During GDC 2026, NVIDIA he had a presentation about tracking and took the opportunity to explain the details RTX Mega Geometrya new program focused on giving leaves. More importantly, they revealed the highly anticipated upcoming title that will use this technology: The Witcher 4.
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A few weeks after the event, NVIDIA finally shared the full video of the presentation, revealing how ambitious it was CD Project redIt’s definitely the next project.
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Delving deeper into the hour-long video presentation, you’ll notice that there’s a tech demo provided by CD Projekt Red that’s hidden in plain sight, showing three tree suits that appear to be drawn straight from The Witcher 4.
According to NVIDIA, the display is built around impressive numbers: a large outdoor area that displays approx 60 million plantsprobably 1 million treesand over 200 different types of plants across a 5×5 km map.
They went on to explain that with RTX Mega Geometry, the leaves are modeled geometrically down to the level of individual pine needles, without the alpha cards used in the basic properties. And some of the big trees even pass by 10 million polygons! In addition, everything is animated differently and features dynamic tracking light filled with pixel shadows. To put it simply, it looks incredibly realistic and impressive.
If the technical jargon is small, you can check out the attractive results for yourself at this link. However, remember that this is a technical demonstration and represents a product that is still under development, which means it is not the final version.
According to NVIDIA, the exhibition is built around the best numbers: a large outdoor area with about 60 million plants, about a million trees, and more than 200 types of plants on a 5×5 km map.
NVIDIA also explained the “technological magic” behind these virtual trees that we see in the technical demo, revealing that the maximum number of polygons is achieved by adding small objects called “branches.”
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Much like Nanite leaves in the system The Unreal Enginea single large tree is made up of unique types of branches that are repeated thousands of times. Therefore, in order to maintain efficiency, these branches are firmly attached to the skeleton for animation instead of using complex vertex-skinning, which allows realistic movement without the high processing power required for such density.
To manage this without crushing the program’s memory, developers have developed many special sections Level of Detail (LOD) system. Unlike conventional methods that reduce the quality of remote viewing, this system focuses on combining these thousands of individual events into a few blocks, which get bigger as the player moves, keeping the geometric complexity almost the same. And through Opacity Micro-Maps (OMMs)characteristic of the RTX 40-series and above, the engine can handle the complex lighting and clarity of millions of leaves with perfect pixel accuracy, ensuring that Witcher 4 looks detailed no matter the size.
For those wondering about the horsepower required to run this, NVIDIA’s display ran at around 80 FPS at 4K GeForce RTX 5090and at 58 FPS at 1440p on a GeForce RTX 4070. As the owner of the “humble” RTX 5060 myself, it’s a relief to see NVIDIA identify an optimization designed to make this technology work on less high-end hardware. It just gives us mere mortals hope that we won’t need a supercomputer to enjoy a well-rendered pine needle in the next Witcher adventure.
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