I was hoping DF would do a breakdown of this as soon as the demo was revealed. Didn't expect to see it this fast though! Well done team, well done.

Easily one of the most exciting tech demos ever. The glass during the shooting shifting about oddly gave me goosebumps

This demo is another meta way of demonstrating the concept of the Matrix, outside of the previous Matrix games.

Imagine this engine on a game that isn’t open world. The detail would be beyond belief

These three guys talking games tech is so enjoyable. Its just like 3 best friends discussing their passion.

Honestly, unreal engine 5 deserves industry-wide applause for actually pulling this kind of technology off in general, not to mention on consoles. This is truly groundbreaking.

20:45 that was the highlight. The movement, the detailed closeup on Keanu's face and the dim lighting/soft shadow. It's 99.9% perfect.

in Demo itself most impressive for me was draw distance and fact that every car had "soft body physics" which can create quite realistic damage model

This tech demo is so incredible. If they don't make a Matrix game with this, it would be absolutely criminal. We NEED a Matrix game with modern tech so bad.

The most important aspect of these technologies are simplifying an existing workflow made difficult due to man-power/time restraints. Crafting an open world while still utilizing traditional LOD models is so incredibly time consuming. To balance that ratio of pop-in, fidelity, taking into consideration the multitude of console variations, PC hardware. Nanite completely rids of that necessity for static environment assets. Lumin? Same thing. Crafting a world that looks accurate in dynamic lighting conditions is another balancing act that just simply won't be needed in the future.

I love that Winamp makes an appearance in the video around 18:22 playing an mp3 from the Matrix soundtrack downloaded from Kazaa. What a great 90s throwback!

Interacting with this Matrix demo was the coolest thing I have seen in tech in years. Excellent discussion DF.

About the dodging the bullets scene, I think all they used from the original movie was the textures for the environment (the building and the city). In the original movie Keanu was shot over a green screen thanks to a circular rig of synchronized cameras surrounding him. The cape too was real and blown back by a wind machine. Even in the movie, you can clearly see that the environment is fake, although really well done for the time. What we see in this Unreal demo was a real time CG recreation, which to me was the only scene that looked not convincing at all. Everything else was absolutely mind-blowing. Especially when the eyes are covered with sun glasses, which eliminates even more that "uncanny valley" problem of cgi.

I’ve been waiting for an example of a Next Gen game unhindered by past technology considerations - this is really cool

I was absolutely stunned with this demo. Flying up to the top of skyscrapers and zooming into the rooms, and textures, gargoyles, etc., looking for any flaws, and finding very, very few. Now I need a game that takes place in this city, it's amazing and gorgeous.

As a teenager I wondered if it will ever ever be possible at all to achieve photorealistic games. 15 years later and we are almost there. Mind bending.

I love tech demos and hope they're more readily available on consoles like this

I haven't seen the DF crew this enamored with a tech demo in a long time. Sidenote: Would anyone else love to see a Virtua Fighter-esque Matrix fighter using this tech?

The detailing in this demo is absolutely absurd! So many building and other assets, rooftops and stuff, it is mind blowing!

I played this on my PS5 on my 4K HDR monitor and it was just mind blowing. I honestly never seen this level of realism in a game like ever, and I have been gaming on the PC for over 2 decades now. Just amazing!

Keanu Reeves: “What is real? How do we know?” DF: Oh we know….. we analyzed the shit out of it.

Played this on my Series X for a few hours just flying around looking at the detail on everything. Just Amazing

This was the first time my series x actually felt like it was being utilised. Awesome demo.

I knew from the moment I'd laid eyes on the in-game visuals and playing this tech demo, I was witnessing a game changer. Your analysis of the tech is a vindication. This demo is truly revolutionary given how closely it mimics in real-time what was once considered only the realm of pre-rendered CG. This genuinely looks like the pre-rendered scenes from the actual Matrix movies and each of those CG scenes took literally days to render! I was equally astonished at how smooth everything ran on the PS5. If this is a taste of what this generation of consoles has to offer, the future is looking very bright indeed. If they can maintain this level of fidelity for VR experiences developed with UE5, the immersion level will be beyond mind blowing!

I checked out this Unreal Engine 5 demo on my series X last night. I couldn't believe my eyes and the prospect of this being the future of gaming.

