Hello, In Unreal Engine 5, there’s dithering in everything translucent: Volumetric Cloud, Sky Atmosphere, Niagara particles, Water, Hair and, of course, all transparent or non-opaque materials.
Why? Is it for performance?
Because visually, it created a lot of ugly visual artefacts. With the massive use of Screen Percentage/Dynamic Resolution localized with Temporal Upscale combined with temporal anti-aliasing like TSR, ugly visual artefacts are even more numerous and coarse, not to mention the lack of fluidity felt with permanent ghosting despite an artificially high fps rate.
My beautiful engine which is the most beautiful
Unreal 5.2|3|+ renders more beautifully than the engines of 2023 games
Why? Lumen and most modern lighting is differed. Differed lighting has some benefits but the major con is transparencies cost a huge amount of performance.
Dithering combined with TAA and TSR can create realist transparencies.
Note: I’m pretty sure DLSS and FSR use TAA
So back to your question.
Why it on Volumetric Clouds = because they can be partially transparent
Why it on Sky Atmosphere = because they can be partially transparent
Why it on Water = because they can be partially transparent
Hair, Foliage and Trees = dither on these is honestly stupid in my opinion.
Old School Forward rendering opinion:
Forward rendering & MSAA looks way better
requires much much more work
main easy lighting solution is baked lighting
doesn’t require dithering, TAA or TSR}
transparency is cheap
I realize this is an older post but since lumen has not been fixed as of this moment still feel like a good topic for discussion.
PS: found this trying to find solutions to Lumen in expedition 33 without using TAA/TSR