CD Projekt Red is focusing on optimizing The Witcher 4 for consoles first, aiming for a seamless 60 FPS experience—though the Xbox Series S may present significant performance challenges which may be a tough task, according to Tech VP Charles Tremblay.
Despite not accurately representing the current state of gameplay, The Witcher 4’s tech demo at the most recent State of Unreal attracted attention for all the right reasons. It’s ambitious to run at 60 frames per second with ray tracing on a base PS5, but it also marks a change for the studio, which has always demonstrated its games on PC.
Charles Tremblay, vice president of technology at CD Projekt RED, told Digital Foundry that the studio had previously run into a number of issues when building for PC and then scaling down. The PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk 2077 made this the most obvious. “We definitely want to focus on console-first development this time around. We then encountered the challenge while working with Unreal. There would be work involved in achieving our goal of 60 frames per second on the PS5.
And for that reason, we began discussing what needed to be done with the technology. We also determined that we must have everything that needs to be developed. It’s difficult to predict where we’ll go from here, but for now, we want to concentrate on what it takes to realize this goal on a console, and we have the project running at 60 frames per second. Instead of reverting to 30 frames per second or something like, we really wanted to shoot for 60 frames per second once more.
Achieving that level of performance on the Xbox Series S won’t be easy, given its hardware limitations compared to the Series X and PS5. Charles Tremblay noted that optimizing for the Series S is “on their radar,” but admitted reaching 60 FPS on the system will be a major hurdle, adding, “Let’s just say it’s something we still need to work out.”
Below is a YouTube video shared by Digital Foundry on an interview about “Inside The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo” between CD Projekt RED + Epic Deep Dive
The platforms for The Witcher 4 have not been verified by CD Projekt RED. It won’t launch in 2026, even the release window is still up in the air because of how early in the development process it is. Fortunately, you won’t have to deal with fetch missions like in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In the meantime, keep checking back for additional developments.
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