Yesterday, Epic Games announced in a surprise announcement at The Game Awards that The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, a new playable technical demo of Unreal Engine 5, was available to everyone on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Created by members of the original “The Matrix” film team including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta in collaboration with teams around the world Both Epic Games and Partners, this experience provides an insight into how interactive storytelling and entertainment related to Unreal Engine 5 were created that might look like in the future.
One of those partners was The Coalition, the studio behind the Gears franchise, who have worked with Unreal Engine for many years. With this experience in hand, the team set out to support the development of the project. While Epic was creating the demo, The Coalition got involved in refining and tweaking their vision, having previously worked with Epic on UE4 support for Xbox Series X.
“We worked with Epic on the first Unreal Engine 4 support for Xbox Series X when the new console was unveiled in March 2020,” said Kate Rayner, studio technical director at The Coalition. “We later released a native update for Gears 5 on the Xbox Series X | S that added visual enhancements like SSGI, improved material and texture details, and increased our 4k real-time kinematics to 60 fps while also increasing the multiplayer mode to a 120.” -FPS performance mode has been increased. . This taught us how to optimize this hardware to improve visual and performance. “
When Epic contacted us in 2021, The Coalition had been working with Unreal Engine 5 “Early Access” for almost a year. The team had worked together and provided Epic with feedback on their experience with UE5, which particularly helped push it forward for Xbox Series X | S and Windows PCs. With their track record of creating games that are tech showcase projects for Unreal and Xbox, as well as our collaboration and early experience with UE5, The Coalition was well positioned to jump in and help tweak and polish The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience with epic.
So what exactly did The Coalition team do? A major focus for her was on memory and performance optimizations in order to take full advantage of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Since the experience offers an incredibly large and dense world with an amazing amount of content, the first step was to optimize the storage. In this area, they worked with Epic to ensure that the assets in the demo were set up to take full advantage of virtual texture streaming and nanite wherever possible, and internal storage systems, especially on the Xbox Series S, were matched to make sure everything fits in memory.
On the performance optimization side, the teams made some threading improvements to improve the utilization of the CPU cores. They also made some Xbox ray tracing tweaks that resulted in performance gains of around 0.5ms. Finally, they enabled Vertical Sync Tuning to ensure a stable FPS throughout the experience.
With that in mind, the Xbox Series S version shipped with the same UE5 features as Xbox Series X (albeit of different quality) including, but not limited to, ray-traced reflections and ray-traced shadows. Regardless of which platform you experience it on, a visual delight awaits you.
“Unreal Engine 5 has improved further over the past few months compared to the“ Early Access ”version, both in terms of performance and quality. The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a great example of how all of the UE5 systems come together to create something special and tangible next-gen, ”says Rayner. “Above all, we were really excited about the potential of ray tracing for shadows and lumens, nanites on a scale with virtual shadow maps and the new World Partition System that connects everything. With these advances in technology, it’s never been better to be a gamer. “
