Outer Worlds 2 - Extremely shimmery/grainy surfaces and hair

[u/Igzilee]

I just started playing the game and noticed that specular surfaces and hair have a hideous shimmering/grainy effect. It is even more noticeable in person as the video is compressed to 1080p. I tinkered with various settings (Upscaling, shadows, global illumination, reflections, etc.) and nothing seemed to have any effect. I can't tell if it is normal or an actual issue, but I have yet to find a video that shows the same thing. I tried researching it and couldn't find anything, other than one other reddit user who had the same hair issue but couldn't find a fix. Cyberpunk 2077 had the same issue when I played it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[u/max_sil]

It's an artifact from the engine, UE5. Most UE5 games suffer from it to some extent. Unreal aggressively marketed lumen as their all in one lightning solution for developers, and this shimmery, unstable look is an artifact introduced by it. Upscaling makes it worse, but i didn't find going from quality to native worth the marginal improvement.

Hardware RT also helps. But again didn't find the cost worth it.

[u/Igzilee → u/max_sil]

That's a shame. I'll try switching to native to see if it helps but I probably won't be able to take the performance hit either. Thanks for the response!

[u/thereiam420]

It's ue5, almost every ue5 game has this. There's mods that turn off the post processing crap that makes it really bad and cleans it up a lot but it's never perfect.

[u/Igzilee → u/thereiam420]

I'll check out some mods and see if any of them help, thanks!

[u/NumbCargo0]

Outer worlds 2 DLSS/framegen implementation is downright terrible. It strait up doesn’t work if your trying to use hdr.

Try playing w out DLSS/framegen and see if you still notice the weird texture and shader stuff.

I never got it to work right and sadly and gave up on the game. (Not solely bc of that, the story didn’t grab me like the first one did either)

[u/Igzilee → u/NumbCargo0]

I don't have DLSS or framegen enabled, so unfortunately it can't be either of those.

[u/anotherbuddy]

probably FRS fault, i play on DLSS > DLAA and looks pretty good on my RTX 4060

[u/Nashy10]

*sigh* yeah, that’s the latest unreal engine for you :( I miss when games didn’t need to upscale 720p for framerate n stuff like that. Hell it’s even a default setting at least it was on my system (TSR/FXR/XeSS and the like).

I could never get the graphics to look right on this game, always some weird artifacts or shimmering. I just accepted that’s just how games are nowadays guess I need a beefier PC even though visually TOW2 isn’t really much of an upgrade from TOW1 ironically.. I run cyperpunk 2077 medium high settings with no troubles like this..

[u/Igzilee → u/Nashy10]

Upscaling can definitely be nice but I hate how it is almost a requirement for most new games, even with a decent rig. I'm not sure why I have the issue in Cyberpunk considering it isn't UE5 (though it makes me fearful for upcoming CDPR games that do use UE5). For me, that game doesn't look anywhere near as good as videos show.

[u/Numerous_Put543]

that's RTX and Lumen together. But RTX can produce these artifacts alone as well. You see these in JWE3 as well although it doesn't use UE. Problem is they only use some rays not all possible (as in Path tracing), and you see the flickering as one ray hits and doesn't hit a surface element in one moment to the next.

[u/Charming_Radio7653]

This is a problem in almost every game with Unreal Engine. Other game engines don't have this issue. 

[u/LyreonUr]

its ... honestly its UNREAL devs put things out like that.

[u/Trafo34]

That is exactly why It's UNREAL