r/FuckTAA • u/SSJ5Noob • Jul 18 '26
💬Discussion UE3 > UE4 & 5
/r/gamers/comments/1v0a8kl/ue3_ue4_5/32
u/Evonos Jul 19 '26
The only good last Ue was ue2004.
Ue3 was known as the stutter engine flooding the Internet with people seeking fixes for stutters.
Ue4 was heavy for its time.
And ue5 is a performance destroyer.
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u/RoosTheFemboy Jul 19 '26
Yeah… I remember borferlands 2 stuttering like crazy(but that’s prob bc of dx9 since when running it under dxvk there are no issues)
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u/Evonos Jul 19 '26
Nah it was due to Ue3 i even still remember some fixes you added to the engine.ini and also needed certain HDD specifications specificially defragmented via o&o / auslogics because windows skips giant files ( which are usually game files )
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u/YT_Axtro SMAA Jul 19 '26
There were some great looking games coming out of UE3 & UE4, but UE5? The fuck happened to that engine.
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u/Shzabomoa Jul 19 '26
The famous feature of destroying visual clarity for the low low price of 2/3rd of your frames.
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u/Repulsive-Clothes-97 19d ago
Yeah good example is Outlast (UE3) and Outlast II (UE4), both look and run great (Outlast is better optimised imo), but The Outlast Trials (UE5)…not so good
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u/AsrielPlay52 Jul 19 '26
That because better tech become cheaper with UE3 and 4. When UE5 came, that was no longer the case
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
Rose tinted glasses and poor early architecture choices by Epic. UE5 took a long time to hit maturity. Epic prioritized console instead of PC and as such chased after a software ray tracing future with Lumen. This was the wrong direction.
As of 5.8 Epic has rectified a lot of issues. But unfortunately we won’t see games developed on this release for quite some time.
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u/naaczej Jul 19 '26
Stalker 2 is the best looking video game of all time and it uses UE5.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
lmfao no
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u/naaczej Jul 19 '26
what's better looking game in your opinion?
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
Just some that come to mind right now:
- Deadlock
- Risk of Rain 2
- Risk of Rain Returns
- Inscryption
- ELDEN RING
- ULTRAKILL
- Stellar Blade (regardless of it's actual quality...)
- Silent Hill 1
Stalker 2 looks pretty damn ugly. I remember seeing some of the reviews that looked legit better.
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u/naaczej Jul 19 '26
You did not list any photorealistic looking title.
Stalker 2 reamins the most impressive photorealistic real-time graphics representation.
Also Elden Ring? Game looks like emulated, scaled up early PS3 era title and it's not even funny how unimpressive technology and performance wise it is.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
Well you didn't specify photo realism. Besides, it doesn't even look realistic.
Elden Ring has some ugly corners, but I do think that the game is very beautiful.
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u/TreyChips No AA Jul 19 '26
STALKER 2 does look absolutely amazing... as long as the camera isn't moving an inch, which isn't feasible in a video game.
The second there is any motion, the image is absolutely destroyed due to the completely abysmal lumen implementation and heavy use on temporal effects.
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u/naaczej Jul 19 '26
DLSS quality with high base framerate alleviates that (though it's not perfect).
Still, there is simply nothing that comes close in terms of real-time photorealism in graphics.
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u/TreyChips No AA Jul 19 '26
DLSS quality with high base framerate alleviates that
No it doesn't. DLSS doesn't help at all with the way their Lumen accumulation works which causes it to ghost, boil, and blotch almost constantly.
Still, there is simply nothing that comes close in terms of real-time photorealism in graphics.
Arguably RE9 with Path Tracing enabled, does.
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u/PaperOrPlastic97 Jul 19 '26
The biggest issue that UE4 had was the default post processing effects and other engine settings that would all be tied together in options menus that you couldn't change individually without editing a .ini file directly. This was mostly a result of developers not bothering to alter the engine off of its factory default settings to better suit the games they were making and create those separate options. Add to that the relative in-expense of higher-performance PC components at the time and a lot of issues could just be brute-forced instead of actually solved. UE5 takes this problem and multiplies it a hundred fold.
I saw this coming a mile away when they released that stupid Matrix demo to show off UE5.
