The Witcher Gamers Blown Away by 'Next-Gen' Free Graphics Demo

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is an impressive game over a decade after its initial release, but it can be better.

Technology is far more advanced than it was back then meaning we can revisit some of these gorgeous open-world titles and push them further than even the developers thought possible.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt looks gorgeous on PCs at max settings and you can see this next-gen version of the game on YouTube.

A demo was shared by Digital Dreams who says the game is running at 4K with 60fps on a RTX 5090 with raytracing on. Footage shows Geralt wandering through the open-world, taking in the sights and admiring the lighting.

It’s all very impressive though we should keep in mind that there’s not a whole lot going on in the video. Geralt only gets into a scrap once with some low-level enemies and while it looks to run fine, I’d imagine things get a little dicier when you start taking on more foes, and bigger foes at that.

Nevertheless, it’s a great technical showcase and if you’ve got a PC powerful enough, you should definitely see if you can replicate this for yourself and see if a full playthrough would work.

Those who watched the video were blown away by what they saw, with some very high praise coming from one commenter who said: “Now this actually looks like the E3 demo that they showed us 10 years ago.”

Looking at this, it’s making us wonder what to expect in The Witcher IV. We’ve seen a brief snippet of gameplay from a tech-demo and it looked gorgeous, but like the video from Digital Dreams, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. It was mainly Ciri wandering through a town, with some brief time spent actually roaming the open-world itself.

That said, if there's one thing CD Projekt RED can do it’s make a living, breathing digital environment.

For all the flack Cyberpunk 2077 took at launch, there was no denying the city felt alive and there’s no doubt The Witcher IV will feel the same. CD Projekt RED feels like it’s on par with Rockstar Games when it comes to open-worlds.

We’ve still got a long time to wait until The Witcher IV drops though, which gives us plenty of time to replay The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt again. In fact, there’s probably enough time for a few playthroughs…