The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as an impressive real-time rendering showcase, with Nanite and a huge photorealistic city, that rivals film CGI.
What it is
Epic's Unreal Engine 5 tech demo set in the Matrix universe, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. It moves from a cinematic to a playable car chase through a large detailed city, with a behind-the-scenes look at the rendering at the end.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends acomjean · 2021-12 · on “The Matrix Is Unreal”
It the demo video (play through) they say it was rendered in real time right at the beginning. Also down in the corner which console its being rendered on,shows up from time to time. so I’m assuming it’s not faked. It looks quite good. Not reality but the cityscape is pretty close.. The fun part is the end where they show the some of the secret sauce of how it was rendered. [this video]
Recommends Animats · 2022-01 · on “Finding your home in game graphics programming”
No, but it is a full time job. It's getting much more complicated. Here's an hour long talk on how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite works.[1] This is a huge breakthrough in level of detail theory. Things that used to be O(N) are now O(1). With enough pre-computation, rendering cost does not go up with scene size. See this demo.[2] You can download the demo for Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5, and soon, in source form for PCs. Explore 16 square kilometers of photorealistic city in which you can see a close-up view of anything. The format of assets in memory for Nanite becomes far more complicated. GPUs need a redesign again; UE5 has to do more of the rendering on the CPUs than they'd like. What they need
Cites dagmx · 2021-12 · on “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience”
The linked video as well for those who want to skip straight to it: [this video] FX Guide also has an article about it with more details [LINK]
Cites aaaaaaaaaaab · 2021-12 · on “The Matrix Is Unreal”
Keanu looked insanely good at the beginning of the white room scene, but then I realized it was real footage when they switched to the uncanny-valley-esque version at 1:41… [this video]
Cites russellbeattie · 2021-12 · on “(mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9”
Has anyone tried the Unreal Engine's "The Matrix Awakens" * tech demo on the PS5 or XBoxen? The settings menu looks like this. Another recent homage to the late 90s. 1. [this video]
Cites dreamcompiler · 2023-07 · on “The Businessmen Broke Hollywood, and Now They Don't Want to Pay Their Employees”
> ...but also poorly made. This. Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time , and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to. I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this. There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth." [0] [this video]