Witcher 3’s path-traced hair is RTX 50 only, and Nvidia’s 430 FPS claim runs at 6X

Nvidia says the path-traced hair added to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered runs on GeForce RTX 50 cards and nothing older, and the highest frame rate it has published for the game, up to 430 FPS at 1920×1080, assumes six-times multi frame generation is switched on. Both claims come from Nvidia’s post of 29 September by Andrew Burnes, and every figure in it is the company’s own.

HairWorks covered Geralt, horses and monsters in the 2015 game. Image: CD Projekt Red Image: CD Projekt Red

The hair technique is Linear-Swept Spheres. Nvidia says its team added LSS path-traced hair rendering for “Geralt and all HairWorks-enhanced NPCs and enemies on GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, which introduced support for LSS primitives via their fourth generation Ray Tracing Cores”.

Spheres and tubes stand in for tessellated triangles

Nvidia’s reasoning is cost. Each strand of hair is built from tessellated triangles, and with so many strands “creating the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) builds for ray tracing becomes computationally expensive, while memory usage balloons”, so LSS uses spheres and tubes instead.

RTX 40 owners get the other half of the path-tracing work. Nvidia says Shader Execution Reorder has…