It’s your last chance to grab The Matrix Awakens UE5 demo

If you’ve yet to download The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo, then now is your last chance. Originally released in December 2021, the jaw-dropping visual showpiece will be leaving the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S digital store on July 9, 2022.

Don’t worry, if you have already downloaded the demo it will still be playable. Even if you have no intention of playing it any time soon, you may as well head over the PlayStation Store or Microsoft Store and it to your games library.

The Matrix flavoured preview gave us an interactive glimpse at what Unreal Engine 5 is capable of. Unreal Engine 5 builds on many of the principles found in Unreal Engine 4, with things like Niagara VFX improvements for particle effects that communicate with one another, Chaos physics and destruction in the environments and for things like cloth motion, animation system enhancements to make character move and interact more naturally, and audio advancements a part of Unreal Engine 4.25, which will happily bridge the generational divide.

However, Unreal Engine 5 brings two new core technologies: Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry and Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution. Nanite can be thought of as a more modern form of bump mapping with normal maps, a process by which you can simulate bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object, helping to reduce the complexity of the geometry needed to render a cobbled street, for example. Nanite truly takes that to the next level, letting UE5 take a scene comprised of billions of polygons and crunch it down to tens of millions instead. The tech demo above uses Epic’s Quixel library of megascan objects – their cinematic versions, and not the typical game versions – and then uses Nanite to process that in real time, rendering polygons down to the size of a single pixel, without needing to create normal maps or LODs.

Meanwhile, Lumen is then a dynamic global illumination system that can handle multiple bounces of light through a scene. This isn’t using hardware ray tracing, and yet there’s the scope for infinite light bounces that mean a single light source can flood an area if it’s bright enough. This is done in real time, meaning artists no longer need to wait for light maps to be baked.

A number of upcoming games are already confirmed to be running on UE5. These include Dragon Quest XII, Black Myth: Wukong, Quantum Error, as well as the next games in the Tomb Raider, Kingdom Hearts, and Witcher series. To see what Unreal’s new tech is capable of, we’d recommend taking the Matrix Awakens demo for a spin.