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Temporal AA is awfull - No good AA function in Unreal

Development Discussion Rendering
#1

Im just going to bring this up again, because it bothers me a lot.
No game can do without any good AA functions nowadays…
Unreal is getting a lot of awesome features, which is fine… but we never had any good AA functions, my whole game looks terrible with temporal AA, and MSAA or FXAA is ****.
A few days ago i was playing a game made in an old engine… using FXAA and all was looking fine!!!. when i use FXAA in unreal i get the most terrible AA visuals i have ever seen.
You have to fix this AA issue… this is getting ridiculous. everything looks as if we use a engine from the stone age. all jagged up… ghosting everywhere… and then you let us try to tweak it for better results… That is absolutely dis-respectful, these AA functions have to be in from the core.

Maybe focus a little bit less on all the cinematic stuff, and focus some more on game-engine… dont forget where you came from!.

So please… better AA functions… tbh… all of them… as it should be :wink:

#2

I posted about poor taa and some of the visual artefacts produced by post processing back in 2015 version 4.9!

While they may have improved somewhat and aren’t as glaringly obvious taa and pp is still poor in some settings. Especially for virtual reality which they had to come out with a solution like forward rendering and msaa. I think though that they should improve the main renderer aa as vr has for the last year or two been low priority and not everyone wants to give up features for vr. Everyone would benefit by improved aa.

#3

Seems they dont really care, unreal is slowly changing into a hollywood gadget instead of a decent game engine…

#4

Graphics were always the most overhyped aspect of UE4. Fancy tech demos focusing on a rock with 8k textures don’t mean anything if every games using UE4 look extremely dated and run poorly. I recently tried the Unigine 2 demo and I was so impressed with how clean and crisp it looks compared to Unreal, it doesn’t have this weird greasy look either. There’s like 4 GI systems packed in there, both baked and real time (ray traced GI, voxel, SSGI, and baked lighting too). The AA also looks amazing. They should do a realistic human demo too because my character looked absolutely gorgeous with their SSS shader. And don’t get me started with the performance, I was able to create absolutely massive scenes with solid 60 fps using two real time GI systems simultaneously.

EPIC are focusing on the wrong things, and are doing too many things at once. Now even Unity’s HDRP looks better than Unreal (especially shaders). This is due to Epic ignoring user requests for years. I still think UE4 is by far the best engine for usability, anyone can easily prototype the game of their dreams regardless of their skills (or lack thereof). But epic need to focus on game stuff. Unreal is a game engine, cinematic and arch vis stuff should not hinder the evolution of the game-related features.

UE4 needs:

  • Better AA

  • Real time GI that does not require ray tracing (look at this!)
    https://www.gdcvault.com/play/102646…l-Illumination

  • New default lit and foliage shaders to compete with Unity’s beautiful HDRP shaders

  • Better performance for real time lights

  • Fix transparency issues and performance

#5

I second this thread big time when it comes to AA, I’ve been waiting for a good AA solution for this engine since the very first release of UE4 when the engine was still costing $20/month !
Cryengine has a great SMAA T2x solution that you can see in Kingdom Come Deliverance, it’s not “perfect” but it’s a really great middle ground that does an efficient anti-aliasing pass while almost not destroying detail, and it’s very efficient too (1 or 2 frames lost max).

#6
  • tbh… i am quite far with a game, but a release without at least a good AA is out of the question, writing an AA on your own seems the only option.
    Which is weird if you work in a game engine lol
#7

So Epic… tell us… do we need to change engine to get what we want?.. other engines are delivering what ppl want or need…
Or can you give us some info that better things for games are coming… soon?

#8

While I agree that more options need to be exposed to make things more easily tunable - you need to bear in mind that the engine has to scale to a wide variety of projects.

It is unreasonable IMO to expect the default implementation of TAA to be perfectly tuned to your use-case. It’s also widely accepted now that people have to expect to dig in and make their own changes to better suit their needs. Most other engines don’t let you do that - and if you can’t do it yourself, you can almost certainly find someone who can.

Probably worth stating that a certain other popular engine also only has FXAA and TAA by default, and it’s TAA is nowhere near as good as Unreals IMO.

There are also third-party solutions you can consider implementing:

NVidia’s TXAA
Community Members SMAA

You can also super-sample natively, but obviously this is expensive and should be an option left up to the end user.

