The Matrix Awakens PS5 Gameplay Demo

This boundary-pushing technical demo is an original concept set within the world of Warner Bros' The Matrix. Written and cinematically directed by Lana Wachowski, it features Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity and—in a reality-flipping twist—also playing themselves.

The creators built a huge, bustling, and explorable open-world city that - like the simulated world of The Matrix - is incredibly rich and complex. Sixteen kilometers square, photoreal, and quickly traversable, it’s populated with realistic inhabitants and traffic. The experience is a tangible demonstration that UE5 offers all the components you need to build immersive, ultra-high-fidelity environments. 

Despite the city’s complexity, a relatively small core team was able to create the experience thanks to a set of procedural tools including SideFX’s Houdini. Procedural rules define how the world is generated: from the size of the roads and the height of the buildings, all the way down to the amount of debris on the sidewalks. 

Using this workflow, you can modify the input rules and the whole city will change, redefined by those new instructions. For small teams looking to build open worlds, that is incredibly powerful. It means you can regenerate the entire city, right up until the last day of delivery, and continue to adjust and improve it. This opens up so many creative possibilities—and proves that any team can make a triple-A-game-quality open world in UE5, irrespective of size.

The open-world city environment includes hero character IO, who was the launch character for MetaHuman Creator, as well as thousands of MetaHuman agents, demonstrating exciting new possibilities for high-fidelity in-game characters at scale.

AI systems drive the characters and vehicles, while procedural systems built using Houdini generate the city. Unreal Engine 5’s World Partition system makes the development of the vast environment more manageable. 

The movement of vehicles, character clothing, and the destruction of buildings are all simulated in engine using Unreal Engine’s Chaos physics system. During the chase experience, because the car crashes are simulated in real time with Chaos, the same crash will never occur twice. It's unique at every run. 

Technical glory

The technical demo also puts previously showcased UE5 features Nanite and Lumen through their paces. In a dense, open-world city environment, UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system comes into its own. 

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. Real-time ray tracing is also used for the cinematic element to generate the beautiful, realistic soft shadows of the characters. 

Temporal Super Resolution, UE5’s next-gen upsampling algorithm, delivers four times more work per pixel than would otherwise be possible, all at the same framerate. That brings more geometric detail, better lighting, and richer effects at higher resolutions to the experience.

The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is now available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Download it for free today to explore the future of interactive storytelling and entertainment with UE5.