Pixel shader too blurry

Development Rendering
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1

I want to create a pixel effect for my game and I’ve hit a roadblock. I set these variables in DefaultEngine.ini as the picture shows.

DefaultEngine_ini_screenshot
DefaultEngine_ini_screenshot529×196 42 KB

This works to a degree, as you can see in the image below:

ProblemPhoto
ProblemPhoto1018×825 80.5 KB

But upon zooming in, it becomes obvious that there is some kind of anti-aliasing effect happening. By contrast here is the same effect using the popular post-processing method:

ProblemPhoto2
ProblemPhoto21018×825 129 KB

The pixels are sharp, but it creates other problems. As I understand it, this approach is less performant because the engine has to render the world at full resolution anyways. And the other issue is that the pixels are rectangles and not squares.

tl;dr - Can anyone help me find a way to properly set ScreenPercentage without blurring the pixels?

2

SOLUTION:

I’m not entirely sure what was wrong with my original approach but I have found a new method that has solved my issues.

Adding these three lines and nothing more to the “DefaultEngine.ini” file is enough to produce the pixelation effect inside the play-in-editor.

r.AntiAliasingMethod=0
r.ScreenPercentage=15
r.Upscale.Quality=0

It’s important to note that this change does not fully apply to the editor viewport which is likely what caused me so much confusion.

3

Are they only visible in the final game ?

And do you see a big performance increase using a very low native resolution ? And also not using any antialiasing maybe also adds some performance ?

4

this is not about performance really, but the retro/pixel look. but yes… this runs extremely low on resources.

notes: you should tweak motion blur to really low values. disable any form of temporal technique to get a stable image or you gotta add filmgrain to compensate the temporal noise. otherwise you cannot use megalights or lumen. raytracing shadows and translucency works but you gotta set light source radi and angles to 0. and area lights create a dither effect. looks nice tho. i tried this pixel look in the past aswell. didn’t look that great, back then. : )

5

I thought with maybe a really low resolution, and zero overhead from AA, you could push maybe some cray amount of details, maybe even on smartphones. Like in these pics, which true, they are not about low resolution but mostly voxel art.

image
image1213×766 555 KB

image
image451×501 169 KB

6

i don’t think that highres voxel art gonna work on mobile devices (atleast mine doesn’t do that and doesn’t need to do that - it’s some old pvr gpu). and/but… this is not about high voxel resolution, but good old retro downscale. pixel art. wrong tree, doggo.

7

Maybe the above picture was not the best example. I meant to ask if one could push lots of polygons with a low resolution like 320 * 240. I mean just because you want the pixelated look, it does not mean you want low details, low poly as well.
As far as I know, today mobile phones have a high resolution, but I guess you could also render with a very low res as well.

8

well… you don’t want to or don’t need lots of polygons to fill a low amount of pixels. there’s no point to compute 200 vertices/polygons to fill a just 64 pixel tile. doing math… the amount of vertices you need to fill 320x240 is just roughly 20k if you give it a quad (2x2) pixel raster.