fair enough, taa is not a great fit for these games and doesn't bring any benefits unless you also create a detailed normalmapped texture pack, but lumen requires temporal accumulation for dedithering. resolution scaling is optional.
TAA is not a great fit for any game and is an industry-wide mistake that we will all look back on in 10 years as a blunder that never looked good.
If you are an artist and you think the current rendering technology produces good results, then I highly suggest a change of career.
the alternative is having basically no highlights at all, but this is tweakable.
Are we really at a state in the industry where the only options are shitty looking overbearing lights, or nothing? What happened to subtlety? Old games managed to have very good looking lighting (both baked and dynamic), including highlights, without any bloom at all, let alone HDR. Are you seriously telling me that it's not possible to have something that has highlights and looks good without completely overprocessing the shit out of it?
I know it's a controversial opinion, but I think UE1 looks better overall than UE5 because of this.
probably the safest opinion you can have on this website
I think the general hatred for how bad modern games look goes well beyond the reach of this site. I have presented this opinion in many places, and always been met with support. People are fed up with how crappy games look now, and look back to how crisp and nice older games look.
i think that's just down to really bad compression combined with questionable post-processing. i suspect the creator of that video has a toaster and is running at sub-native resolution at 1080p, cause it doesn't look like it's a full 60fps.
You think this garbage would look better without being compressed?
Is the blurriness a baked in feature of UE5 or is it something devs are adding? Is it literally impossible to get sharp visuals on modern engines?
Old games that don't have ever present blur are so much more visually attractive.
TAA and sharpening were basically added to enable anti-aliasing on deferred-rendering engines like Unreal. It was done for performance reasons and because deffered-rendering engines can't do proper AA. Then, a few years later, artists collectively deluded themselves into thinking it looks good, so they don't put in any effort to work around it or hide it in clever ways that downplay TAA's faults, making the blur much worse.
Deferred-rendering became the standard because you can push more polygons due to it being very slightly more efficient than traditional forward rendering techniques. So in our endless quest for better graphics, we've completely undermined graphics.
Deferred rendering looks bad in every single game it's used in, but for some reason, it seems to be 10,000 times worse in unreal. The TAA in Doom Eternal, for instance, causes far less rendering artifacts than your typical unreal engine game, my guess is that the generic "one size fits all" solution in Unreal has none of the techniques to try and obfuscate or hide the rendering issues caused by TAA and other nonsense, which is why it looks so much worse in Unreal.
Forward-Rendering is essentially deprecated in Unreal now, so it's practically impossible to make a game that isn't a blurry mess. This is why I recommend developers
actively avoid using Unreal for your projects, and it's why I don't purchase or play games made using Unreal Engine 4 or 5. Any game with a "resolution scale" setting is an instant no-buy because it's literally impossible for any of them to look good under any circumstances - even when rendering at the native resolution - because worthless "image enhancing" (read: image ruining) techniques like dedithering, sharpening, and DLSS are always active no matter what - that's the nature of the Unreal (and other modern engine) graphics pipelines. They are literally built entirely around scaling and sharpening the image in lieu of proper anti-alising, and handling features like reflection purely in screen-space (which is why reflections in Unreal games look so weird, and also why none of them have mirrors) because deferred rendering prevents these things from happening at their proper place in the image rendering process, so they have to be done as post-processing effects instead, which only ever results in horrible blur and other image degredation. This performance "compromise" means it's practically impossible to make anything that doesn't look terrible in any modern engine that has drunk the image-scaling post-processing kool aid, at least not without completely rewriting the graphics pipeline - which would essentially mean creating your own engine anyway, defeating the purpose of using an off-the-shelf engine in the first place and WAY out of scope for most indie and even AAA projects.
Being eye-catching was the only thing AAA gaming has had going for it for over a decade now. If the industry doesn't change course immediately and adopt older, more tried-and-true rendering techniques, I fear they may shoot themselves in the foot so hard that they collapse and take the whole industry with them. Normies are starting to notice how bad it's gotten. My roommate only plays CoD, FIFA, and other low-quality garbage on his XBOX and he told me yesterday he's noticed the image quality has gone to shit.
I know people shit on Unity, because of the whole CEO debacle a few years ago, and because it's generally declining in quality with every version, but it remains the only popular engine on the market right now that supports both forward-rendering and proper baked lighting, doesn't rely on resolution scaling and other horrible hacky workarounds to have a fast and efficient render pipeline, and gives full control over the entire render pipeline, so it's your best choice if you want to make something efficient that actually looks good. Unreal heavily leans on a black box (Lumen) to do it's wacky dynamic and mixed lighting techniques, which is why everything looks overly bright, why Unreal games run like ass, and why every single game made in Unreal has a day-night cycle, since you effectively get it for free because everything is so reliant on dynamic lighting.
TL:DR
ALL Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games look like shit. They will always look like shit and the engine is designed in such a way that it's literally impossible for them to not look like shit. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn't know what they are talking about, is lying, or works for Epic and is actively trying to sell you their terrible engine.
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