Every project that I’ve run in 4.9 has two issues: black flickering on mesh surfaces and grainy borders around the screen. Old projects that ran fine in earlier engine versions suddenly produce these glitches when converted for 4.9 or when run in 4.9 without conversion. All new projects in 4.9 have these issues. The issues appear both in the editor and when playing the projects, and it appears that they may be closely related, because the grainy borders occasionally begins to flicker exactly like the mesh surfaces. Both issues are described below in more detail.
Regarding the flickering, meshes have a black flickering that becomes more prominent as you get closer to the meshes. The flickering happens merely slightly (or not at all) when you are moving but then becomes very prominent once you stop moving. Changes to Engine Scalability Settings affect the flickering, as seen in the attached images below of a C++ FPS Template project.
Image 1: With all Engine Scalability Settings set to Epic, mesh surfaces show almost no flickering from far away. Only slight flickering is seen at the top of the left-most cube.
Image 2: With Effects set to Low but all other Engine Scalability Settings set to Epic, black flickering can be seen on most surfaces from far away.
Image 3: With all Engine Scalability Settings set to Epic, there are bands of flickering on nearby meshes, but a ‘flicker-free’ region surrounds the player’s gun.
Image 4: With Shadows set to Low but all other Engine Scalability Settings set to Epic, the ‘flicker-free’ region surrounding the player’s gun remains, but the bands of flickering become more distinct, and green flickering also becomes very obvious.
Image 5: With Post-Processing set to Low but all other Engine Scalability Settings set to Epic, the ‘flicker free’ region surrounding the player’s gun disappears.
Setting Anti-Aliasign to anything other than Epic removes all flickering, while Texture Quality and View Distance have no major effect on the flickering.
Regarding the grainy borders, I can’t attach any more images for this question, but it can be seen to some extent in the already attached images. In Image 1, the dark graininess at the bottom of the screen extends to everywhere except the very left side of the screen. In Image 2, it is only on the left side of the bottom of the screen. In Images 3 and 4, it is broken up into multiple bands on the bottom of the screen. In Image 5, it is not present.
This grainy region does not become substantially darker when standing near objects that are directly lit (as is the case in all of the attached images), but the region notably becomes pure black when standing near shaded mesh surfaces. The shape can change each time the game is restarted as well, as seen in the images. Not seen in the attached images however is the fact that the grainy region can also extend to the left and right edges of the screen instead of just the bottom edge. It’s unclear to me so far what causes changes to shape or location of the grainy region. Normally the graininess does not flicker, but in some instances it clearly flickers just like the flickering issue described earlier.
Suggestions? Is there anything I can do to prevent the mesh flickering without turning Anti-Aliasing quality down? Is there anything I can do to prevent the grainy black regions around the screen edges?
If there’s more information I can give to help resolve these issues, I’d be glad to give that information as well.
Thanks.
Specifications:
Unreal Engine 4.9 is running on OS X 10.10.3 with Xcode 6.3.2. Computer has 2.3 GHz Core i7 CPU, 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU with 1 GB VRAM, and 128 GB SSD.