Epic has seemingly released a new development branch of its new game engine, Unreal Engine V5.1, and it appears to have improved the performance of the Matrix Awakens tech demo.

　　As covered by Dsogaming, YouTuber and plugin creator, Maxime Dupart, has released a new version of Epic’s City demo as a packaged executable running in Unreal Engine 5.1 main development branch. As mentioned by Dupart, in order to be able to run this demo, users will need DirectX12 Ultimate. This new City demo features the “Blueprint Settings Menu” which adds a useful settings menu containing all available Unreal Engine settings features.

　　While Epic hasn’t shared release notes for this new main development branch of Unreal Engine 5, this new version does appear to improve performance – as can be seen in the video below, there are fewer stutters within the Megacity demo. Check out the new video of the Matrix Awakens Tech Demo running in Unreal Engine Version 5.1 down below:

　　Those interested can download Dupart’s packaged executable via Google Drive here.

　　Unreal Engine 5 was released last month following a preview of the new engine back in February of this year. The main features of Epic’s new game engine include Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), Lumen Global Illumination, the “Nanite” virtualized micropolygon geometry system, Virtual Shadow Maps (VSMs), and more.

　　First off, there’s Lumen—a fully dynamic global illumination solution that enables you to create believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door. With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting your players will see when the game or experience is run on the target platform.