What's up with the dithering?

[Drib]

So first off, the game looks great in general. I really like the lighting engine in particular compared to previous versions.

But there's a weird amount of dithering, meaning like alternating/checkered pixels as part of effects. See the water spray around waterfalls. Why dithering? Feels like I'm back in the 90's.

Also half the surfaces in the game, if you have lumen on, either wobble constantly with weird lighting updates or have some kind of dithering static constantly buzzing over the surface. It's just a really odd look, and makes everything look.... faker.

I guess it'd make sense if there was some subplot about the pioneer being in a simulation or something, but since it's supposed to be a physical world, it feels like painted or brushed metal surfaces shouldn't be effectively showing me television static.

Is this just something on my system? Are other people seeing the same thing? It's not a huge deal but it's kind of distracting.

Edit: Well, there's a bit in the FAQ about white static, but that's not what i'm seeing. Might be related though, I guess i can try to update drivers.

[ThanatosX]

Probably not your drivers, noticed that sort of screen door on the water particles too. Is dithering the right name for that. I have DLSS on and set to AA only, that's about as good as I could get my game to look.

[Drib]

Dithering is the term that was used in the 90's to refer to that screen door effect when games used that to make another 'color' out of EGA's 16 or early VGA's 256 color limits.

I don't know if it's the correct term for this instance but it looks the same.

[ThanatosX]

It might be some legacy garbage from Unreal 4, not sure, haven't seen much Unreal 5 stuff yet. Particle effects are usually pretty compute expensive so it could be a choice.

[TH3R4BB!T]

Think that the 'upgrade' from UE4 to UE5 took more than they had time for and left a lot as is. The map itself look stunning, only the effects are a bit weird and outdated. Bit like Valve Source Engine when releasing HL2. Game also looks terribly optimized, if you float you see things on the map 'come and go' close and far away. Enemies (for me) pop-up really late, sometimes I suddenly face one spawning in front om me. Looks like there is much work still left for them to fix, but at the time it is all smooth.... most players already dropped the game

[Drib]

Originally posted by TH3R4BB!T:

Enemies (for me) pop-up really late, sometimes I suddenly face one spawning in front om me.

All the time. I land from my jetpacking, think "Hey, look, this HDD is undefended" then pop in two radioactive hogs or whatever, right in front of me.

Well, game is still fun, weird as it is.

[king_of_jamaica]

Dithering is used to save on memory bandwidth for alpha-tested textures/effects. It's also used in this and many other games for LoDs because fading something in dithered is generally preferable to things just blinking into existence 10m from the player.

As for the Lumen Fizzle as I'll call it, that's just an effect of the technology. Lumen lighting runs at a much lower resolution than the render resolution, and over multiple frames. Since it's doing that, it has to guess and then denoise everything other than what it actually calculates each frame. Only way to fix that would be to increase the resolution of the software RT that it uses, or use hardware RT. I don't think the game has any option to do either of those things. That said, at high enough res and framerate, that little bit of fizzle is more than worth it for the massive increase in lighting accuracy. I personally played at 1440p DLSS Quality, so 900p native, and I usually didn't have an issue with Lumen GI at the 90-130fps I was getting.

[TyCobb]

Originally posted by Drib:

Dithering is the term that was used in the 90's to refer to that screen door effect when games used that to make another 'color' out of EGA's 16 or early VGA's 256 color limits.

I don't know if it's the correct term for this instance but it looks the same.

It was mainly used because it allowed for some really great effects on CRTs and analog inputs. It's why a lot of effects in certain games look like complete crap on today's monitors and TVs.

Perfect example here if interested. Timestamped, but if it doesn't work, 5:13 is the comparison between digital and analog.

https://youtu.be/x0weL5XDpPs?t=323

[SternLX]

I keep Lumen turned off. It doesn't look like it was fully implemented with DLSS on.

[Sanddrinker]

I noticed the same thing, it looks awful and FPS performance around waterfalls is terrible for me. I have Nvidia with DLSS and Lumen enabled.