The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
It's impressive, but I'm skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere.
It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it's PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall.
Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video.
EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It's clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it's not that far away from where it would need to be. And when it's not struggling with jaggies/framerate it's pretty jaw-dropping.
It's always been like that for demos and promo videos. Sometime they straight up run the demo on a PC with crazy specs while pretending it's running a console.
Marketing people are at it again
I wasn't aware that was common practice. I assume this is for ease of playtesting a game before any optimisation phases have happened? I wonder whether it has a setting to convert down to actual PS5 power levels.
> And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'.
Of course. Sigh...
...
here i googled it for you
https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstat...
If you have a compatible console I'd really recommend checking it out!
Unfortunately if you watch it on something other than the rendering device you are very likely to be seeing through a video compression/decompression cycle. Providers like YouTube are notorious for rescaling the compression to match the current qualities of the channel. Just a big caveat when looking for rendering artifacts because they may be indistinguishable from compression artifacts.
Note that "playing it on a PS5" is meaningless unless you had demo software. The PS5 has a YouTube player and it's not representative of your in-game experience.
I do not think they were talking about watching the video on their PS5…
The moment that drove it home for me was flying up into the sky, striking out in a random direction, flying to the roof of a building and zooming right up to a cluster of pipes and seeing individual rivets accurately modelled. All of this, for a 10 minute demo.
This is a staggering achievement, by all accounts made possible by some pretty amazing new tooling. Genuinely baffled that anyone could fail to be impressed by this.
Edit: don’t forget to open up the menu and play around with the lighting, crowd, AI settings, etc.
You can still do stuff like that in UE4. Have a look at what's possible with Quixel Mixer, you can create detail like that surprisingly quickly. I'd tentatively argue that modelling tools are the real MVP when it comes to increased geometric LOD in modern engines. They allow you to add that kind of detail quickly enough that it becomes economical to actually detail rivets.
Either way, it's very cool. The crowd simulation stuff is going to be useful, current tooling there absolutely sucks outside of a few very expensive dedicated products.
After reading your comment I went back in to the demo to have another look at the rivets up close. In the options menu, you can switch the viewport so that it shows you the triangles that make up object geometry under the "Nanite" system. Would be interested to hear from anyone with access to the demo and the right background what they make of this.
Edit: I took a couple of screenshots of default view vs Nanite triangles view but not sure what the convention is on HN for where to host them. Happy to put them up if someone can clue me in.
Edit: I've just put the screenshots up [here](https://imgur.com/a/2FMpLJa) and a ~30 sec vid [here](https://youtu.be/s1PUCadh1TU), showing cycling through the viewport modes.
I hear tweet threads are really appreciated /s
Nanite really blurs the line between geometry and texture - in a sense it’s a shader that uses triangle mesh data as if it were a texture source.
This siggraph session will expand your mind: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw
Watch the SIGGRAPH video to get the feelings of: that's impossible - oh, I kind of see how that works - one pixel triangles? - how do they get that mesh representation set up right? - oh, graph theory - that data format has to be a pain to generate with all those constraints - they're rendering mostly in the CPU? - that's all that needs to be done at render time? - GPUs need to be redesigned to be a better match to this - how to stream this stuff? - that compression scheme is clever.
I was much more impressed by Battlefield 2042 graphics when I first saw it. So while this looks "good", may be I was expecting much more. But then again we are limited by Hardware so I guess I have too high of an expectation.
Some downsides, the "metahuman" face modeling isn't great, it seems very uncanny valley compared to titles like The Last of Us II. There's some obvious framerate issues during the car chase scene where I wouldn't be surprised if it dipped into the 20s.
I think each character in last of us 2 is a custom scan and artist creation. Metahumans is made from an amalgam of scans and lets you parameterize the face (adjust everything with sliders) so it is a much harder problem.
Going to be funny listening to elitist PC gamers talk about how inferior everything still looks by then, even though they just play nostalgic pixel art games on Steam all day.
https://www.hinnavaatlus.ee/1891263/sony-playstation-5-digit...
I think it is pretty clear there is a level of detail difference between the 'white room' scenes with Neo and the 'city'.
I would be shocked if the 'white room' scenes where not fully motion captured and then transposed into 3D models to run in engine. A bit unfair as while it may be real time rendered it is fully scripted. The player has no control. It is essentially a movie converted into a 3D environment then optimised to hell and back with pixel corrections where needed.
