Anyone following Witcher 3’s development knows how much hype has surrounded it and the new REDEngine3 tech that is powering the RPG sequel, but what they didn’t know is how this would run and whether we would need to build a 3K PC to see it. Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case…at least according to engine programmer Przemysław Czatrowski.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPm3NXWcEec

In an interesting presentation, Czatrowski mentions Umbra and their new streaming technology that, much like Carmack’s Rage engine, only loads tiles that are able to be seen by the player. What this does is make an especially visually intense game like Witcher much easier for hardware to handle by limiting the work it has to do in order to render a scene.

Here’s how the occlusion process works:

1:The world is split in tiles, and for each tile a “tome” data package is built, including the occlusion data. The engine determines which tomes are needed to be shown depending on the camera position and direction.

2:If the newly determined set of tomes differs from the previous set, an asynchronous computation process starts, creating a new tome collection, that is sent to the renderer to replace the one previously rendered.

3:Tomes that are not used anymore are removed from the stream to free up memory.

A more thorough explanation is made available on the slides they’ve posted online.

It’s nothing new to European game fans, since advanced graphics technology has always been one of the hallmarks of development in that region, though this does show how far ahead of the curve CD Projekt really is.