Every world-model demo looks more spectacular than the last, yet generating a video and playing one are different things. Generating means turning a prompt into a convincing clip. Playing means you press a key and the next frame reacts, with a delay short enough that your brain never notices the break. This piece is not about image quality, and it does not re-run the selection math. It asks one question: as of October 2026, how many open projects have crossed the threshold where you can actually play them.
1. Setting the Ruler: Three Meanings of "Real Time"
The common mistake is flattening everyone's numbers onto one line. But "real time" refers, in the source documents, to at least three different quantities. The first is model processing throughput, how many frames a model chews per second. The second is end-to-end latency, the time from an input action to a visible frame, usually called action-to-photon. The third is presentation frame rate, the smoothness a user actually sees. These can differ by orders of magnitude, and mixing them guarantees a false conclusion.
The cleanest evidence comes from the v4 README of Matrix-Game 4.0, which draws the line itself. It labels --fps 40 as a target capture cadence, not a throughput or latency guarantee. Its A100 numbers are labelled as model processing throughput inside an online session, plus server-side pipeline throughput that includes waiting for game frames, and the README adds that neither is browser presentation FPS or action-to-photon latency. So the rule here is to separate the measurement basis first, then compare, marking every vendor figure as not independently reproduced.
2. Seven Contenders on One Table
Our 2026-09-14 comparison, "Open Does Not Mean Commercial: Four Ledgers for World Models" (open-world-model-comparison-review), tallied four ledgers, meaning license, hardware, data and openness, across seven entries including lingbot and gods-eye. This piece does not repeat that selection math; it tallies only the playability layer. Our July features on LingBot-World 2.0 and the small-model local deployment guide cover a single release and installation steps respectively, so this article restates neither. All star counts below are GitHub API snapshots from 2026-10-16, recorded as fact, not as a quality verdict.
| Project | Stars | License | Real-time / playable figure | Hardware floor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matrix-Game 4.0 (Kunlun Wanwei / Skywork) | 2,488 | Code Apache-2.0 (v4 directory text) plus MIT at root | Vendor: 480p 60FPS, latency under 150ms; README self-test: about 38-39 FPS at 864x480 on A100 | A100 80GB / RTX 5090 |
| MineWorld (Microsoft) | 494 | MIT | Diagonal Decoding at 4-7 FPS, described as real-time interactive | A100 / H100 |
| HY-World 1.5 / WorldPlay (Tencent Hunyuan) | 1,619 | Undeclared (defer to the repo text) | README states 24 FPS; next chunk equals 16 frames | 28G to 72G by parallelism |
| HunyuanWorld-Voyager (Tencent Hunyuan) | 1,604 | Undeclared (defer to the repo text) | Not real time: 540p needs at least 60GB of VRAM | 60-80GB |
| Helios (PKU-YuanGroup) | 2,206 | Apache-2.0 | 19.5 FPS on a single H100; a user measured 20.89 FPS | Single H100 |
| PixVerse R1 (AIsphere, closed reference) | n/a | Closed | Vendor: 1080P general model, real-time positioning, 1-4 steps | Cloud |
| Genie 3 (Google DeepMind, closed reference) | n/a | Closed | Public reporting: 720p at 24fps, about one minute of consistency | Cloud |
3. The Five Open Models and Two Closed References
Matrix-Game 4.0 (Skywork): one project, three measurement bases. The repository is SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game, address: github.com/SkyworkAI/Matrix-Game. The license chain reads piece by piece: the root LICENSE is MIT, while Matrix-Game-4/LICENSE in the v4 directory is the full Apache-2.0 text, and the v4 README states that project code is Apache-2.0 while vendored components keep their own licenses; the bundled TAEHV component is MIT. Three performance versions coexist. The vendor figure is a single RTX 5090, 480p at 60FPS, end-to-end latency under 150ms, 83 FPS steady state and 18.5 GiB peak VRAM, and it is not independently reproduced. The official performance panel is still a placeholder reading 0FPS, 0ms, 0p and 0GPU, so the slogan numbers have not landed yet. The hardest version is the README self-test: one A100-SXM4-80GB at 864x480, shooters at about 38-39 FPS fixed-prompt as model processing throughput, and racing at 38.5 fixed and 28.9 dynamic as server-side pipeline throughput from an earlier checkpoint of the same architecture. That 38-39 is throughput, not browser FPS. The 10-15 RTX 5090 presets use FP8 weights. Weights and assets defer to the Hugging Face model card, which our proxy blocked, so no license is guessed here.
