That doesn’t prevent you from showcasing the progress made around a solution in R&D. Who knows, it might even inspire other developers, and maybe even developers at Epic.
Ten years ago, it was already the same issue : some artifacts, blurriness at lower resolutions with TXAA. Not much has changed since then.
That’s good, it’s a start, but it probably won’t change anything. Frame generation will most likely be the standard for a huge portion of games in the future, and it might even be impossible to disable. I wouldn’t be surprised if Epic introduces their own in-house solution with UE6 (in addition to Sony’s and Microsoft’s solutions).
So yes, there are improvements to be made. Personally, I play in 4K, and with or without upscaling, the temporal issues don’t cause any problems the image is very good. But at lower resolutions, typically 1080p, it’s quite mediocre (depending on the title, but nothing extraordinary). I doubt the industry as a whole will make progress unless there’s a real game changer in anti-aliasing. And since we’re moving towards AI-based solutions (even FSR seems to be heading that way for version 4), we’re not likely to see temporal methods disappear anytime soon, especially with ray-tracing denoising, which is also temporal.
I recently played Star Wars Outlaws, which runs on Snowdrop, and all the GI and reflections are ray-traced. Even while playing in 4K with DLAA, it was blurry, whereas The Division 1 and 2 are sharp.
I also played Alan Wake 2 at launch with no RT, which doesn’t use Unreal but Remedy’s engine, and it was extremely demanding. I even had to play on balanced mode with frame generation to get a good framerate, especially when the screen was packed with particles and other effects. People talk about Unreal and its heaviness, but all engines are like that. Most games are becoming more and more demanding.
We can also add the Frostbite engine, which is extremely demanding on Dead Space Remake. Good luck running it at native 4K at 60fps, even with an RTX 4080.
Even Naughty Dog’s engine is incredibly heavy on PC it’s unbelievable.
You’re focusing on Unreal, but it’s no better elsewhere you just have to deal with it.