PC users have long been looking for a way to experience The Matrix Awakens UE5 demo. If you’ve had a chance to play around with the Unreal Engine 5 demo on the PlayStation 5, you’ve seen that the results are already impressive.
The first games with the Unreal Engine 5 (with the exception of Fortnite) should arrive in the second half of this year. So it’s likely that the demo you’ll find here for PC is just a sample project for the Unreal Engine 5 developers to go through rather than a proper, standalone technical demo of The Matrix Awakens as on the PS5. So we can consider that many optimizations are still to come.
Matrix Awakens: the UE5 demo not yet optimized for PC…
The City Sample is a free downloadable sample project that reveals how the city scene of The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience was built. It consists of a city, with buildings, vehicles and crowds of MetaHuman characters. The project shows how we used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5, including World Partition, Nanite, Lumen, Chaos, Rule Processor, Mass AI, Niagara, MetaHumans, MetaSounds and Temporal Super Resolution, to create the experience. Designers and developers can use this playground to discover how to use Unreal Engine 5 to create expansive and engaging environments.
…But still impressive
Downloading this project is still possible, however, but will require quite a bit of work if you want to actually run the demo outside the editor. Developer Victor Careil of Unreal Engine plugin maker VoxelPlugin has compiled it to make access less complicated. However, you’ll have to download a 17 GB file to get an idea. We already have some feedback since a Youtuber was able to install and use it on his PC equipped with a 12900K and an RTX 3090. And the least we can say is that the animal sweats… The Matrix Awakens demo oscillates between 30 and 50 FPS. The resolution cannot be changed and is capped at 1440P. However, it was clearly noticed that the optimizations are missing with a very low CPU load. This is obviously very promising for the future of video games.
