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.
But it’s the scene of Neo being woken by his computer that is the shot I find most impressive in the entire demo. There are slight differences in terms of placement of objects – and the nature of the objects themselves, but the note-perfect lighting absolutely showcases the power of ray-traced visuals delivered by this new iteration of Epic’s Lumen global illumination system, particularly in how the few lights of the scene interact with the materials. In the case of the Construct scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Epic was overlaying its own CG over the original movie. With the scene of Neo awakening, this look flat-out like a simple BD rip, but that’s not the case. Welcome to the real world.
The final scene I want to talk about is the close-up of Keanu Reeves waking – another real-time render. All of the detail in his skin is captured and more, the real stinger being him peering into the camera with the reflection of on-screen text in his eye. On the face of it, it’s the most remarkable shot of all, but stacked up against the original, it’s the one comparison that doesn’t quite match up. For example, the specular response on Keanu’s skin is good, but still rather different from Keanu’s real face, the light diffusing a little too much in the real-time version running on consoles. That’s not to diminish the achievement though: getting complex materials to run with good performance in scenes driven by real-time ray tracing is an enormous challenge – one that may only be fully addressed by the next generation of console hardware.