The beauty of using The Matrix for a tech demo is the whole thing makes sense in-universe. Any glitch, any inconsistency, even the fact that you are manipulating the world, works as part of the Matrix. It's like you're an AI constructing the world.

For the first time since we were teenagers, my friends and I watched this trailer together and our jaws collectively dropped. We also said the words we used to say back then: "Graphics just can't get any better than this"

The cross over in tech from games to movie production and back again is fascinating. The last 3 big commercials I worked on, all featured Unreal in some form or other. It is becoming as ubitquitus as the camera, and has enabled the widespread use of LED volumes. Surely they are up for the Science and Technoloy Oscar?

This tech demo was insane definitely wasn't expecting the graphics to be so realistic.UE5 is true beast of gaming engine

After it was announced at the Game Awards that this went live, I’m sure all of us were waiting for the Digital Foundry tech review

This really blew my mind - loved how closely they got to a truly photo real version of the original movie's introduction of neo waking to his pc from the matrix rain effect. I wasn't sure what to expect from the teaser countdown but this really cemented what the new console hardware can do!

Anyone who isn't totally blown away by this doesn't understand the tech involved. There are lot more at play here than just 3D visuals. I'm still collecting my jaw off the floor. The physics alone is 👌. And all running on 500 dollar consumer hardware. 🤯

This is probably the biggest move forward in visuals technology in video games since the days that ushered the 3D graphics. Most impressive indeed, let's see where this will go.

the way the characters walk breaks the illusion in a big way..

NEO SLEEPING BY THE PC IS REALTIME UE5????? OMG I was positive that's ripped from the movie. That's insane. This way above anything out there.

Amazing, the character models look on par with the cg character models of matrix revolutions which was professional grade movie production, one of the most expensive movies of its time

I played it yesterday on a 1080p screen, on my XSX and it still looked remarkable. Thanks for the great analysis as always, was waiting for this! I hope Epic updates this demo with any future improvements.

Played this on PS5 last night and it was incredible. I’m especially impressed with Nanite, I spend a good hour just zooming in on random props on the street and architectural features on buildings and just being absolutely blown away by the amount of geometry, and how seamlessly the level of detail changes as you move closer / further from it

Played through this today. I'm so appreciative that they released this for free. I know it's in their own interest to do so, but I'm so impressed and it feels like the newest gens of demos we used to get.

This demo only scratches the surface of what will be possible in games in the coming years. Really exciting stuff.

seein Neo so real as a GAME character was actually unreal, the whole demo is insane but how realistic they made Neo is actually amazing

Tried on my Xbox Series S (24" 1080p display) and PS5 (4k 55") it's an amazing demo. I was shocked!

The Collapsing Bridge is an animation but I bet its technically a 'cached' chaos physics simulation played back.

Winamp! It really whips the llamas ass. Edit: totally got side tracked and forgot to thank you all for the amazing breakdown. You did great and thank you kindly!

This tech demo was insane definitely wasn't expecting the graphics to be so realistic

It was such a great surprise seeing this and being absolutely blown away. Just incredible. Can't recall the last time I've played a game and was visually blown away

I was totally blown away when first exploring the city in this on PS5. It's very close to photorealism

Spider-Man needs to feel like it’s this scale. The buildings feel SO much bigger in this than in any game I’ve ever touched.

This demo and seeing Hellblade Senua 2 are making me super excited for the future of games

The fact we can get this running on a console - before the improvements and optimizations coming with a new engine - is astounding. It's going to also guide PC performance and quality for games to sky high levels if console is squeezing this out.

Can't wait for the Switch version.

I see you sneaking that Winamp in there at 18:22. Because thats exactly what I was using to play music from back then. Best music player on PC.

Seeing this running on my PS5 was jaw dropping. I haven't been this impressed with something in a long time.. if this is the future of the next gen systems and PC then I'm glad I'm already on board. UE5 is a true beast. I can only imagine how flawless this looks on PC..

You gotta love and respect digital foundry for this stuff especially for the fact they get videos out so fast.

This is the arrival of true next-gen graphics. Can’t believe what I’m watching.

