Unreal Engine 5 and The Matrix Awakens available to download now

After its game-changing reveal on PlayStation 5 and following a period of early access, Unreal Engine 5 is finally available for general download. In combination with the release, Epic is releasing a cut-down, Keanu-free rendition of the remarkable The Matrix Awakens demo alongside a sample game project to experiment with, called Lyra. UE5’s release takes centre stage in today’s State of Unreal virtual event, and we’re told to expect a range of tech deep dives surrounding the technology alongside the launch of the engine itself.

UE5 takes the established Unreal Engine 4.27 and adds full support for a number of key next generation technologies. We’ve already seen these in action, of course. Lumen is Epic’s take on a fully real-time global illumination solution, eliminating the need to rely on static, pre-calculated ‘baked’ lighting, leaning into hardware accelerated ray tracing where appropriate. Nanite is UE5’s virtualised micro-polygon technology, delivering incredibly granular detail from assets of motion picture quality and the elimination of geometry ‘pop-in’.

The demands of these systems are such that native rendering at 4K resolution is not feasible on today’s game consoles and that ties into another key feature: Temporal Super Resolution. Recently seen for the first time in a non-UE5 title – Ghostwire: Tokyo – TSR is the best software-based temporal upscaling solution we’ve seen to date. In upscaling from a native 1080p to 4K – a 2x resolution boost on both axes – the quality is comparable (if not quite as good as) Nvidia’s DLSS.

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• Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-unreal-engine-5-and-the-matrix-awakens-available-to-download-now