Digital Foundry recently interviewed Charles Tremblay, vice president of technology at CD Projekt RED, who revealed that the team has turned to a "host-first" development method to achieve its ambition: to run an open-world game that enables hardware ray tracing at 60 frames per second on Sony PS5 consoles.And this is much easier than the work CDPR had to do in previous games - scaling down (from PC to console).
Turn to the "host-first" development strategy
"When we started working with Epic, we had high expectations for this project (Witcher 4). We used to always lead the PC and then scale down to adapt to the host, but we had so many problems in the past, so this time we decided to do the opposite: from the start, we were host-centric. We then worked with Epic and realized the challenge of achieving this goal: it would take a lot of work to achieve 60fps on the PS5. So we started talking about figuring out how we needed to leverage the technology."
The previous development model of CDPR was to first achieve high-standard effects on the PC, and then try to reduce the specifications to adapt to hosts with weak hardware.This "transplantation" has caused serious problems in "Cyberpunk 2077", especially on old consoles.So this time, the team decided to do the opposite: develop with the PS5 as the starting point, with the goal of running smoothly at 60FPS with hardware ray tracing enabled.
Unreal 5 Engine and Technical Challenges
"The Witcher 4" is developed using Unreal 5 engine, not simply applying the engine, but working with Epic to deeply customize the technical level to ensure stable performance under high-fidelity image quality - especially when the goal is to "60 frames in the whole process".
Currently only for technical demonstrations, the content is incomplete
"Our goal is 60fps, not back to 30fps. At the moment, we are very clear that we have a lot of work to do. It's a technical demonstration, the game loop is not fully implemented, there are a lot of systems that are not yet completed in combat, but the goal has been set, and that's what we set for The Witcher 4. It's too early to say whether we can succeed, but we'll do our best to ensure it."
CDPR currently displays not a complete game, but a technical proof of concept version, and many key game mechanics have not been launched yet.Work is still in its early stages, but “performance goals” have been set as the core guidelines.
Xbox Series S is a big problem
“It would be very challenging to run 60FPS on the Series S.”
PS5 was selected as the performance benchmark for console development, and the weaker Xbox Series S has not yet begun to optimize. Tremblay also admitted that "it has not started yet" and said that it is extremely difficult to achieve equal performance on Series S.This reveals CDPR's concerns about "next-generation low-end phones", which may also mean that the Series S version will have more compromises (resolution, ray tracing, frame count, etc.).