Tim Sweeney Epic Games :"PS5's storage architecture is way ahead of anything currently available for purchase on PC for any amount of money." "I'm referring to actual speeds, not theoretical specs. The PS5 can transfer and decompress textures and geometries from memory directly to video memory, with no CPU decompression and driver abstraction overhead, making overall performance much higher than on the PC"

Remember: *This is an extreme stress test of Unreal Engine 5 on these MSRP $299-$499 consoles* with a sprawling seamless open world packed with activity and effects. Yes, the frame-rate buckles under that pressure but *this is due to sheer volume of geometry, assets, AI, and effects work pushing the consoles* Now, dial it back a bit. Very few Unreal Engine 5 games will go for this raw scale. Imagine "wide linear" games like Halo Infinite, Far Cry, etc. running on UE5. Imagine smaller scope yet densely packed and detailed games like Control on UE5. The consoles can certainly brute force through more conservative scope game designs on UE5, and 60fps is absolutely still on the table. We need to keep the demo's massive scope in perspective when criticizing the relative performance/frame-rate. There's no need to jump to conclusions like "the new consoles are back to 30fps now!" because we'll obviously see many different game types/world complexity in future UE5 titles on Series and PS5.

For the price, that series S is one impressive little box.

This demo feels like a lucid dream when you're flying around with the drone. I started holding my breath every time I went up, to simulate what I do in lucid dreams (holding breath = floating). It's unreal. Well... lol yes I suppose "Unreal" is quite the appropriate word.

The Ps5 actually looks like it has very slightly sharper details

This demo allayed my fears about Xbox Series S not being able to run true next-gen experiences.

I'm really impressed XSS could hold up that well.

Alex's face when Richard said John was the first to play it...

I love the Winamp Kazaa throwback (Clubbed to Death, matrix OST lol). The bespoke levels of this video are off the charts. Thank you guys!

Let's hope this tech transfers into future projects...its really very impressive and extremely surprising to see this kind of playable tech demo on consoles. Finally some true next gen software running on the new machines...

When Series X and PS5 came out I struggled to figure out what the big deal was. It took a year but I'm finally impressed.

Besides this amazing tech demo, I'd like to ask you guys to take a moment and appreciate the AMAZING job that Digital Foundry did reviewing this. This guys certainly are one of a kind on KZfaq. 😊

This is an exciting time to be gamer.. I started gaming on an Nintendo and to now be gaming at this level is mind boggling to me. Very impressive open world

You're praising the "geometry stability" but distant geometry is flickering hard (11:06, 12:04, 12:21, 12:43), which is almost worse than LOD transitions because its constant. Not that LOD pop is the end of the world, but it seems contradictory to what your saying.

This tech demo was absolutely stunning. Parts of it looked nearly indistinguishable from real life. I am so excited for this engine and the future of gaming. The only issue is the NPCs, once you start walking around. They kind of ruined it. Even then, the buildings look super realist and the sense of scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I didn’t feel like I was a small person walking around a model city, like in every other game ever made. I actually felt the size of the buildings. If that makes any sense.

Finally games look like CGI trailers.

I had no idea the shot with Neo sleeping on his desk was NOT the original plate from The Matrix. The low light conditions make it easier to achieve, sure, but hell ! it's impressive.

Playing this blew me away. Can’t wait to see what the future holds.

I played this on my PS5 and it looks absolutely stunning!!! Frame rates are wonky though. But if the future is even 60% of this, it's going to be amazing!

Definitely a pretty impressive demo. Tried this on my XBX today. It's true that the buildings and such have no pop-in. The only pop-in is actually with the vehicles. They do have a limit of how much they actually draw the cars before they disappear, so if you move around high enough (like with the flying cam) you'll see where they suddenly pop-in. Needless to say, it's still impressive that the buildings do this. Also impressive is the distance the cars do render. If you don't go flying high, you'd never see where the cars stop. I would say they render far enough that if you are driving in a reasonably fast car (ground level), the cars/peds will render far enough to be just beyond vanishing point. While I would probably give this up to the limited time in developing this demo, the main distraction is that certain layered textures, for certain specific objects) spaz out. Like dirt map on a certain sidewalk texture that is flashing in and out. But I could say it fits as this *glitch* in the Matrix. You'll also see a funky shimmer at distance buildings at certain distances. The Pedestrian AI is definitely a step above, in most places. They avoid each other's and your character's path, and there is real collision used. Also, many people are good at going around various routes almost like they have somewhere real to go. They seem to also choose random path choices when they come to a place where they can choose a direction. I was thinking individuals had a fixed circuit or something, but I've stalked an NPC to see them almost do that Chaos theory thing when they approach the same location, if they make back around to it. I did find some very specific places, in the city, (one case, not far from those specific Chain-link fences shown in this video) where the pedestrian AI goes off the rails and just sits there walking into a wall. You can try to bump them to the sidewalk, but they'll just do their animation where they react and look at you and your audacity to bump into them, but won't really budge to fix themselves. I would guess that would take a little more hands-on massaging, of spots like that, to fix so that the AI doesn't get trapped there. Still, impressive demo, and definitely shows where they can go.