However the 'city' environment is quite stunning with incredible level of detail and you can free roam either walking/driving around the street or fly by. Really quite something to play about with the real time rendering pipeline to see the triangle make up, etc of every object or adjust the position of the sun in the sky, etc.
A lot of fun. Reminded me a lot of when I first got to play Spider-man on the PS4 and just swing around the city. Will be great to see where this leads in a year or two once devs have really had time to get a feel for how everything works.
The animations don't look that good to me, nowhere near mocap. The weird arms movements alone scream "video game"
The textures looked super flat to me in this, the world looked decent, but all together i hoped the PS5 was holding their tech down.. because i expected more. Nanite (codename for high model density rendering) examples previously were _much_ better in my view. Eg: https://youtu.be/U-dRBjqAGgI
https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-specialists
I was kind of hoping this demo would include something similar, but this looks more like a cinematic than anything. Then again I'm too old to play games like that now. Civilization and Railway Empire are more my speed.
EDIT: Here's a gameplay video if you're interested.
I can only find reference articles about music but I’m sure it’s all the same. https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-p...
This was one of my favorite games for a while. I was part of a “clan” and played tournament games — even made my own website for the whole thing. It sucked up a lot of my time for a summer or two.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/317360/Double_Action_Boog...
"Say something to the effect of this, when this thing happens on screen, but phrase it however you like."
Visually stunning, but no matter how realistic it is, you're killing the chance of enjoying it because you go "Nobody would say that", and it also doesn't sound natural.
This is why I enjoyed the Fallout games so much. Even the earlier ones like 3 and New Vegas that weren't realistic looking had fantastic, believable dialogue.
What I would like not just for this but games in general is more interaction with the environment, you see a building, you can go into it. You see a bench you can sit down etc.
The realism only lasts until you try to do something out of bounds then it's just a reminder that it's all pretty superficial.
But yeah this will be a day one buy when the full game/experience is released!
Now, it's animations that are too perfect, as you've pointed out. Even a perfectly trained athlete or ballet dancer still moves in slightly irregular and imperfect ways.
In this demo, most still frames could often easily be confused with a still frame from one of the films. Blown away, there. You're so right about the lighting, models and textures being virtually indistinguishable.
However - in motion, the effect is completely broken - only every few seconds - but enough to push it into uncanny valley territory.
I notice Nirobi (? sic, the Jada-Pinkett Smith's character) in the backseat seemed to be the most offensive in terms of unnatural animation.
I'm guessing - I'm hoping - ML models could be of tremendous use in terms of improving animation in video games? The problem is always that it is too unnaturally smooth. People just don't move like that.
Just as we got texture detail to the point of perfection of the unnatural - pores on the face, etc - we need to get animation to the perfection of the unnatural.
Even freaking same with the camera. After getting used to VR, the weirdly static, linear, unnatural camera movements in regular console games have aged like milk. Not sure why we are still treating cameras in 3D like it's 2001.
I also wonder if it's cheaper.
All I can think of are sports games like FIFA, or side quests in Red Dead Redemption. Any other suggestions?
I am interepreting great visuals broadly to include great art direction, but there are some very nice looking realistic 3D games in that list
Some other ones that I don't particularly care for but that many people love: Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn
There are also many great games that feature combat as a core mechanic but are no more "about it" than The Odyssey or The Seven Samurai are. For example: Yakuza 0, Kenshi, INSOMNIA: The Ark, Vampyr, Valakas Story, Pathologic 2, Ghost of a Tale, A Plague Tale
The Matrix demo is set in a city because (a) that's where the Matrix is set, and (b) it's relatively "easy" to do photo-realism in a city because you can use actual photos, and because other than the people the objects are reflective shiny boxes or surfaces.
If they are trying to make a game based off that universe, with the same actors/actresses, why would they not aim for the most realistic possible portrayal possible?
Your statement also ignores phenomenal games like Flower, Journey, NiGHTS Into Dreams - your statement even excludes the Mario series. Even 'Halo' has imaginative worlds that can benefit from photorealism.
Photorealism does not remove creativity. It's also a standard, a boundary to which digital artists have aspired to since the beginning of the medium.
You might as well ask why realist painting is a thing?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...
Honestly, after reading that supposedly some of the shots of current age Keanu are not rendered but real, I'm wondering if that's even true though. Maybe the odd appearance of the eyes is an artefact of the lighting of the all white room.
