Are they worse than masked materials? What is the difference if the difference is not visible? If there no difference and masked materials can do everything (or they cant? In which cases?) - why transparent option even exists? What are the appropriate use cases for transparent and masked materials?
translucency is “bad” in many ways. the worst issue being that they don’t utilise z-buffering efficiently and create massive amounts of overdraw. that’s why they are bad for foliage or hair. masked materials basicly are solid and they can use the z-buffer for rasterizing. means they can use early z-culling. technicalities.
the other issue being when a mesh uses backfaces like glass bottles or things like that, they produce depth sorting glitches.
the other unreal specific thing is they can be rendered into a seperate pass and are composited at a later stage. this requires a full screen pass to composite, but is most like integrated into the final image production, reducing that cost a good amount.
that’s from the top of my head. pretty sure other devs have some more insight into this.
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Thank you