The Matrix Awakens vs the original movie - and it's shockingly close

Digital Foundry: "We have unfinished business with The Matrix Awakens. With its early scenes using real-time graphics to recreate iconic scenes from the Matrix movie, how close does the demo get to the UHD Blu-ray? Just how close are Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

[Magog]

So I guess The Coalition had to spend a lot of time cutting out individual light sources and particle effects to get the demo to run on series S even at around 600p internal resolution. Ray tracing also takes a big hit in accuracy from having that lower resolution essentially making surfaces either darker or blown out. I wonder if they will find a way to automate those cut backs and balance the lighting. If not programming for Series S|X is going to take a lot of time and effort to get it looking right and performing acceptably.

[Orchard]

“If not programming for Series S|X is going to take a lot of time and effort to get it looking right and performing acceptably.”

UE5 scales all the way down to Switch and mobile devices, I don’t think supporting Series S will be an issue.

Also from the footage they shared, it looks pretty great for a $299 box. Epics super res is pretty impressive given how clean the image looks on all platforms, while none of them were running at anywhere close to native 4K.

[Magog]

I didn't say it doesn't scale. Of course it scales. What I said was it will likely take a lot of work to make it scale with acceptable performance given the coalition had to manually remove many light sources, reflections and particle effects from the demo and the lower internal resolution has large repercussions for the lighting of a RT scene since there are fewer rays being bounced the darks get darker and the brights get blown out. Watch the video and he explains it very well.

[bouzebbal]

I remember Matrix on ps2 was also graphically impressive.. it ended up being a meh game.. people are focusing too much on performance and forget the most important.

[waverider]

Of course it runs on the series S. They cut the rez to under HD... It will run on the Switch and in whatever platform they want. It just a mattter of how much they drop rez and settings and are willing to spend time to make it work. Of course its much, much, much harder, because the lack of gpu power, bandwith, ram. almost everything compared to the Series X.

[Aloymetal]

According to some fanatics the UE5 scales down to a potato, it does not matter if it looks like potatoes because the important thing is the scaling...
On a serious note, the demo looks incredible and I personally can't wait for the big dogs (1st party devs) at PlayStation start releasing more PS5 only games either using their own engines or UE5. Good times ahead.

[CrimsonWing69]

Here’s the thing though, cloud gaming! it’s becoming more and more prevalent. The S won’t have an excuse to hold anything back at that point. It’ll be your bandwidth.

[Magog]

Sure if you like latency, artifacting, and always online requirements.

[darthv72]

Series S really tickles your pickle. You just cant stay away from it like a moth to a flame. Just buy one already and be one of us... people who enjoy it and are impressed at the little engine that can.

[Charlieboy333]

No thanks....I prefer the big engine that does

[Orchard]

Their SSD investigation is interesting, tapering off the performance of the SSD to ~1.7gbps (slower than XSX) and UE5 runs it just the same as having a very fast (default PS5) SSD.

Crazy that they have managed to get UE5's nanite to use so little bandwidth - Epic confirmed that UE5 is not heavy on storage/streaming, and that the engine uses ~300mbps max at 30fps.

[Magog]

That said they stated the two pre-rendered scenes in the demo were pre-rendered because they couldn't get the data to stream fast enough to make it work real time. I wonder if it was exclusive to the console with the SSD with double the bandwidth if those scenes could have been rendered in real time.

[Tacoboto]

I remember in the announcement demo of UE5 that people here really thought the engine wouldn't run on Xbox. Oh crazy people

[yeahokwhatever]

I remember 0 people saying that. I DO remember saying that the SX wouldn't likely look as good as the PS5, which turned out to be true.

[Gamer79]

People on here saying it needed a super fast ssd, he even mentions this in the video. Now they are denying anyone said that. Comment histories say otherwise.

[Einhander1971]

Every time I see the valley of the ancients demo, I keep imagining how incredible Motorstorm would look using UE5.

[Magog]

Remember that things like mud and vegetation don't work with nanite.

[Gamer79]

Remember motorstorm getting shown for the first time and people thought it was in game footage, turned out to be CG like killzone 2 and massively downgraded.

[yeahokwhatever]

The videos on the net looked really impressive. In my ps5, i was pretty disappointed. It looks good, but there's that weird speckly artifact thing going on. It actually looked like Dreams, tbh. A good bit of slowdown at times as well. I dont know, i just dont see this as some giant leap forward its being billed as (for marketing purposes, obviously). I was much more impressed with the cave tech demo.

[fr0sty]

Someone doesn't actually have a PS5.

[yeahokwhatever]

I've had one since day 1, smart guy. I've had every PlayStation since day 1. "someone" is just being honest. There was quit a bit of slowdown. If you didn't see it, then you're not very observant. I've been out of hardcore game development for a while, so I'm not sure what the proper term is for the small dots around moving objects but I find it annoying. Dreams has a lot of it, I suspect it has something to do with achieving the performance it does. This UE5 demo has some of the same, though not as bad as Dreams and usually in father off objects. BTW I think Dreams is a technical masterpiece.

[Abear21]

Seeing inside office buildings and flying around at speed was a cool next gen experience, seems like hardware tech is WAY out in front of software now and devs need better tools before we see that uncanny valley come in to view

[Magog]

Makes sense. You can't develop software for hardware that doesn't exist yet but you can and should develop hardware that expands the potential capabilities of software.

[Michiel1989]

then how do older games work on newer pc hardware?

[Knightofelemia]

The tech demo looks great I kept asking myself I wonder if GTA 6 will look like this so real looking. I tried everything to get the agents on my ass nothing happened flipped a car into the ocean it just hovered like a Jetson's car. I myself I am not big into movie games but if they made an actual Matrix game looking this good I would break my rule and buy a movie game.

[KingofBandits]

This was VERY impressive but I was disappointed to see my XSX choking on the chaotic traffic crashes I was making lol. optimizations would likely fix this, I can't wait to see Gears 6 and FF7R2 running on UE5

[KingofBandits]

though in watching/reading it looks like thats just optimization since it has to switch to a different mesh for deformation since Nanite can't handle deformation right now