Hi,
I have started using UE4 yesterday and, while watching tutorials, I realised my game looked very blurry. My character animation is weird since when I’m moving the camera around him, I do see weird frames around him because of his movements (idk how to describe it). I added some screenshots:
that looks like the normal motion blur, try turning that off in the PostProcessingVolume that should be included by default in that example map you use
Well I searched in the PostProcessing scetion and there was no Motion BLur settings. But I searched for motion blur and I had already deactivated it. So it might not be the solution…
- Motion Blur
- Resolution scale
- Temporal Anti Aliasing
Those are the three causes for Unreal Games to look blurry. You already disabled motion blur. The next one would be to ensure that the resolution scale isn’t below 100% (the big “Settings” button → “Engine Scalability Settings”).
Disabling TAA is generally not a good idea, because it’ll introduce aliasing. UE4 has four AA algorithms by: TAA, FXAA, MSAA and SSAA.
TAA has the downside of introducing ghosting (the afterimage you can see on your first screenshot) and reduces texture detail (which creates the overall blurriness).
FXAA is a worse (but faster) TAA, if you wish. Since it’s not a temporal algorithm, it doesn’t introduce ghosting, however, it still screws with your texture detail and makes everything less sharp.
MSAA is the slowest of the three “normal” algorithms and does not reduce texture detail. However, it only works with the forward renderer and is broken for foilage (no ATOC).
SSAA is a special one. In terms of effectiveness it’s the best, because it not only doesn’t reduce texture quality, it even improves the it due to how they are filtered. The downside of SSAA is that it’s just not viable to use for the most part, because it comes with an enormous performance penalty. Generally speaking, the use cases of SSAA are making pretty screenshots and the playing the games of yesteryear on the powerful hardware of today. You can enable it via console, by setting r.ScreenPercentage to values above 100 (doesn’t show in the editor preview, you need to play).
why do you post it as a solution then -__-
this is not how the answer hub works.
Oh my God I think this is the world’s best community. I got helped in less than 3 hours and your answer ,TheSniperFan, was so accurate that it easily solved my problem. Thank you very much everybody and have a great day 
glad it helped but can you PLEASE stop abusing answers as comments?
the SSAA performance pentalty seems to be tied directly to resolution and fragment fill rate, right? so i guess e.g. if your hardware would support playing a game on a giant screen it should be the same performance on a smaller screen with SSAA? e.g. I have a 1920x1080 primary display but my gpu would probably run most games on 4K ok, so it should be save to say turning the percentage up to 200 would actually be still performing better than on the 4K display i don’t have?
Basically.
What SSAA does is render the game at a higher resolution and then scale it down to match your display resolution. Aside from what you already mentioned, the VRAM usage explodes, too (especially if you’re using the deferred rendering path, because all your g buffers grow).
I’ve also seen people mix SSAA and FXAA to find a middleground. Post processing AA algorithms like FXAA and TAA produce better results on high resolution images. Details like thin wires are usually lost before those algorithms do their thing. SSAA preserves them and thus gives those algorithms a higher quality base image.
Two things to note in regard to Unreal and SSAA:
- Don’t go above 200%. The visual quality actually goes down at that point. I guess it’s due to Unreal handles the resizing internally.
- There is a bug where the editor’s performance will tank, if you mess with those settings at runtime too much. If you keep changing the SSAA and AA settings via the console a lot to see what the results look like, the editor will start slowing down. You can fix that with restarting.
ooh yeah, more fragments in buffers means more VRAM of course. but am i right to guess a 200% ScreenPercentage would cost approximately the same ressources as no SSAA on a screen that’s twice (in terms of side length; so 4 times in terms of area) as big?
also good notes there, i’m not planning to use it much currently (my current projects are in a prototype stage where i don’t yet care much about AA quality but rather “wtf should this map layout be” :P) but it sounds interesting and at least like something great to allow users to pick on a high-end rig with a rather small-ish screen. would probably do it with the “Dynamic Resolution” system then though…
Yes, you are correct in your assumption. In any case, you could just add a resolution scale slider from 50 to 200% to your graphics options and call it a day.