I took another look at the visuals of Death Stranding 2 in different scenarios, which is considered to be one of the most optimised and visual impressive game to date and there’s a massive drop in the visual quality of mountains at middle to far distances, especially on the base PS5 running at performance 60 fps mod.
In the meanwhile The Witcher 4 demo is so much more impressive with zero visual degradation on the distance and the use of raytracing for lighting and shadows. The forest was so much more detailed it’s not even comparable (DS2 forests have flat terrains with very few grass patches and small rocks even on PS5 Pro quality setting). The city was running good with a lot of characters on screen. We will have to see how it looks on the final game in 2-3 years but it was a realtime demo presented on stage with much more optimisations to come.
Looking at the screenshots, there’s no way they could have done it with classic LODs.