delivers 80–90 FPS, while the RTX 4070 achieves around 60 FPS.

VRAM and resource usage

The demo is designed for graphics cards with 12 GB of VRAM. Around 5 GB is used for buffers and data structures, with total memory usage, including drivers and DLSS, reaching approximately 9 GB. The upper-level acceleration system consumes an additional 900 MB of temporary memory.

The difference between ray tracing and rasterization is minimal — about 1–1.5 ms on the RTX 5090 — demonstrating how ray tracing is approaching rasterization performance.