And a showcase for Unreal Engine 5 that's fully playable now on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. A collaboration between filmmakers and the talented engineers at Epic Games, The Matrix Awakens features some of the most impressive photo-real images we've seen to date. Check it out after the jump.

In this detailed video we get to see film morph into a cinematic action scene, but the real wow stuff comes later as we see that the cars, traffic, buildings, and city are all running in real-time.



It's a testament to the power of Unreal Engine 5 and its new groundbreaking tech. For those interested here's the breakdown of what's happening under the hood.

World Partition: automatic open world streaming
World Partition automatically divides large maps into a grid and streams the necessary cells, making it easier to build and manage massive open worlds like the city you see in the demo.

Nanite: virtualized micropolygon geometry
Nanite renders this vast city environment at unprecedented level of detail, from buildings with intricately carved moldings and reliefs, to chain link fences, to dense traffic filled with thousands of cars, all modelled down to the nuts and bolts.

Lumen: dynamic global illumination and reflections
Lumen simulates light bouncing off of surfaces dynamically, providing incredibly realistic multi-bounce indirect lighting, sky lighting, and reflections in the huge open world.

Chaos: physics and destruction system
Unreal Engine’s high-performance physics system is used to achieve cinematic-quality levels of destruction in real time and simulate the movement of cloth, hair, vehicles, and more.

Houdini integration: procedurally generated open worlds
The city in the experience is procedurally generated by combining the power of Houdini and UE5. This enables teams to work at speed and scale, significantly reducing the number of people needed to create a large open world.

Rule Processor: automated object placement
A new rules-based data structure system ingests the Houdini point cloud of the city and enables the huge dataset to be managed at speed in UE5.

Mass Framework: crowd and traffic system
Mass is Unreal Engine's high-performing solution to populate large worlds with a vast amount of simulated and interactive entities, such as the crowds and traffic all around the city.

Niagara: particle system
Niagara, Unreal Engine’s VFX system, was leveraged extensively. The results showcase Niagara’s maturation into a fully production-ready VFX tool to deliver a real step-change in the level of detail, realism, and interactivity.

MetaHumans: next-generation digital humans
The city is populated with thousands of next-generation digital humans, which have been built using MetaHuman Creator.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR): higher displayed resolution
UE5’s new antialiasing solution keeps up with vast amounts of geometric detail to create sharper, more stable images than before, outputting high-resolution images at a low processing cost.