The Radiohead art exhibit was amazing. They do an interactive art piece with "How to Disappear Completely", "Pyramid Song" and "You and whose Army".
Serious amount of work goes into these, I'm sure and it's great to use the console for something other than FIFA.
The hero movies hollywood keeps churning out make no sense in a meatspace world where you can build, own and be god; in your own virtual world.
The goal is to build the real matrix (or oasis, the name hardly matters), and you cannot build it with high polycount or large textures.
The future looks more like Minecraft or Roblox, like it or not.
As long as we still enjoy reading good books, we probably will continue enjoying watching good movies and playing good single player games.
Says who? There is place out there for both Minecraft and for extremely high detail one-off experiences, we aren't destined to all move into the Oasis.
>>The goal is to build the real matrix
Again - says who? Who has that goal?
Theater -> Books
Music -> Radio
Books + Radio -> Movies
Movies + Books -> TV
Movies + TV -> Games
So far we have used books and movies as content, but the internets native content is an open action 3D MMO, it just takes time for new mediums to develop their own content type.
Why have a linear hardcoded storyline when the users can live out their own stories in the game?
I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it.
Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch.
And while movies might be fun for them, the time spent in Movies vs. Minecraft + Roblox is an approximation error.
Because a lot of people seem to enjoy exactly this - 10-30 hours of a very linear, hand crafted experience, not sandbox "you can do anything" kind of experience.
>>I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it.
I don't even understand what that sentence means, to be honest with you. I work for one of the largest video games companies in the world and we somehow still build both sandbox as well as single-player focused games.
>>Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch.
Kids have zero purchasing power, and it's the money which decides what to make. Your "average" gamer, by industry's own stats, is a 20-30 year old male, who owns a console, and buys exactly 3 games a year - latest Fifa, latest CoD, and one other game(and companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing to occupy that 3rd spot).
Minecraft and Roblox are as big as they are not only because they are good games, but also because they are fantastic at extracting money from parents through children. Trying to figure out the future of gaming by looking at those two is like saying that future of movie making and holywood is animated cartoon short stories, since Peppa The Pig is unbelivably popular with kids.
So what happens when these kids grow up and don't have to nag their parents?
Again, not sure what you mean - PS5 uses very very little power compared to a gaming PC, about 200W under load - my own GPU uses about 300W and that's without the rest of the system. An hour of gameplay on the PS5 costs about £0.05, and that's if you hit the electricity cap and are not on a fixed tariff. At my prices it's more like a two pence per hour. If these expenses turn your PS5 into a paperweight, I have to question how were you able to afford one in the first place.
And in addition - not sure what PS5 has to do with this?
>>So what happens when these kids grow up and don't have to nag their parents?
They buy whatever they like, not sure what you are trying to suggest here.
1) it's an industry average, so some people will only buy a console to play Fifa with their mates and literally never buy anything else, some people buy loads of games, but the average across the the industry is 3 games per year, and those games are extremely likely to be the ones listed above(in fact the 3rd one is usually, more often than not, a copy of GTA 5, as crazy as this is)
2) It only applies to people spending money. So if you just play WoW and nothing else, and never buy any new games, you aren't even counted.
3) Not all gamers are equally interested in all games. So of course a developer of a small indie game probably isn't aiming for the same crowd of Fifa/CoD buyers. Just like a small film director isn't making a decision on whether to make a movie based on whether they can compete with Marvel - they usually have different crowds. So yes, if you are predominantly interested in short, single player experiences in the £20 range, then probably no one at EA or Activision is pitching games for your crowd - but there will be other developers who do, and for whom you are the #1 target audience.
This is obviously absurd, or else there wouldn't be billions of dollars in advertising toys and kids games every Christmas season. They might not directly have purchasing power but they have it indirectly by convincing parents to buy stuff.
But to me, video games with fancy CGI is like a chessboard with ornate gold pieces. Impressive, but in the end it's still just chess.
My target is to keep that number above 1000 when the world + physics is in.
On Jetson Nano (1/2 Nintendo Switch at 5W GPU) that number is 300 and I hope 150 on release!
The server can handle 10.000 action players (no spraying/headshot but mario/zelda mechanics/physics) at an avererage of 50 players in view on a large AWS machine.
