Welcome back to the Unreal 5 Matrix tech demo. Only… it’s not quite the same,
this time around! But not in a rubbish way like that new movie was. No- this time, it’s better!
This is based on a slightly updated version of the Unreal 5 engine, and it gives better support
for graphical and gameplay features. But MORE IMPORTANTLY… I’m running it on a futuristic PC,
comprising of the latest, state-of-the-art Geforce 4090 graphics card… and a processor
to match. And 64 GB of DDR 5 RAM. The new gameplay features let me shoot
holes wherever I’m looking, which really lets me inspect the destruction system and how… subpar it
really is. And it lets me spawn cars. if I hammer that button over and over again I’ll gradually
climb up into the air. Sort of like I do in dreams if I flap my arms really really hard.
Next-gen physics. Dropping heavy things
on the ground is all well and good, but I had my fill of that when installing the Geforce
4090. So the main focus of this video will be to see what sort of framerate this futuristic
tech demo will get on my futuristic PC. So the first thing to say is that this
game runs with upscaling. Even if you think you’ve disabled upscaling, it still uses upscaling in the
form of the Unreal 5 engine’s built-in TSR, which isn’t quite as good as DLSS and you’ll see lots
of shimmering in the distance where it can’t quite resolve details. But what are you gonna do. So, at
this 540p upscaled resolution, let’s hop in a car and experience some next-gen driving simulations!
After an initial period of lagginess, which you can see in action here, it settled somewhere
between 90-110 FPS, at EPIC settings. Though, the experience from then on was still marred
by semi-frequent microstutters and a weird time-dilation feeling effect. Almost like I’ve
got LAG. And also, terrible vehicle controls. All this time I thought it was low fps making me drive
terribly, but no, the vehicles in this game just handle like ASS. And not the good kind. It feels
delayed, and unresponsive. It’s like I’ve become a disposable henchman in an action movie car chase.
And the vehicles themselves are drama queens, exploding and tipping over at the slightest
nudge. Don’t even get me started on the bumpers. Believe it or not, this ISN’T maximum settings.
Given it’s a graphics engine, built by a company called EPIC, you’d think the highest quality
settings would be called EPIC, wouldn’t you. But they’re not; there’s a setting BEYOND epic,
called ULTRA, and setting it to that caused my average framerate to plummet down to between
55-70 FPS. So I actually commend EPIC for naming the more-optimised-but-still-good-looking preset
after the company, rather than this needlessly maxed out power-drain setting. Good thinking.
Luckily, despite being lower, this framerate remained roughly the same no matter where I was,
nor how much was visible on-screen. 55-70 FPS, but with regular stutters as it’s presumably loading
in new content. At this point, having just moved to the latest and greatest components, DDR5 RAM,
ultra-fast NVME drives and all that, the fact that this microstutter STILL exists makes me feel
like it will do forever more. But that surely can’t be the case! It’s foolish to believe the
hardware will never be good enough, no matter how insane the challenge may feel at the time!
Back in the day, I used to think that running Unreal Tournament at 32 bit colour,
with 4X AA was forever going to come with lag! Then I thought that Half Life 2’s
loading screens would always take forever. I thought that Crysis feeling laggy at maximum
settings was a feature, and not a hardware limitation. Then, more recently, I thought
real-time raytracing would always be several console generations away. Time and time again,
hardware has advanced and what formerly felt like mountains to overcome, now with hindsight
look nothing more than molehills. How naïve of me to ever have doubted technology. So eventually,
I believe that computers WILL eventually be able to run this tech demo flawlessly.
They just have to! Computer progress eventually irons out all challenges.
Apart from Operation Flashpoint at maximum draw distance; that will never be possible!
But let’s accept microstutters as being a fact of life for now, and return to ground
level to test how my PC can run 4K at EPIC settings… because if EPIC settings are good
enough to be named after the guys who made the Unreal 5 engine, then it’s good enough for us.
And I was still getting 60-80 FPS at this resolution, indicating it probably wasn’t
a GPU bottleneck at lower resolutions. But while the average framerate may have dropped slightly,
if anything, I felt fewer micro-stutters at this resolution than I did the lower
one, and it really was a good experience to just fly about this city at various different
heights. Even Unreal 5’s built-in upscaling methods finally looked good at this resolution,
too. Just so you know, trying this same thing at the higher ULTRA preset halved my framerates
down to 30-40. And I really don’t think it’s worth that, just to be able to say you’re gaming
at maxed out settings. In fact, I’d even go as far as to say that doing so is a bit… rubbish.
Truck.
So if a game was based on this current tech demo, EPIC settings, at 4K is probably how I’d play on
it. Now we’ve established that, let’s go WILD and see how high we can ramp these settings.
This, is Unreal 5, at 8K, at the maximum, ULTRA quality preset… with only built-in upscaling. My
Geforce 4090 is averaging somewhere between 20-25 fps, so unfortunately, it looks like
it’s time for me to upgrade my system again. Seriously though, this is still running a lot
better than I was expecting. Like… A LOT better. And I think that’s probably thanks to the Geforce
4090’s ample amounts of VRAM. You consume more of this stuff in games by upping the resolution
and texture quality, and if you surpass the amount your graphics card has, then your performance will
PLUMMET. Like, fall off a cliff, down to slideshow levels. Pretty much for the last 10 years,
the debate has been whether 4GB of VRAM is enough for gaming any more. And I think the
answer to that was, and still is: yes, as long as you don’t mind dropping the texture detail
a bit. In more recent years, it’s shifted over to whether 8 GB is enough for gaming any more,
and high-end cards are beginning to transition over to 16. The Geforce 4090 comes with a stonking
24 GB of the stuff, which is more than a lot of PCs have in total, and is more than enough
to run this game at 8K. It’s just that the REST of the card that’s struggling to keep up with
it! Turns out maxing out Unreal 5 at 8K is really, really demanding. Who’d have thought. But is this
really how I want to end this video? What about MINIMUM settings at 8K? How would that perform?
Minimum settings in Unreal 5 can run at 120 frames a second at 8K. But… ‘run’ is a bit of
an overstatement, when everything’s fullbright and I’m being chased about by a phantom black
square. But ignoring all those bugs and problems, if you squint a bit… then it can sort of look a
bit like Midtown Madness 2. And yet, the stuttering between areas was still there!
So lastly, I did what I should have done in the first place. I ramped it up to the SECOND highest
preset, turned on DLSS Ultra performance mode, and it looked great and it ran at about 60 fps,
at 8K. I mean… calling this 8K is a pretty big stretch. But then,
so is calling this a game. And claiming that the latest Matrix movie is ‘worth watching’.
My FUTURISTIC system CAN run this game at 8K,
and at maximum settings. Just… not both of those things at the same time. Playably. At least,
not quite. But you know one game I still can’t max out?
Operation Flashpoint.