{"id":438678,"date":"2025-11-07T18:59:40","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T18:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.xbox.com\/en-us\/?p=162581"},"modified":"2025-11-07T18:59:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T18:59:40","slug":"how-the-coalition-worked-with-epic-to-bring-the-matrix-awakens-to-life-on-xbox-series-xs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/how-the-coalition-worked-with-epic-to-bring-the-matrix-awakens-to-life-on-xbox-series-xs\/","title":{"rendered":"How The Coalition Worked with Epic to Bring The Matrix Awakens to Life on Xbox Series X|S"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday, in a surprise announcement at The Game Awards, Epic Games revealed that The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience<\/em>, a new playable Unreal Engine 5 technical demo, was available for everyone on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Created by members of the original \u201cThe Matrix\u201dmovie team including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta in collaboration with teams across both Epic Games and partners, this experience offers a glimpse at what interactive storytelling and entertainment created with Unreal Engine 5 could look like in the future.<\/p>\n

One of those partners was The Coalition, the studio behind the Gears series, who have been working with Unreal Engine for many years now. With that experience under their collective belt, the team set out to support development of the project. While Epic created the demo, The Coalition got involved helping to refine and optimize their vision, having previously worked with Epic on UE4 support for Xbox Series X.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe worked with Epic on the initial Unreal Engine 4 support for Xbox Series X when the new console was revealed back in March 2020,\u201d says Kate Rayner, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition. \u201cWe later shipped a native update to Gears 5 on Xbox Series X|S that added visual enhancements like SSGI, increased material & texture details, and pushed our 4k real-time cinematics to 60fps, all while boosting Multiplayer to support a 120FPS performance mode. Through this we learned how to optimize for that hardware to push visual and performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Epic reached out in 2021, The Coalition had been working with Unreal Engine 5 \u201cEarly Access\u201d for almost a year. The team had been collaborating and providing feedback to Epic about their experiences with UE5, which especially helped to push it forward for Xbox Series X|S and Windows PCs. With their track record of creating games that are technical showcases for Unreal and Xbox, along with their collaboration and early experience with UE5, The Coalition was positioned well to jump in and help optimize and polish The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience<\/em> with Epic.<\/p>\n

So what exactly did the team at The Coalition do? A primary focus for them was on memory and performance optimizations to fully take advantage of both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Because the experience features an incredibly large and dense world with a staggering amount of content, the first step was working on memory optimization. In that area, they worked with Epic to ensure the assets in the demo were set up to fully leverage virtual texture streaming and nanite wherever possible and tuned internal memory systems, especially on Xbox Series S, to ensure it all fit in the memory.<\/p>\n

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