If you’ve been following the Game Awards last night with Xboxygen, you probably remember the appearance of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. But they weren’t there for a game, at least not nearly. If you haven’t already, we recommend that you download The Matrix Awakens right away.
What exactly is the Matrix Awakens?
Matrix awakens it’s not a game. This is a free technical demo that runs in real time on the Unreal Engine 5, but it is playable!
And that’s all the difference. We’ve had several demos of Unreal Engine 5 in the last two years, but they were always videos of what was possible in the future with the Epic Games engine. But this time it’s truer than ever.
Playable Demo titled “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” Now Available on Xbox Series X | S and PS5.
the future is here
How was this demo designed? What is hidden behind? This is what our housemates reveal Eurogamer after chatting with Epic Games.
If the characters of Keanu Reeves (Neo) and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) seem so realistic, it is because they were created with technology. Metahuman from Epic Games, which we detailed in early 2021.
The playable tech demo is obviously heavily written, but that doesn’t stop it from being very impressive when you know that everything runs in real time. Explosions, for example, are calculated in real time using the physics system. Chaos d’Epic.
Does the world created for this demo seem too frozen at first? So wait until you get to the last third where you can roam freely and take control of the vehicles. It is Nanite technology, dedicated to geometry, that hits the mark here, along with Lumen, which manages the lighting. It is also possible to play with the options to, for example, modify the position of the sun. Ray Tracing works wonders here.
We also learn that to further improve the overall rendering, Epic relies heavily on their TSR (Super Temporal Resolution) solution which injects the data from the previous images into the current one to improve quality. With the help of tools and procedural generation, Epic Games has created a coherent and realistic world for a city the size of downtown Los Angeles (downtown district). Here are the numbers.
- The city is 4,138 km wide and 4,968 km long, slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles.
- The area of the city is 15.79 km2
- The perimeter of the city is 14,519 km long.
- There are 260 km of roads in the city.
- There are 512 km of sidewalks in the city.
- There are 1,248 intersections in the city.
- There are 45,073 parked cars, of which 38,146 are drivable and destructible.
- There are 17,000 simulated vehicles on the road that are destructible.
- 7,000 buildings
- 27,848 street lights only on the side of the street
- 12,422 sewer holes
- Nearly 10 million unique and duplicate assets were created to create the city.
- The whole world is illuminated only by the sun, the sky and the emitting materials of the mesh. No light source was placed for the tens of thousands of streetlights and streetlights. In night mode, almost all lighting comes from millions of emitting windows in buildings.
- 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians
- Average number of polygons? 7,000 buildings made up of thousands of assets and each asset alone could represent up to millions of polygons. Therefore, we have several billion polygons to make up just the buildings in the city.
This is the same team that ran this Matrix demo that was previously responsible for the Unreal Engine 5 demos. For an overview of what the Unreal Engine 5 looks like in a real game, we recommend that you watch the first one. Hellblade 2 gameplay video broadcast tonight.
Finally, keep in mind that while watching the demo videos on your phone is impressive enough, the experience will be more amazing on your 4K TV.