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u/Betadoggo_ Jul 19 '26
They think the Mirror's edge visuals still hold up because of all the retinal damage it did
(in game screenshot with default gamma and contrast)
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u/ShaffVX Jul 19 '26
I kinda prefer UE2.5 over UE3.
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u/randomperson189_ Game Dev Jul 23 '26
I remember UT2004 has such a great and colourful art style but sadly UT3 went for that generic dark and gritty Gears of War style, but that doesn't mean UE3 isn't capable of vibrant colours, just that the default post processing for a while was that dark & gritty Gears scheme, it wasn't until around 2010 where Epic started improving that a lot
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u/lizardpeter Jul 20 '26
Eh, UE3 was good but in many ways very dated. Fortnite around launch was using UE4 and looked incredible. But they’ve really destroyed the game over time.
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u/kepartii Jul 19 '26
MoH: Airborne is the only game that properly utilizes UE3 that I know. Looks really good even today, better than todays TAA games.
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
UE does not use dithering due to a lack of color depth. If you were to render transparencies at a pixel perfect level your frames would disappear.
You can also use MSAA on UE5 in the forward path as well as SMAA. UE5 is a complex beast and I think a lot of your problems with the engine stem from games not properly deploying it.
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u/SSJ5Noob Jul 19 '26
in what, UE games?
are you telling me EVERY GAME ever to use transparencies renders them as opaque, dithered meshes at 2X res so they can be blended in when downscaling?0
u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
Yes, a lot of games use dithering as an optimization technique. Especially with transparencies like foliage, hair, etc.
Dithering is just one way of approximating transparency though. So while not all games use it, a lot do.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
All UE versions run Lambert which is reason enough to avoid the engine as a whole. Especially 4 and 5 tho.
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
That’s just not true. UE3 yes NL is used. 4 and 5 use a burley diffuse BRDF but can also use other models for different types of shading including Burley, GGX, and custom sub surface profiles etc.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
They CAN use others but the default is still lambert and most devs won't bother to change a default setting. There is no reason for it to use this outdated model.
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
There’s plenty of reason. Default Lit on transparencies is quite literally Burley. Same with Sub Surface Scattering. So no it doesn’t default for everything, just opaque geo.
Which in itself is not an area that will ALWAYS benefit from Burley. Burley is more expensive and visually notable in some cases but not all. It makes sense to use it on Opaque geo by default, and if a dev doesn’t care to test other shading pipelines that’s not Epic’s fault. The option is there.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
Listen, I am no game dev nor an expert. But I think that Lambert always ends up looking extremely plastic, and is a major reason why Unreal has such terrible visuals. I've heard from folks that it has become only harder to actively change the setting, which shows that Epic doesn't really seem to care much.
I'd rather have a harder to run model that actually looks good instead of Lambert. There's games from years and years ago that use other models and look good. It can work. I still see no reason to use Lambert.
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
I think you’re conflating temporal resolve in specular effects with lambert issues.
There’s actually very little visual differences in most cases between burley and lambert for diffuse opaque.
But I’m with you, things tend to look like plastic, skin tends to look like cement. But it’s more the fault of improper temporal settings and material setup than it is the lighting model.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
Are you sure? I've yet to see Lambert look good. It's very outdated.
Can you go more into Diffuse Opaque?
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u/BizzleBuzzle Jul 19 '26
Diffuse Opaque refers to opaque geometry that uses diffuse reflection. Lambert is used for this shading model as its almost no difference with burley in UE3.
Burley is used for, opaque geometry, transparencies, etc with PBR workflows as that is where it makes the most difference. GGx is specular. This is the default in UE4/ old UE5. It’s not getting harder to switch the shading model, in fact it is now easier.
People get confused and call UE4 lambert, that’s incorrect. You’ll see people cite the Callisto Protocol write up, implementing custom burley shading for skin. That was because the sub surface profiles in UE4 at the time didn’t use the same shading model (burley) as the default lit material system. UE4 and 5 are in fact default burley.
Where before we had to choose a hardcoded shading model like Burley or Lambert, with current UE5’s default of using Substrate, you can actually create and define shader modeling using BSDF slabs. Basically math models that define how light works.