MineWorld (Microsoft): the honest 4-7 FPS. The repository is microsoft/mineworld, address: github.com/microsoft/mineworld. Its core trick is Diagonal Decoding, and its stated figure is a generation rate of 4 to 7 frames per second, described as enabling real-time interaction in open-ended game environments. That real-time lives in the Minecraft context, where 4-7 FPS is enough to interact, and it should not be compared head-on with a 60FPS slogan. One fact must be recorded: since May 2025 the Hugging Face checkpoints have been temporarily taken down, so it reads more like a reproducible research artifact than a ready product.
HY-World 1.5 / WorldPlay (Tencent Hunyuan): 24 FPS, sixteen frames at a time. The repository is Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-WorldPlay, address: github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-WorldPlay. The GitHub API flags NOASSERTION and no specific license is named, so the repository declares no license and the repository LICENSE text governs, with commercial risk on the user. Its introduction states that it generates long-horizon streaming video at 24 FPS, and inference advances 16 video frames per next-chunk prediction before Reconstituted Context Memory rebuilds context from past frames. Its VRAM accounting is detailed: with the autoregressive distilled model at 125 frames, sp=8 costs 28G, sp=4 costs 34G and sp=1 costs 72G. It marks itself real-time in its own evaluation table, and it open-sources data, training, RL post-training and distillation.
HunyuanWorld-Voyager (Tencent Hunyuan): explicitly not real time, and the steepest floor. The repository is Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanWorld-Voyager, address: github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanWorld-Voyager. Again NOASSERTION: the repository declares no license and the repository LICENSE text governs. Its requirements table says 540p, batch size one, 60GB peak GPU memory, with 60GB minimum and 80GB recommended, and its output is camera-controllable RGB-D world video plus an exportable point cloud, not a frame-by-frame response to keyboard and mouse. The latency table is clearer still: at 512x768, 49 frames and 50 steps, one H20 takes 1,925 seconds and eight H20s bring that only to 288 seconds. It belongs here as a reverse ruler: the same four words, world model, but its time scale is minutes to half an hour, an order of magnitude away from play.
Helios (PKU-YuanGroup): 19.5 FPS on one H100. The repository is PKU-YuanGroup/Helios, address: github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Helios. Its Apache-2.0 license is the cleanest among the five. It is a 14B real-time long-video model whose vendor figure is 19.5 FPS end-to-end on a single H100, without the usual long-video anti-drift strategies and without standard acceleration such as KV-cache, causal masking, sparse or linear attention, TinyVAE or quantization. On an Ascend NPU it reaches about 10 FPS, and one user measured 20.89 FPS on better hardware. It generates autoregressively in chunks of 33 frames. Its key caveat: the interactive inference script states the feature is still under development and results may not always meet expectations, so 19.5 FPS means high-throughput long-video generation, not a game-grade loop. Group offloading can push VRAM to about 6GB, but that trades throughput for memory and is not the same as playable at 6GB.
Two closed references. PixVerse R1 (AIsphere) is closed; the vendor describes it as the world's first 1080P general real-time world model, announced January 2026 and invite-only, with an instant-response engine that compresses more than 50 sampling steps to 1-4. Those are vendor and press figures, not independently reproduced. Genie 3 (Google DeepMind) is also closed, with public reporting of 720p at 24fps, roughly one minute of consistency and no multiplayer, a basis we also used in our September 14 comparison, so it counts as second-hand. Neither offers weights or a VRAM figure: at this layer, real time is rented from the cloud, never self-hosted.
4. Hardware: From One Consumer Card to 80GB of VRAM
Sorted by hardware, the spread is extreme. At the consumer single-card tier, Matrix-Game 4.0 is the only entry with a dedicated RTX 5090 preset, and 5080 and 5070 arrive next week. Above it: the single-H100 tier (Helios at 19.5 FPS, long video, interactive mode in development), then the 60-80GB tier (Voyager needs 60GB at 540p and is not real time; HY-WorldPlay needs 72G at sp=1). At the top is the closed cloud tier: PixVerse R1 and Genie 3 need no deployment, at the cost of never being self-hosted. One trap: Helios can compress VRAM to about 6GB through group offloading, but that trades throughput for memory, so "runs in 6GB" is not "plays in 6GB".
