Question:
Can you not just throw the transparency into a different processing buffer like we used to be able to do at the time ray tracing came out?
Afaik you have options to choose from when rendering it.
The pipeline that works and has been somwhat reliable for a few years, with its many caviats and required rendering hacks. Which I believe is essentially forward rendering.
Or the pipeline that doesn’t work/has never worked/I wouldn’t expect it to work any time soon IF ever, that’s the other option on the material domain settings of the transparent material.
Additionally to this, remeber thar epic is incapable of doing things right, so Nvidia stepped in with custom engine versions.
Their releases often provide much better ray tracing results, even on transparencies. They even include caustics.
Im not sure what kind of FPS you can get out of a build from one of their engines, since they focus on pretty more than performance.
If you are doing things for clients to watch which have to be “pretty”, then you may be better off using one of the Nvidia engine distros to publish your stuff with…
It will be curoius to see what Nvidia does with Lumen improvements once they get to it… so far (not that i looked) i havent seen anything mentioned…