How The Coalition Worked with Epic to Bring The Matrix Awakens to Life on Xbox Series X|S

Epic Games made a surprising announcement yesterday at The Game Awards. The Matrix awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Experience, 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 “The Matrix”movie 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.

The Coalition is the studio that created the Gears series. They have worked with Unreal Engine since many years. This experience allowed the group to help develop the project. The Coalition was involved in the development of the demo. Epic had already worked with them on UE4 support.

“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,” says 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.”

When Epic reached out in 2021, The Coalition had been working with Unreal Engine 5 “Early Access” for almost a year. S.|S and Windows PCs. The Coalition, with their experience in making games for Unreal and Xbox as well as our early collaboration with UE5, was well placed to assist with optimizing and polishing UE5. The Matrix Awakens- An Unreal Engine 5 ExperienceEpic.

What did The Coalition’s team do exactly? They focused their efforts on optimizing memory and performance to maximize both Xbox Series X (and Xbox Series S) respectively. This was because the game features a dense, large world that contains a huge amount of content. They worked closely with Epic in this area to make sure the assets were optimized to maximize virtual texture streaming, nanite, and other nanite features. Additionally, the team tuned the internal memory systems on Xbox Series S to fit all the content.

To optimize performance, they made threading improvements that would increase utilization of the CPU cores. The teams also optimized Xbox Raytracing, which resulted in performance gains of approximately 0.5ms. They also enabled Vertical Sync tuning, which ensures a steady FPS during the entire experience.

This focus meant that the Xbox Series S version came with the same UE5 features as the Xbox Series X, but with a different quality. Regardless of which platform you experience it on, you’re in for a visual treat.

“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: Unreal Engine 5 Experience is an excellent example of all of UE5’s systems coming together to make something special and noticeably next-gen,” says Rayner. “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.”