It's likely to go down in history as one of the greatest E3 demos, its iconic status only embellished by the fact that outside of behind-closed-doors visitors, nobody has actually seen it. But the trailer footage looks sensational and are stoking plenty of excitement. And now, we have confirmation of the PC hardware that was actually running it.
CD Projekt RED's junior community specialist Alicja Kozera posted on the game's Discord channel that Intel's Core i7 8700K was the CPU of choice for the demo, while Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti provided the all-important graphics component. Digital Foundry's John Linneman witnessed the demo first-hand during E3 and noted that the game - which was fully playable and running entirely in real-time - was operating at a capped 30 frames per second on a large 4K screen, though it was unclear whether the in-development code itself was rendering at native ultra HD. John reports that performance was smooth by and large, but there were some occasional performance drops.
It's worth pointing out that CDPR brought along a development build of the game, rather than a vertical slice that would have been optimised specifically for demo purposes. In effect, what lucky attendees saw was a game clearly in a very early stage of development but still running rather well overall. Here's the full demo PC spec, as revealed by CDPR. The extent to which the current demo requires such a large amount of memory and state-of-the-art storage remains to be seen.