Nobody has ever played an action MMO (with fun gameplay and physics) that plays like mario but scales to 10.000 players yet. When they do, they won't play anything else ever again (or do anything else in meatspace) is my prediction.
You are spot on; gameplay is more important than surface.
Roblox and Minecraft could only build the future by spending less time on fidelity, hence the awkward animations and "ugly" characters.
I think the tech itself is there just about, but there are some real technical limitations to why it hasn't been done (well) before. I'd love to hear how you are addressing these things.
As for the conversation about the matrix and the metaverse, my conclusion a long time ago was that the real matrix/metaverse will be FOSS. Thats why all these big companies (Meta, Epic, etc) dipping their toe into this admittedly juicy arena are going to fail in their vision. (also one of the reasons why I still have hope for a hacker culture of freedom in the future)
be warned though: with all this censorship they are coming for your game worlds next
(Mostly visual, zero motion-to-photon improvements have been made and again the meaningful practical internal improvements can be added retroactively in the OpenGL drivers.)
The server is allready open-source (under mixed algpl/mit/commercial license): http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html
The last engine has to be modifyable and resellable, so the ownership model should probably avoid corporate models seen the legal/bureaucratic problems that brings. Right now I'm keeping all rights for myself and my son will probably inherit those.
I'm still experimenting with the licence pricing that you can find on my github sponsors page.
The b2c product should cost ~$10/year and gives you the right to mod and redistribute for free independently of me, something both Minecraft and Roblox lack.
Unfortunately the client will initially only be partially open-source; keeping the core engine .exe closed, and the game specific .dll open-source as an implementation example.
Also the cl.exe compiler is not redistributable, so I'm looking at solutions (use another compiler for the game .dll) for that until people move to linux:
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/allow-redistri...
The server is allready prooven in all technical aspects with 350.000 b2c customers, and the client is months away from PoC:
http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
They can't censor TCP/IP, or atleast not in a way I can't work around with my own encryption. The internet removes that possibility permanently, it's binary: either you have global connections and then the world is open or you don't and then we're all screwed back to the stone age.
I don't see why this diversity should disappear.
Apply that to all the examples you mentioned and imagine what that means!
And you can still make a fire and send smoke signals if you wish!
Lots of (old) people enjoy old pass times.
Citation needed. What do you think will make this an inevitability?
From Everquest to PUBG which are the two only adult evolvers.
You can tell by looking at what they changed by how copied they became.
And Minecraft and Roblox which are the young evolvers.
Nobody has managed to copy Minecraft and Roblox successfully yet and the AAA studios are stuck in a grind making meaningless sequels.
But then if you look at the technology, you see that theres an obvious combination that is missing: Everquest - RPG + physical action gameplay like mario/zelda + modability of Roblox/Minecraft.
The final game (engine).
Maybe the most recent one is Cyberpunk 2077 and there were many reasons for that disaster other than the "tech", but it always ends with a couple million angry people robed and a few hundred burned-out employees with long lasting mental issues.
Cool demo, but nothing more.
For some reason this strongly reminds me of The typing of the Dead. A "Typing of the Matrix" would fit the theme quite nicely!
I feel we already close to reality, but are in-human desire to over-crank things to justify the huge performance hits or showing off some these features is hurting us. Games that I see that don't jump largely from medium to ultra are often because they softly layer the effects to the point where it's not noticeable at first glance, but as time goes on it builds up immersion.
Detail is amazing, the technology is insane, and the attention to detail is jaw-dropping, I don't want to undermine the impressive work both from a technology as well as hard work implementing it.
Tech demos are kind of like concept cars. They're a glimpse of what's possible, but not necessarily practical.
The neo that wakes up in front of computer didn't look real. Also when he transformed to his young self, that immediately looked bad and definitely CGI.
The statement at start of video is not fair (a lie).
This article (linked by a poster above) has everything you need to know: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...
This article is also speculation and I don't believe them. If it was all a render, all faces should have maintained the same detail and realism. But only Keanu's face is real enough. You can even see his individual hair which are out of shape. That's way too real. Those hair can't possibly be 3d captured like that.
As someone else pointed out, he does change to 3d render at 1:39 in a far view and you can easily see how unrealistic that one is.
Perhaps the video I saw was on a PC with a 3090 or something insane like that.
I don't know how kids these days can have access to games like these and still want to do anything else, like go outside, or do homework.