I suggest reading through this. It’s old but still relevant.

There’s also an age-old community thread here of people who have played with some simpler tuning values:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…AA=&viewfull=1

…really?

#9

I don’t think you are in the position to say that. random people like you are not the target audience for UE4.

#10

Temporal AA might be awful, but humanity hasn’t come up with something better.
The issue is not TAA, but the fact that it is the only meaningful AA available.

#11

We don’t get any problems with TAA with our settings. Default settings are bit too soft but I just changed them and its work perfectly.


r.TemporalAASamples=4
r.TemporalAACurrentFrameWeight=0.1

We also use normal curvature to roughness and baked normal map variance to roughness texture(Composite texture). On mobile we use MSAA4. What settings you are using and can you provide some video/screenshots.

#12

Fair enough :-)… what i do like about unreal is that its indeed open to any modification you like, but still i think some good non ghosting AA from the core would be very nice, just to support the game developers and their time / money.

Im going to give above options a try… thanx :wink:

-Edit
Any 4.20+ builds available with smaa or txaa ?

#13

I’ve been using those settings for some years now and they are indeed a good improvement, but still not ideal. with CurrentFrameWeight=0.1 any realistic vegetation that’s a few meters away starts to look very noisy.
I also enable Separable MotionBlur which makes TAA+MotionBlur slightly better, but it’s still problematic.

IIRC your game uses stylized graphics which is a good case for TAA (looks great btw)
in more realistic scenes specially with lots of “lines” (grass, plants, tree branches) or noisy textures (coarse sand, small rocks) the amount of ghosting is too heavy to bear. I recently made a prototype level with these assets and the ghosting caused by the ground textures and the noisy vegetation basically invalidated TAA as a solution.

TAA has come a long way with small improvements but at this point it’s still a “static screenshot” feature and not something that can be used everywhere

Edit: here –

bigger size: Imgur: The magic of the Internet - since I tried sharpening solutions on top you can see that the image’s blurriness vs sharpness is all over the place

#14

Game developers are supposed to be the target and guess what, I work in the industry. And please stop being so over defensive over valid critics shared by many people (including Maximum-Dev, ex-crytek employee who specializes with outdoors), I’m not bashing the engine here. I just want it to get better. And people who turn a blind eye over the engine’s well known issues are not making things any better.

Yes. Graphics are not the reason why I like unreal, ease of use and great tools is. As I said, tech demos are something, actual games are something completely different. I’m not talking about games taking place in small areas with bake lighting (which looks great in Unreal, no question about that), I’m talking about large games with outdoors. There’s something wrong about the way outdoors and foliage looks in Unreal. I highly suspect this is due to the diffuse models the engine uses by default (as well as the TAA that turns foliage into mush). I know there was a way to change the diffuse models but it’s not working anymore and there’s hardly any documentation about that.

#15

I saw something else as well with TAA… 2 different trees…one i found on the internet, and one i made in speedtree… the speedtree one gives all the blur with wind, the free one does not?.
I have no clue why that is, but i think some blur and ghosting can be resolved through textures.

#16

The material probably has “accurate velocities from vertex deformation” disabled. That needs to be enabled for materials using WPO-based animation so the material generates the motion vectors the TAA uses to find the previous frame samples.

#17

For all those saying that taa is bad only in realistic textured or asseted scenarios, i would like to see how a strategy game with hundreds of tiny units onscreen works with taa vs msaa. In my experience its been inferior very inferior.

i for one believe other engines dont expose their source code because most of the time they dont need to. The base is there just add and go and there is proof of this and yes ue only saving grace with its competitors is and only is its bp integration. Mark my words here gentlemen and see how the tides will shift once unity brings up their visual scripting.

#18

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that. Unreal is still a fantastic engine with unmmatched tools. It has it’s issues but what engine doesn’t after all. I just wish they’d focus more on years-old issues such as AA and transparency instead of fancy raytracing stuff.

#19

If you’re really curious take a look at Tropico 6, it’s UE4 so it’s only TAA vs FXAA (not MSAA).
I can’t say it’s inferior, it’s just better and worse in some things (like most all other UE4 TAA cases)

#20

MSAA is too expensive and doesn’t solve shader aliasing. See the PDF file I linked.