Yesterday, gamers were able to experienceThe Game Awards 2021with all the different video games, trailers, and world premiere announcements that were made during the event. Among the various reveals was a new clip fromThe Matrix Resurrections, the upcoming fourth entry in the film series.
Along with the newMatrixclip, Epic Games made a surprise reveal at The Game Awards of a new playable technical demo calledThe Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience. As the name suggests, it is a tech demo that allows gamers to experience the world of theMatrixfilms on next-generation consoles. The game is now available for everyone to play for free on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
RELATED:The Matrix Awakens Playable Now on PS5 and Xbox Series X
Earlier today, Xbox recently shared a new post with some details about the development ofThe Matrix Awakens. It was made in a collaboration between members of the originalMatrixmovie team, including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta. They worked with several development teams across Epic Games and other partners like The Coalition, the game studio behind the recentGears of Wargames. The Coalition has experience working with the Unreal Engine for years and provided support for the project. The post stated that Epic Games reached out to The Coalition earlier in 2021, when thestudio had been working with Unreal Engine 5’s Early Access version “for almost a year.”
While Epic Games was making the tech demo,The Coalitionhelped with memory and performance optimizations to take full advantage of the Xbox Series X/S consoles. The studio worked with Epic to ensure the demo’s assets were set up to “fully leverage virtual texture streaming and nanite wherever possible and tuned internal memory systems.” Also, it made sure all of this fits in the system’s memory, especially for the Xbox Series S. When it came to performance optimization, the development teams “made some threading improvements” in order to improve the utilization of CPU cores.
The teams also made various ray tracing optimizations on Xbox, which results in “performance wins of about 0.5ms,” and enabled Vertical Sync tuning, which will allow for a stable FPS during the whole experience. The post added that both the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X consoles were shipped with the Unreal Engine 5 features enabled with varying quality. This includes ray traced reflections and shadows, so gamers should be able to enjoyThe Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experienceon either console.
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experienceis available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
MORE:The Matrix Awakens is a Great Showcase for the Potential of Next-Gen Games
