Default 4.24 Product Design settings are weird

Left is the default 4.24 Product Design new project settings without any starter content, right is a scene migrated from a 4.22 project into that very same 4.24 project:

I’ve only changed the project settings to forward shading and let all shaders compile, yet it looks super off.

i wouldn’t be surprised that a couple things setup in the new templates are not well supported in the forward shading.

the visual artifacts you see are most likely caused by a high dynamic range exposure and lighting making the forward rendering clips or break somewhere.

a few pointers:

reduce the sun intensity to 1.0
reduce EV (exposure) accordingly
turn off exponential fog

this is just a guess

Two things:

The Datasmith Product Visualisation option is probably more used for VR than any other Datasmith template. Why wouldn’t this be optimized for forward?

Second:

Why would the senior technical enterprise manager have to guess about this? Forward rendering in VR is not a priority for you guys? (I’m only half joking.)