The Witcher 4 reveal trailer was "pre-rendered on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce GPU," which tells us... not much, actually

The Witcher IV – Cinematic Reveal Trailer | The Game Awards 2024 – YouTube

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There were some tasty reveal trailers at the Game Awards yesterday, and the internet is abuzz with discussion about the first glimpses of several upcoming games from some of the greats. We’ve got a comprehensive list of all the Game Awards 2024 reveal trailers for you, but I think it’s fair to say that none generated more excitement than our first (cinematic) look at The Witcher 4.

However, keen-eyed hardware enthusiasts (and we most certainly are) will have noticed that the trailer begins with a line of explanatory text confirming that the trailer was “pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU” .

Well then. I’m guessing this would be one of those mysterious 50-series graphics cards, although it’s unclear which one. The entire hardware community (including ourselves) is expecting Nvidia’s next-generation cards to be unveiled at CES 2025 in Las Vegas next January, and the hype is palpable as the expected date draws ever closer.

We are currently assuming that this year’s show will likely see the launch of the top-of-the-line RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, and possibly the RTX 5070 too, if rumors are to be believed. Speaking of rumors, the recent RTX 5090 leak spoke in hushed tones of an immensely powerful 21,760-core, 600W TGP monster that, in my opinion, is worthy of both extremely demanding gaming in 4K and the Silver Sword.

Other than that, pre-rendering a trailer on a new GPU doesn’t really mean much. Technically, you could pre-render a spectacular looking trailer on a very slow card, since you have all the time in the world to carve out individual frames at whatever speed it can handle before stitching them all together into a 60 fps burn for the later video. Hence the whole “pre” part of “pre-rendering”.

Still, to my knowledge, this is the first trailer to mention an “unannounced GeForce GPU,” so it’s something to talk about. Personally, I reserve my enthusiasm for some real-time footage of something running in a 50s series, or a gameplay reveal trailer for The Witcher 4. Which, I have to say, looks pretty good even in cinematic form, isn’t it?

A quick check of my Steam account shows that I spent 182 happy hours in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and I’m sure I’ll experience something similar in the new game. Hopefully I won’t need an RTX 50 series card to run it, but since it’s a major release of Unreal Engine 5 I can imagine it will still have some pretty high hardware requirements. Wait a minute, RX 7800 XT. You got this, buddy.

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The Witcher 4 reveal trailer was “pre-rendered on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce GPU,” which tells us… not much, actually

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