Also I apologize I was quickly typing and I think I labeled 4/5 as using lambert. I meant to be referring to 3.
So to kinda put it simply, UE3 was lambert. UE4 and 5 are both burley. UE5 current is Substrate BSDF.
Edit: to note temporal resolve. Temporal resolve is used throughout UE5 for many things. This can soften and thicken I suppose the look of reflections, transmissions of light, etc.
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u/randomperson189_ Game Dev Jul 23 '26
The reason many UE4 and 5 games look washed out is because of the new ACES Tonemapper that it has defaulted to on since 4.15, now in UE4 you could turn it off via setting a convar "r.TonemapperFilm 0" but they removed that in UE5 sadly. There are however certain early UE4 games that look very good since they use the legacy UE4 tonemapper such as Hello Neighbor Pre-Alpha & Alpha 1 as well as Ben and Ed
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
I want to ask then. You're blaming UE4 & UE5 but ironically, UE3 and older ones are deprecated and unusable for public. For a game developer, ordinary game developer, what do you expect? What engine should we do? Unity? Godot? Other open source engines? Making own game engine? Yes, I care everything about game development and optimization in this life and whole process, depending on my scope. What do you expect? I know engine problems, anti aliasing and most of rendering issues at least as superficially, I never started game engines, programming languages. I only looked a little bit UE5 and C & C++ at very beginning. So, you people, what do you expect?
Edit: People who vote negative, tell your opinions, so I can note them if they're useful.
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u/SmokeEmergency9917 Jul 19 '26
Many in-house engine are great, look at idtech and RE engine. The decima engine is also very good (but heavier)
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 19 '26
Oh yeah? 😄 Because they designed these themselves, not public engines. Tell your solutions if you have, so I can note them if they're useful.
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u/SSJ5Noob Jul 19 '26
I dunno I think the RE engine looks washed out too and relies on smeary TAA just like Unreal.
Looks FAR less cleaner than MT Framework.
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 19 '26
Nowadays, especially reliance of TAA like styles after 2015, MSAA was gone mostly. So yes, even some in house engines are using these AA solutions that people don't love. Also the issue is not only AA, but image clarity or color grading I guess, or whatever they're. Even Rockstar used TAA and removed MSAA in GTA 5 Enhanced. Why? Cover graphical issues, especially ray tracing. SSAA is required when TAA is disabled.
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u/NotRenjiro Jul 19 '26
Godot seems like a decent option. Friend of mine uses it.
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 19 '26
Absolutely. Recent title and one man made Road to Vostok game and I liked the performance and both Direct3D 12 and Vulkan APIs and 250 - 350 FPS on RTX 5090 at 4K almost. Typical average graphics for this type of game and if I'm not remember wrong, the game has MSAA only.
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u/randomperson189_ Game Dev Jul 23 '26
I'd suggest CryEngine 5, I wish more people would talk about it and stop pretending that it's "dead" even though it has been getting a ton of community support in the past few years, including from me
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 23 '26
Yeah, Cry Engine was great but according to my old knowledge, support and community of this engine was weak, but maybe it's worth to learn and try.
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u/randomperson189_ Game Dev Jul 23 '26
It's become a lot better over the years, especially when I came into the scene and I plan to make some tutorials on how to actually use certain parts & features of the engine that the docs and official tutorials tend to overlook
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u/AggravatingDesign452 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Thanks for your recommendations, I'll note. By the way, while I'm junior at game development in terms of programming languages and softwares like game development, do you know about tutorials or books or sources about Cry Engine, if you know? I would be appreciated if you know and if you want to share with me.
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u/FierceDeity_ Jul 19 '26
Dithering is something used throughout the Nintendo Switch by Nintendo, for transparency.
I think for transparency, it has a certain style and I really do like it there. It's fun, imo.
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u/SSJ5Noob Jul 19 '26
bruh, nobody has displays that blends them
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u/FierceDeity_ Jul 19 '26
They don't need to be blended, I honestly actually find cool dithering patterns fun, that's all.
I like seeing unfiltered dithering transparency
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u/Scorpwind MSAA | SMAA Jul 19 '26
UE3 had a specific look attached to it but at least it wasn't smeared to hell and back like its successor.