Epic Games has just released a brand new interactive tech demo for Unreal Engine 5, The Matrix Awakens. This interactive tech demo shows what current-gen only games can look like, and you can find below a full tech demo playthrough.

Now the bad news here is that this tech demo is only available on current-gen consoles. Epic Games does not currently plan to release this tech demo on PC. We asked Epic Games why it made that decision and have not received any answer yet.

Now while the 3D character models for Keanu and Carrie-Anne Moss are highly detailed, they are let down by their facial and movement animations. Sadly, all facial animations are not up to what Naughty Dog or Ziva Dynamics have achieved. As such, these characters feel weird and unnatural. This also applies to vehicles. On the other hand, though, its city and lighting system are mind-blowing.

The Matrix Awakens features a huge, bustling, and explorable open-world city that is incredibly rich and complex. This is by far the most realistic real-time city we’ve seen and gives us a glimpse at what the current-gen only games may look like.

The Matrix Awakens Full Tech Demo Playthrough

The city comprises seven million instanced assets, made up of millions of polygons each. There are seven thousand buildings made of thousands of modular pieces, 45,073 parked cars (of which 38,146 are drivable), over 260 km of roads, 512 km of sidewalk, 1,248 intersections, 27,848 lamp posts, and 12,422 manholes. Nanite intelligently streams and processes those billions of polygons, rendering everything at film quality, super fast.

Unreal Engine 5’s fully dynamic global illumination system Lumen leverages real-time ray tracing to deliver incredibly realistic lighting and reflections throughout the interactive parts of the demo. The demo also uses real-time ray tracing to generate the beautiful, realistic soft shadows of the characters.

Temporal Super Resolution, UE5’s next-gen upsampling algorithm, keeps up with vast amounts of geometric detail to create sharper, more stable images than before. According to Epic, TAASR can output high-resolution images at a low processing cost. That brings more geometric detail, better lighting, and richer effects at higher resolutions.

Let’s hope that Epic Games will at least reconsider and release this tech demo on PC in the future!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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