Digital Foundry Confirms Witcher 4 Tech Demo Ran on Standard PS5, But Final Game May Differ

Many people have asked if the tech demo of The Witcher 4 really ran on a standard PS5, and Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia has shared his thoughts. He believes that it most likely did. According to Battaglia, the credibility of the demonstration is important because Epic Games chose it as the main showcase for their State of Unreal event, aimed at showing the potential of their graphics engine.

“If they were lying, that’d be a pretty big thing for both the investors and the companies using Unreal Engine,” Battaglia explained. He pointed out that there’s too much at stake for it to be a pre-rendered video or a PC posing as a console.

By carefully analyzing the high-quality version of the video, Battaglia also noticed some graphical imperfections, like small visual artifacts and environmental details that would not likely appear in a demo created to impress. “There’s a lot of aspects of it where you can see flaws that you wouldn’t imagine they would put in there for the purpose of showing a PC version of the game,” he explained. Even the 4K, 30fps version of the demo showed slight image softness, almost like the game was targeting 1440p resolution but using upscaling to reach 4K.

Is This a True Technical Revolution?

For Alex Battaglia, the Witcher 4 demo shown at the State of Unreal event behaves similarly to recent PS5 games, like Alan Wake 2 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which use dynamic resolutions and upscaling techniques to maintain 60 frames per second. However, he urges caution because the demo doesn’t necessarily represent the final game. CD Projekt RED has made it clear that this was just a technology presentation, meaning many of the features shown may not make it into the final product.

In the finished game, we can expect to see more variation in the environments, with some areas possibly having less uniform graphical quality. In an open world of this scale, it’s normal for visual optimization to not be perfect in every corner of the map.

However, one thing is clear: the demo ran perfectly at 60fps with no drops or stuttering. “I ran it through our tools, and it’s flawless throughout,” concluded Battaglia.