This Unreal 5 Matrix tech demo thing can be downloaded for PCs
from the link in this video’s description. I’ve been waiting for this since I first saw
it a few months ago. And luckily, unlike the movie it was made for,
this demo is worth the wait- IF you can run it. It’s been a while since we got this many new
things to play with in a new graphics engine. The first thing that hit me about it is how REAL it
feels. It’s gritty and grainy, and over-done in a way that blurs the line between game and reality.
Which is what I suspect they were striving for, from a Matrix-inspired tech demo.
But the more you look, the more you can see the joins and cracks. This world is
still just a load of props jammed together, and when it’s done at such massive scale,
there will be stuff that floats, breaks, or that architecturally doesn’t make any sense.
But to me it only adds to that dreamy, futuristic feel this whole simulation has. It is EXCITING!
But before I get all nerdy, some important information for you if you’re trying to run
this game. Because whoever designed the control system for this demo is a
terrible person, and they should be ashamed. Fortunately, the stock controls are listed
down the side, and this is needed because they make no logical sense.
And there is an options menu, which again is a nightmare to use for reasons I don’t understand.
The ‘O’ button will load the options menu, the bracket buttons -for some reason- will switch
between the menus, and the arrow keys control the menu options themselves. Inside these,
you’ll see options to change the angle of the sun, to toggle day / night mode, and to enable
all sorts of nerdy stuff that will let you see beneath the surface of this impressive tech demo.
It was perhaps one of the more primitive technologies stole my attention the most early on.
‘Interior Mapping’ is not a new feature- I noticed parallax-mapped rooms in Deus Ex,
a game that’s over 10 years old now! But recently, game designers have found ways of making them look
a lot more convincing. I know that Spiderman made extensive use of this sort of thing,
but since I only have a PC, I was unable to experience it then. So I’m experiencing it now,
and I spent a lot of my time in this tech demo floating about and peering into rooms.
These rooms do not exist, they are merely very clever pictures.
And again, you can break them. But they still go a long way towards making the world feel real,
and even though I know they’re not proper rooms, it still does the job well enough
that it tricks my brain any way. So that’s nice! The next thing I toyed with was the destruction.
The way it does this is not particularly next-gen- it merely swaps out bits of
cars for damaged versions whenever a collision occurs. Or should I say, whenever it wants to,
because the hit detection on this game is janky as hell. The twisted metal bumpers
seem to behave more like jelly, and I have to admit, I wasn’t really as impressed with the
destruction in this game as I had anticipated I was going to be when I first loaded it up.
Raytracing is the big new thing, and I feel Unreal 5 has taken a cautious approach towards it,
by creating a kind of ‘hybrid’ tech that makes the performance impact a bit more manageable,
but this does come at the expense of the raytracing’s… robustness.
So Unreal 5 has a technology called ‘Lumen’, which is essentially a playstation 3 version of the
world. It’s really low in resolution, it doesn’t have many polygons, but it uses this version
of the world to calculate all the expensive raytraced light bounces and reflections and so on.
So it is still raytracing, but it’s doing it on a low-quality version of the world and then porting
its results across to the one that you’re viewing. So here’s a reflection of a building in a car’s
bonnet, and here is the building itself. If we compare the two, it’s extremely difficult
to fault the reflection. Those posters are PROBABLY a much lower resolution,
but the reflection’s general muddiness makes it difficult to notice what it gets wrong.
But on the glass car windows -of all places- it refused to reflect anything but the screenspace
reflections. And when these weren’t possible, it seemed to swap them out for an ultra
low-res cubemap image instead. Which isn’t ideal! But whatever’s going on here, the reflections
in this demo us a hybrid system of raytraced, screenspaced, and possibly ultra low-res cubemaps,
which can sometimes reveal the limitations of these methods, especially where they intersect.
So it’s definitely a step up above the previous gen, but is far from being a definitive solution.
It’s just lots of compromises mixed together in a way that you’re unlikely to notice if
you’re actually playing the game. But this isn’t a game, it’s a tech demo.
The other cool new technology Unreal 5 uses is NANITE, which lets them drop movie-quality models
into a game and the engine will do all the hard work in dealing with the billions of polygons that
it has to somehow keep track of. So using Nanite should hopefully do away with the traditional,
blocky looking things in games- the limit really is how high in quality the artist
decides to make them in the first place. And also the size of your hard drive! But hopefully,
using Nanite will result in less ‘pop up’ and just a general improvement in visual quality
all-round. I have to admit, I have still seen popup in this demo, so it’s not gone completely.
And the last technology I noticed in this tech demo was the upscaling!
Just to explain why this is needed: it’s because this Unreal 5 demo is IMMENSELY demanding to run!
