Digital Foundry: Witcher Unreal Engine 5 & FSR 2.0 Tech
The Shift to Unreal Engine 5
CD Projekt Red announced a major transition, moving from its proprietary Red Engine to Unreal Engine 5 for future Witcher development. This shift signifies a strategic pivot aimed at improving development efficiency and onboarding, as maintaining custom tech proved increasingly difficult.
Key Considerations & Challenges
• Homogenization vs. Agility: While custom engines often allow for unique visual styles and lightweight performance (like Doom Eternal), Unreal Engine 5 offers a robust, standardized toolset.
• The Foliage Problem: A significant technical hurdle is that Nanite currently lacks support for masked materials, such as foliage—a critical requirement for the Witcher series. Effectively overcoming this will likely push Unreal Engine 5 development forward for the entire industry.
• Brain Drain: Leading rendering engineers are increasingly gravitating toward big entities like Epic, Unity, and Nvidia, making it difficult for independent studios to maintain proprietary tech at a competitive level.
PS5 HDMI 2.1 & VRR Features
Sony is finally rolling out support for HDMI 2.1 features, notably VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode).
"Make it a toggle. Simple. Please do that, Sony. Like, seriously. Otherwise, you've messed it up."
- The mandatory nature of ALLM causes issues for users who prefer using Black Frame Insertion (BFI) for motion clarity, as the two features often conflict.
- VRR is viewed as a necessary "get-out-of-jail-free card" for increasingly unoptimized titles like Elden Ring or Ghostwire Tokyo, though it does not solve underlying issues like improper frame pacing.
Upscaling: FSR 2.0 & Intel XeSS
Technical presentations at GDC highlighted the evolution of temporal upscaling:
- AMD FSR 2.0: A major improvement over FSR 1.0, bringing it up to parity with competitive temporal reconstruction techniques.
- Intel XeSS: Employs a machine learning approach and hardware-accelerated instructions (XMX) to achieve high-quality results. Early demonstrations suggest an Ultra Quality mode that provides superior anti-aliasing compared to standard TAA.