5. Openness: Apache-2.0, MIT, Undeclared, Closed
Split by license, the boundary is clear. The first tier is Apache-2.0: the v4 code of Matrix-Game 4.0 and Helios, commercial-friendly, requiring that notices be kept and modifications noted, and granting a patent license. The second tier is MIT: MineWorld, the older code at the root of Matrix-Game, and the bundled TAEHV component. The third tier is undeclared: HY-WorldPlay and Voyager, flagged NOASSERTION on GitHub, so the repository declares no license and the repository LICENSE text governs, with commercial risk on the user. The fourth tier is closed: PixVerse R1 and Genie 3. A license decides whether you may use something, not whether it is any good, and star counts are snapshots, not verdicts.
6. What to Pick, by Need
Tier one, self-hosting and source modification. Check the license first, then the VRAM. For Apache-2.0 plus a consumer card, Matrix-Game 4.0 satisfies both; for 14B-class throughput under Apache-2.0, look at Helios and accept that interactive mode is still in development. Tier two, experience only: PixVerse R1 and Genie 3 work out of the box, at the cost of never being self-hosted and mostly vendor or second-hand figures. Tier three, long-horizon exploration and reconstruction: Voyager and HY-WorldPlay fit better, but budget for 60-80GB of VRAM and accept a time scale that is not frame-by-frame playable. For pure research reproduction, MineWorld is honest, light and readable. In one line: many projects can generate, few can be played, and playability is locked behind three gates, the measurement basis, the VRAM and the license.
Related reading
- Open Source Is Not a License to Sell: World Models Audited
- Realtime video models compared: who edits while you talk
- Open Video Model Local Deployment: Five-Axis Comparison Review
FAQ
Q1: How do the three meanings of "real time" differ?
A1: They are model processing throughput, end-to-end latency and presentation frame rate. Throughput is how many frames a model processes per second. Latency is the time from an input action to a visible frame, the action-to-photon figure. Presentation frame rate is what a user sees. The Matrix-Game 4.0 README separates all three and states that --fps 40 is a capture cadence target, not a throughput or latency guarantee.
Q2: Can the 480p 60FPS figure for Matrix-Game 4.0 be trusted?
A2: Read it in layers. The vendor figure of 480p 60FPS, latency under 150ms and 18.5 GiB peak VRAM is a vendor claim, not independently reproduced, and the official performance panel is still a placeholder. The README self-test reports about 38-39 FPS at 864x480 on an A100, and that is model processing throughput, not browser presentation FPS.
Q3: Can I use a NOASSERTION project commercially?
A3: Not by assumption. HY-WorldPlay and Voyager are flagged NOASSERTION, and no specific license is found. The accurate wording is that the repository declares no license and the LICENSE text governs, and before commercial use you must read the LICENSE text, the weights license and the asset license. If a license is not stated, the risk is yours.
Q4: With only one consumer-grade card, what can I run?
A4: On the current snapshot, the one entry with an explicit consumer preset is Matrix-Game 4.0, which ships an RTX 5090 preset and says 5080 and 5070 arrive next week. Helios can push VRAM down to about 6GB through group offloading, but that trades memory for throughput. The rest need a single H100, or 60-80GB of VRAM, or exist only in the cloud.
Q5: Do more stars mean more playable?
A5: No. Stars are a 2026-10-16 snapshot, not a playability score. Helios has impressive throughput but an interactive mode still in development; Voyager is explicitly not real time; MineWorld is the one that honestly states a 4-7 FPS interactive figure.
Closing Thoughts
The takeaway is not whose frame rate is highest, but that "real time" points at different things in different projects. Generating is no longer hard. Making throughput, latency and presentation all clear the bar of play at the same time is hard, and that bar sits between two walls, one of license and one of VRAM. Decide first which kind of real time you need, then check the license and the VRAM, and only then look at frame rate.