The Matrix Awakens has been with us for a week now and slowly we’re gaining much more of an understanding on the scale of the technological achievement in Epic Games’ work – such as the fact that several segments in the demo’s opening are actual real-time 3D recreations of scenes from the movie. Armed with a UHD Blu-ray copy of the film (a widely acclaimed 4K transfer, by the way), we’re in a good position to see how next-gen consoles can replicate the look of the source material. The results are remarkable, highlighting the advances in fidelity provided by more GPU horsepower working in combination with hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
In the video below you’ll see how the various scenes compare, starting with the Construct. In the demo, this sees a virtualised contemporary Keanu Reeves walking around the classic scene from The Matrix. While Morpheus is a billboard – a flat sprite, effectively – everything else is generated in real-time. We’re also getting, dare I say it, the best chair rendering seen a video game since the RT Chesterfield armchair in Control! Epic has also managed to capture ambient studio lighting effectively, making me wonder if Epic had reference photos of the original set in order to understand exactly how lights were placed out of frame.
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