Witcher 4 RTX Mega Geometry Foliage demo runs at almost 60 FPS on an RTX 4070 and 80 FPS at 4K on a RTX 5090

NVIDIA gave us a sneak peek of The Witcher 4's potential real-time performance with its new foliage LOD system for RTX Mega Geometry during GTC 2026. NVIDIA published a talk discussing the future of Path Tracing, and showed off a demo of the tech running with all the dials cranked (allegedly) at 58 FPS or more on an RTX 5090 and RTX 4070.

The demo was comprised of nearly 60 million plants, one million trees, and over 200 different species of plants in a 5x5 km area, with all of the assets running in VRAM. Martin Stich, one of NVIDIA's spokespersons and the leader of NVIDIA's ray tracing team, claims that if you flattened the entire scene at maximum LOD, the demo would have over 5 trillion triangles. What makes the system special is the fact that all of the foliage geometry is modeled, all the way down to the individual pine needles.

All of these assets were running with full path tracing enabled. On the RTX 5090, NVIDIA claims the demo ran at 80 FPS with DLSS quality mode upscaling from 1440p to 4K. The RTX 4070 with DLSS Quality mode upscaling from 960p to 1440p achieved 58 FPS. NVIDIA also laid out the frame time analysis, showing that the path tracing scene takes almost 50% of the GPU's render time per frame.

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If it wasn't obvious, a scene of this complexity would likely be impossible to render without NVIDIA's Mega Geometry and other technologies assisting the 3D render pipeline. RTX Mega Geometry's foliage rendering capability is designed to provide real-time rendering that doesn't succumb to LOD pop-in at a quality level unseen before. However, it's worth mentioning that these performance statistics are part of a demo, and should not be used to guess The Witcher 4's actual performance. Likely the game itself will use an optimized version of NVIDIA's new foliage tech that can run performantly with all of the game's other assets, including game logic, cities, and NPCs.

RTX Mega Geometry was showcased when the RTX 50 series was announced, and has already been implemented in games such as Remedy's Alan Wake II. The tech aims to expand the amount of polygons that can be rendered in real time while reducing VRAM requirements for ray-tracing and improving performance at the same time. In Alan Wake II, RTX Mega Geometry boosted performance by 15-20%. However, the Witcher 4 so far appears to be the first game that will take advantage of the new foliage system coming to RTX Mega Geometry.