The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience

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Epic Games and a Warner Bros team including Lana Wachowski, co-director of the original The Matrix trilogy and the upcoming The Matrix Resurrections movie, have revealed a startling tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 based in the universe of The Matrix.

Officially titled The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, it gives players a first real look at what could be possible with the new engine underpinning games on the new generation of console hardware — and it’s free to PS5 and Xbox Series players right now.

Part gameplay demo and part cinematic experience, Awakens stars Keanu Reeves (Thomas Anderson/Neo) and Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) but — aside from a short video clip of Reeves — entirely in virtual form. It’s set in a Matrix-style environment of a green-tinted generic American city, measuring some 6.1 square miles (15.8 square kilometres) in area.

The gameplay part of the experience involves car chases and fast-paced action sequences, which Epic says are completely dynamic and will respond “in a fully unscripted way”. That means that there should be a unique experience every time players run it.

This is all down to Chaos, UE5’s high-performance physics system that can simulate the movement of cloth, hair, vehicles, and more, all in real time.
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further reading:
www.gtplanet.net

The Matrix Awakens is a Free Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo With Over 38,000 Drivable Vehicles

Epic Games and a Warner Bros team including Lana Wachowski, co-director of the original The Matrix trilogy and the upcoming The Matrix Resurrections movie, have revealed a startling tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 based in the universe of The Matrix. Officially titled The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal
www.gtplanet.net www.gtplanet.net
 
DiabloDane said:
On the stream i watched, they were able to adjust the amount of people and vehicles on the road, MAX vehicles made the highways look like peak traffic right across the map, i think it could easily fit 38000 vehicles
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Right across the map? How do you see right across the map. Probably till the edge of your POV.
Same thing already achieved in GTA 4. Max traffic slider the roads are packed.
It's not that impressive.

38 000 vehicles to me mean 38 000 types of vehicles.
If it is just vehicles you can drive with several copies in different colours of the same few vehicles, then once again. Already achieved in GTA

What exactly are they bragging about then?
 
Beyond.Celsus said:
What exactly are they bragging about then?
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I'm not really understanding your pessimism here. The car thing isn't the selling point...it's just something mentioned / used by that particular tech site in their headline. It's more a tech demo showing off the scalability, raytracing, nanite etc. of unreal engine in a playable tech demo.
 
saor said:
I'm not really understanding your pessimism here. The car thing isn't the selling point...it's just something mentioned / used by that particular tech site in their headline. It's more a tech demo showing off the scalability, raytracing, nanite etc. of unreal engine in a playable tech demo.
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I am pessimistic of anything 'AAA' studious claim their games will do.
The final product is never what they bragged it will be.
 
Beyond.Celsus said:
I am pessimistic of anything 'AAA' studious claim their games will do.
The final product is never what they bragged it will be.
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It's Unreal Engine. Unless you've been living under a rock you're surely aware of what a big deal it is. This isn't a studio bragging about a game. It's a studio who's developed one of the most useful development tools showing off by creating a tech demo that's freely available. It's like you didn't even read the article?
 
Beyond.Celsus said:
Right across the map? How do you see right across the map. Probably till the edge of your POV.
Same thing already achieved in GTA 4. Max traffic slider the roads are packed.
It's not that impressive.

38 000 vehicles to me mean 38 000 types of vehicles.
If it is just vehicles you can drive with several copies in different colours of the same few vehicles, then once again. Already achieved in GTA

What exactly are they bragging about then?
Click to expand...
It's a tech demo of what the engine is capable of. And to my eyes it blurs the line between reality and UE5, and it's a fitting metaphor that they chose the Matrix to do so. Which is kind of the point.

Not some arb thing about 38,000 vehicles. Come back here when GTA 4 looks like this, then you'd be comparing apples with apples...
 
Beyond.Celsus said:
Right across the map? How do you see right across the map. Probably till the edge of your POV.
Same thing already achieved in GTA 4. Max traffic slider the roads are packed.
It's not that impressive.

38 000 vehicles to me mean 38 000 types of vehicles.
If it is just vehicles you can drive with several copies in different colours of the same few vehicles, then once again. Already achieved in GTA

What exactly are they bragging about then?
Click to expand...
In GTA 4 there is always noticeable pop-in no matter which system you run it on, with UE5 that’s reduced to zero. The cars are only rendered within your FOV, but unlike in other game engines the AI is persistent and will not disappear when you round a corner. The engine keeps track of all the npcs and cars using point data.

Also the fidelity is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and it goes way beyond what we usually get when you boost CPU and GPU power, thanks to nanite and lumen etc.
 
One important thing I learned from this demo: the PS5 nvme isn’t as big of a deal after all. At least not for UE5.
 
Mike Hoxbig said:
It's a tech demo of what the engine is capable of. And to my eyes it blurs the line between reality and UE5, and it's a fitting metaphor that they chose the Matrix to do so. Which is kind of the point.

Not some arb thing about 38,000 vehicles. Come back here when GTA 4 looks like this, then you'd be comparing apples with apples...
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I would not be shocked if you tell me the head of Rockstar dev team deleted the GTA 6 project after this demo dropped.

Don't think Take-Two's latest engine is even capable of the amount of detail that we saw here, never mind the ray tracing and dynamic shadows it pulls off in real time.
 
AlphaJohn said:
I would not be shocked if you tell me the head of Rockstar dev team deleted the GTA 6 project after this demo dropped.

Don't think Take-Two's latest engine is even capable of the amount of detail that we saw here, never mind the ray tracing and dynamic shadows it pulls off in real time.
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I said 'impressive' and 'wow' above 'cos MyBB doesn't allow me to say '****ing amazing' - like yourself, I was blown away by this tech demo on a Xbox Series X.
 
The car part is incredible. The neo and trinity models with the humanoid protagonist model in the back seat.

If someone said that was an actor, i would have been “yeah, of course”
 
AfricanTech said:
I said 'impressive' and 'wow' above 'cos MyBB doesn't allow me to say '****ing amazing' - like yourself, I was blown away by this tech demo on a Xbox Series X.
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The PS5 is on par with Series X as per Digital foundry, what truly blew my mind on the engine was how well it scaled on the Series S. Sure it was not as crisp/clear as the PS5 but it had all the data points, draw distance, ray tracing.

Its normally one aspect where some render engines fail, ie scalability. Sure you wont see it on a PS4 or Xbox one but that's more to do about technical limitations (Old tech) than power limitations.
 
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