Subpar VR rendering quality compared to other engines.

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
1

In many UE VR games I see very poor visual quality, like if everything is lower ress and with jagged edges. As far as I recall only ADRIFT looks good. Is this because of deffered rendering and TAA which should be solved with the new forward renderer and MSAA?

2

Whole Oculus dreamdeck looks gorgeous and it’s made with UE4…

3

Actually, Oculus used a custom implementation of forward rendering for Dreamdeck. You can learn more about it out here:

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/introducing-the-oculus-unreal-renderer/

4

Few things:

  • Until 4.13.1 Unreal Engine did not support Forward Shading, and until 4.14.0 Preview 1 it did not support MSAA, which allows rendering sharper, pixel-perfect edges in VR than FXAA or Temporal AA does (for the price of performance, but it’s being offset by the next point). (ps. There’s a branch made by unity with forward rendering, but noone I know of chose to use it simply due to lack of any support for it from Unity and the number of features they removed to make it work, so everyone waited for Epic Games own implementation into the UE)
  • Games in Unity in most cases have cartoon graphics (eg. Lab, Accounting, Job Simulator) or have clearly defined edges (eg. Budget Cuts, InMind, Pierhead Arcade) which significantly helps with clarity. Devs in Unreal Engine tend to prefer much more detailed, rich models and envoirements (eg. Raw Data, Gunjack, ADR1FT) which makes them look less clear.
  • Unreal engine offers extremely easy access to various expensive shaders and effects, so pretty much everyone use them all over the place. As a result you get lower performance for something that oftentimes could be done in a cheaper way without sagnificant losses in quality. Also keep in mind that indies rarely focus on things like clarity or performance - they focus on having a title to show and sell. Whichever engine by default makes it look clearer and perform better will naturally hold an upper hand in these two aspects.
  • Only engine you can really compare with UE is Unity. VR games that use other engines (eg. Serious Sam VR) have a large, professional studios backing them, as a result they can achieve things not comparable with vast majority of UE or Unity games - indies
5

MSAA is not great for outdoor scenes with lots of foliage though so if you are looking to make a Zelda type RPG forget about using it.

7

thanks, that clears things up a bit. it’s also the general impression i had but wasn’t sure.

8

Yea. With alot of foliage, using FXAA or TAA is the better option. MSAA is amazing for lots of geometric detail.