Earlier posts have shown a preview of the capabilities of Epic Games’ forthcoming version 5 of Unreal Engine and explored in detail how its “Nanite” rendering engine works.
What does this mean for video games and virtual worlds? This is a walk-through of the The Matrix Awakens world, recorded in real time with Unreal Engine 5 running on a stock Sony PlayStation 5. If you have a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S, you can download The Matrix Awakens Experience from Unrealengine.com and try it for yourself; it isn’t a game, but rather a world you can explore, sixteen kilometres square, populated with inhabitants and traffic.
The city comprises seven million instanced assets, made up of millions of polygons each. There are seven thousand buildings made of thousands of modular pieces, 45,073 parked cars (of which 38,146 are drivable), over 260 km of roads, 512 km of sidewalk, 1,248 intersections, 27,848 lamp posts, and 12,422 manholes. Nanite intelligently streams and processes those billions of polygons, rendering everything at film quality, super fast.
We’ve come a long way since Super Mario.