Gears Dev The Coalition Worked With Epic on The Matrix Awakens - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 December 2021 / 1,782 Views
Developer Epic Games during The Game Awards 2021 last week announced the technical demonstration, The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, was now available for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
In an Xbox Wire post it was revealed Gears 5 developer and first-party Xbox studio The Coalition worked with Epic to help bring the demo to life. The studio helped refine and optimize the game having previously worked with Epic on Unreal Engine 4 support on the Xbox Series X.
"We worked with Epic on the initial Unreal Engine 4 support for Xbox Series X when the new console was revealed back in March 2020," said Kate Rayner, Studio Technical Director at The Coalition.
"We 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."
The Coalition has been working with an Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5 for nearly a year by the time Epic reached out. The developer provided feedback to Epic on their experience with the engine, which helped push it on Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Rayner added, "Unreal Engine 5 has continued to improve from the 'Early Access' version over the last several months, both in terms of performance and quality. The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is an excellent example of all of UE5’s systems coming together to make something special and noticeably next-gen.
"Most of all, it really got us excited for the potential of Raytracing for shadows and Lumen, Nanite at scale with Virtual Shadow Maps, and the new World Partition System tying it all together. With these technical advances, it’s never been a better time to be a gamer."
Here is what The Coalition did to assist in the development of he Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience:
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.
On the performance optimizations side, the teams made some threading improvements to improve utilization of the CPU cores. They also made some Xbox Raytracing optimizations, resulting in performance wins of about 0.5ms. Finally, they enabled Vertical Sync tuning to ensure a stable FPS throughout the experience.
With this focus, the Xbox Series S version shipped with all the same UE5 features enabled as Xbox Series X (albeit with different quality) including but not limited to raytraced reflections and raytraced shadows. Regardless of which platform you experience it on, you’re in for a visual treat.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Gears 6 is gonna look ridiculous
Great move to have Matrix as their first playable demo for the UE5. When I ran it for the first time on my XBSX, I was like Neo "no, that's impossible. I don't believe it."
The Coalition are masters with the Unreal Engines.
Yep they are preeminent in the console space anyway and one of the best and most experienced developers using UE full stop.
Pretty cool to see companies working together on proving what is possible. Tech demos can sometimes have a longer lasting impact than the games themselves because of how inspiring they can be. I'm still blown away by the Zelda Wii U tech demo all these years later!
Some of the most impressive work done with UE4 was Gears 5. Especially when you consider how well optimized it was on base Xbox One. So its not that surprising Epic worked with them.
Good to have feedback from a team that is involved deeply with the platform allowing for tweaks that will make both the engine and the tech demo better.
Essay Pro