I will say you can tell they spent the most amount of time on Keanu. The mouth movements when speaking in the intro is spot on. But when it shows Carrie-Anne walking showing the meta-humans, she is looking very CG, to my eye it's mostly the speaking movements

Regarding Series S and objects in the distance: Nanite tries to show every mesh with a tessellation level where every polygon equals one rendered pixel. Less rendered pixels => lower mesh resolution. More rendered pixels => higher mesh resolution. Therefore the difference in mesh quality for distant objects.

I love the fact that Epic got The Coalition (unreal masters) to help with this project. Can't wait to see how Gears 6 will look.

What I found so intensely cool about this demo was the sheer scope of the city and the tiny details on everything. I also really enjoyed just destroying cars to the point where the hazard lights turned on and the car pixelated into nothing. The draw distance was something I have never witnessed before in any game and I like the way the city looks without the Matrix filter. I did see a few cracks in the demo that most have not yet. There were a number of buildings that are sitting on top of water which looks wild. Also a bunch of the plinths to change day into night we're not appearing for me. I wish they gave us the option to change it in the menu. When you do find one that works the night cycle changes seamlessly and without any loading...impressive. Addendum- I played the tech demo on both the Xbox Series X and PS5. I honestly didn't see any real difference between the two. We have our 9th generation consoles running through two Samsung 55 inch QLED's.

Is that a record? The first time John says 'bespoke' is at 15 minutes.

Finally. The only tech analysis the whole gaming community has been anxiously waiting for 😊🙏

Playing this blew my mind. Its the first time i've genuinely seen anything that made me think "oh this is next gen"

We're in for an insane gen. Imagine what smaller scale titles and full optimisation will bring

Nobody noticed that if you park a car in the middle of the highway or cause a massive crash and then you get out, go flying like a mile back to the highway ramp, get a new car then go back into the highway, then there is a huge congestion. And if you fight your way through it, then your old car is still blocking traffic. In any other game that old car would have disappeared the moment you went 100 ft away.

The temporal super resolution blew my mind. When the demo switched TSR on and off the difference was huge.

With these visuals, I think it’s safe to say next gen is finally here. It’s about damn time too.

Keanu: how do we know what is real? Me: hair animation. Proper gravity is a b1tch to duplicate...

Cyberpunk could do with some of this! The color grading in this demo is phenomenal. Straight from the movies.

If they fix the frame times, and the odd ghosting from what I am assuming is the upscaling, this will be a huge leap ahead.

I played the demo blind after waited for the damn countdown to end. It blew me away what it offered for a tech demo. A funny thing to do is a massive traffic jam, never seen before.

A new Insomniac Spiderman game made using Unreal Engine 5 exclusively for the PS5 (not a cross gen title) would be pretty impressive.

it looks incredibly close to uncanny valley, but the fact they've come so far to actually pass the curve is just amazing, it'll only get better from here on

My concern is that 30fps becomes the norm again on consoles. If there is no option for 60fps, I am out - just can't go back to this judder.

I went through three stages when I tried this. I thought it was all just a video until the rooftop bullet time thing and then went "that's pretty cool, but it's not interactive so I won't get too excited", then the on-rail shooter started and I thought "OK, it's a *bit* interactive, but it's still constrained and highly scripted", then they handed the controls over and I did a little wee...

Super impressed that this is running on consoles. It looks tremendous.

"there's no popin!" 13:46 bunch of texture popins

The first time EVER I been excited for next gen. Epic is standing up to their name as well as the Unreal engine name. 🙌🏽👍🏽🔥

The world reminded me of the recent Yakuza/Judgement entries. Can't wait small team of developers to get their hands on this. Great stuff

I fired this up on my PS5 without seeing anything beforehand. I've been driving and flying around this city and my mind is utterly blown. I have never seen anything like this. We are in for a real treat gamers!

Finally after many years the jump in tech feels like that of PS2 -> PS3. I was giddily watching the demo, felt like a kid again.