The Witcher 2 Tech Analysis

With The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition due out in just two more days, Eurogamer has wrangled up an analysis of the technology that powers the RED Engine and why it looks “even more astonishing” on Xbox 360. They also include a “head-to-head video”, two separate performance videos, and various comparison screenshots to show off the console edition’s revised lighting, altered weather conditions, and more:

We used our standard PC test rig here – an i7 set-up overclocked to 3.33GHz and working in combination with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680. All settings in-game were set to the maximum with the exception of texture downsampling and CD Projekt RED’s overkill selectable, ubersampling, which hits performance hard even on top-end systems.

As you might expect, from a nuts-and-bolts technical perspective, there are some easy wins for the PC: for a start, texture quality and filtering is generally in another league altogether compared to the Xbox 360 game. This is not exactly unexpected. Special cases aside, the standard for multi-platform development these days tends to be a case of targeting artwork for console 720p and then simply offering the option of higher resolution rendering on PC. Not so with The Witcher 2, where the developers are clearly providing superior assets aimed at looking great at 1680×1050 and beyond.

Indeed, there’s so much detail in the textures here when running at 720p that there’s sometimes a shimmering pixel-crawl effect – a by-product perhaps of the lack of multi-sample anti-aliasing and too much detail being crammed into what is, by PC terms, a fairly meagre level of resolution (if you have the GPU resources to spare, here’s where the Ubersampling option comes into its own).

PC also scores easy wins in terms of shadow quality and the number of them being rendered dynamically. Effects work doesn’t just benefit from higher-precision buffers, but also from physically higher resolution: performance-sapping alpha effects such as smoke, fog and particles are clearly running at a lower res on the Xbox 360, with intersecting geometry often showing some noticeable jaggies.

If there was ever any doubt over whether or not the team is extremely talented at what they do, this article certainly dispels that notion.