There has to be a sacrifice- either it runs at a low resolution,
or it runs at a low resolution, with some form of upscaling to try and make it look better. Luckily,
they chose the upscaling option, and have their own tool for this which they’ve called ‘Temporal
Super Resolution’. This is better than FSR and NIS- it’s more like DLSS, but is compatible with
all sorts of hardware. Including the consoles. So it works by placing new frames on top of
old ones, and over time, it constructs a higher-quality image than the resolution
it’s using would suggest. It’s powerful stuff, and without it, this demo would have run significantly
worse than it already does! I believe this demo runs on the Xbox Series S at 720p,
and on the X and Playstation 5, somewhere between 1080p and 1620p? I’m honestly impressed that it’s
that high, because I don’t think my Geforce 3080 was running it well enough for that!
Not that it matters much, because no matter what you’re playing this on, your framerate will be
JANKY. Think 30 fps, rather than 60. And that’s despite it running on my very fast SSD,
with lots of clever trickery, and a powerful upscaling solution.
But how good is this upscaler? Is it as good as DLSS? Well my gut says no, but I understand it’s
under a lot of strain with this engine. You know how Red Dead Redemption 2 looked great,
but also horrible? That’s because it couldn’t do transparencies, so instead relied on checkerboard
rendering a LOT. And I feel the same is being done in this game! Look at the hair and you can
see checkerboarding. Look at distant stuff, and it shimmers and fizzes in a very unpleasant manner.
It COULD be the upscaling doing this… or it could be that the upscaling’s doing its
best to hide this stuff. It’s just that the result isn’t perfect. It isn’t even pleasing!
Unreal 5 looks like it puts graphical quality ahead of its image quality, if that makes
sense. What you’re seeing here is a wonderfully beautiful and advanced world, but unfortunately
you’re viewing it through fuzz-o-vision. And you can make it even worse!
Go to THIS directory, and load up this file, and you can modify the graphics settings.
I recommend you make a copy of this file before you break it. You have been warned.
In the scalability options, everything defaults to a 3.
Setting it all down to 1 loses the reflections and makes it look like a Playstation 4 game, and
0 sends it straight back to the Playstation 3 era! So while interesting, I wouldn’t
recommend dropping these settings too greatly. Setting them to 2 is still a possibility, if it
gives you better framerates- objects no longer appear to self-shade and self-reflect so well,
and global illumination in the distance looks a bit flatter- but overall,
the quality level is still great. So, if you’ve dropped it all to 2
and are still struggling to get a playable framerate- which, let’s be honest, you will be-
then you can enable DYNAMIC RESOLUTION, which SHOULD, hopefully, give you a more
stable framerate. I say hopefully, ‘cos mine was still all over the place! And the other option
you can alter is the resolution quality, which forces it to upscale from a lower resolution.
So here it is, set to 50, which at 4K, still looked great. Probably cos 4K’s MASSIVE.
At 25, though, the limitations of the upscaling start to show. It reminds
me of when a video is encoded at a really low bitrate and it doesn’t have enough information
to update around moving objects, resulting in this weird blob around people and stuff.
And here it is at… 2. Oh no! I think there’s a hard cut-off somewhere cos 10 looked the same.
This is excellent for showing HOW the upscaling works, and how it tries to turn pixels into…
well, blobs, I guess. But it isn’t great for viewing what should be the most beautiful tech
demo you’ve ever seen. And the real kicker? Playing like this still slowed my PC down.
I also noticed that the resolution this demo plays at is multiplied by your monitor’s scaling,
so if it’s blurrier than you expect for your monitor’s resolution, then it could be that
you have scaling at 200% Or something like that. Set it to 100 before you load the game.
In conclusion: this Unreal 5 demonstration is wonderful, and a better tribute to the
Matrix universe than that new movie was. But let me warn you now: it’s HEAVY!
I’m running this on a Geforce 3080 graphics card, and until now, this thing has spoilt me. I assume
it can run something, and if it can’t then I just drop the resolution a bit and then it can.
But not this! This tech demo brings my PC to its knees, in a way I haven’t felt
in over a decade. Recently, we’ve been living in an era of hardware stagnation.
But there used to be a time when was normal for a brand-new, super-fast computer
to then be obsolete within a couple of years, and there was always that moment
when you loaded up the latest game and instantly knew that your PC was no longer good enough.
Well, this tech demo has done that to my PC! So thanks for that bit of nostalgia, Unreal 5.
Of course, that isn’t really true. I know that the proper games made with this engine
will be far more scalable, and a lot more optimised. What we’re see here is merely
a taste of what’s to come- of the engine that will be driving the majority of games out during
the Playstation 5’s console generation. Just as the Unreal 4 powered many Playstation 4 titles.
So please, I urge you to give this tech demo a go. It’s stuff like this
that got me into graphics and hardware in the first place.
Recently, breakthrough moments like this have got fewer and further between…
which is even more reason why you should give it a go when stuff like this does come along.