I'm honestly not that impressed by The Matrix during gameplay. It looks good, but isn't blowing me away. Horizon looks more impressive due to the art direction.
You are complaining about an aspect of the demo that is clearly due to the fact that it was made under a year with a tiny team of people.
Not 500-1000 people over the span of 5 years.
This is why you see alot of asset repetition. this is why the entire city is bare, crispy clean. Look at the cars, they all look brand new, no dust, no scratch. Which makes them look out of place. Look at the road textures, all identical. Look at the side walks and the ground side of the buildings. Again perfectly clean and bare. That's what's jarring you.
But that's not due to the tech, its due to the facts its not an actual game. you don't have 1,000 people working on it for over 5 years. People are going to be shocked when an actual AAA game comes out that fully ultilizes UE5 features.
Not a single one exists, they look good, but clearly fake.
No game, or even any tech demo is coming close to the quality of that pre rendered trailer. The lighting and effects are simply on another level. Need to stop using prerendered things as a short term goal. They are constantly doing things that require computers that are literally hundred of times stronger than what we have.
This is simply not true. we are ALREADY there when it comes to world lighting, whether you are doing real-time GI or just baked GI.
Where we are not there is the vfx and fluid sim. We will need dedicated NN processers for that in the next PS/Xbox. The other thing we are not there with is scaling character rendering. We ARE there with the rendering but not scaling it. We need Nanite for characters so we can have hellblade 2 reveal fidelity. But clearly we are there with the rendering as you can see.
Lastly again i repeat. The matrix demo only look fake because it lacks art direction and an actual art team the size of what games typically has. Like I said, its environment (streets) are completely bare, too clean, etc.
But this is not the result of the tech, its the result of having only a tiny team work on the project for 1 year rather than 500-1000 people for 5 years.
Its the same reason the 2016 The division trailer is still the best looking trailer ever. It looks even better than the matrix demo. Yet the tech in there is way inferior and if it was converted to use UE5 it would look 10x better.
Why does it then look photorealistic? Its obviously the asset density and variety. I have fooled many people with a pic of this image. I want one of you people to tell me that this pic doesn't look photoreal and how this pic and the entire experience can't be done today in UE5.
Tell me how with Nanite and Lumen and the superior Material shading of UE. How this can't be done today and even better?
I've found that a lot of the most fervent fans of the matrix demo haven't even played it on a big screen. Not all of course, but quite a few.
It looks brilliant on YouTube but blow it up to 65" or whatever and all kinds of imperfections appear. There's shimmering and flickering everywhere. It must have the worst IQ I've seen since the early days of the last generation.
I much prefer how Miles Morales looks tbh, even though it's about 10% as complex.
You prefer Miles Morales because the city received 5+ years of full time 500-1000 person dev time.
Imagine if the matrix demo got that rather than what ~10 people in the Epic special project team for 1 year?
How is it that you people can not understand?