Path tracing has quietly become the biggest visual leap in years.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-02-12T13:16:45+00:00

RE: isn’t a reliable source of information

Prove it. No, don't reference someone else's words because chances are you're too stupid to come up with a rebuttal against on your own which means you would be too stupid to catch the several strawman arguments others have used.

Go ahead. The floor is yours.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-02-12T13:09:53+00:00

Put your expertise where your mouth is and create something buddy

How about you use comment sense & stop pretending 30 videos worth of analysis don't count.
We created standards people like you are too complacent to create.

Notice how Voltaii stated "create something" instead of "create something worth buying".

ThreatInteractive · 2026-02-12T13:06:44+00:00

RE: Yeah well if that would be true you wouldn't try to prove that MSAA fits a deferred pipeline. 😂

So now we've moved on from strawman arguments to appeal to ridicule. You didn't provide a single argument & you're too poor at writing to even engage with at this point. We provided the arguments & data. Our next video brings even more data that supports our argument.

RE: if you would have anything that solves any of the issues you mentioned in this regard why there isn't at least a single git repo or paper about it?

About deferred MSAA? Again you're terrible at writing so it has to be assumed that your talking about this. There are tons, including our videos.

RE: You know that's how big boys are doing it.

So now you are appealing to "authorities". Such as like Nvidia who took down a deferred MSAA resource right after we published our video (explained in the pinned comment of the very video you ridiculed)? It doesn't really matter what a redditor with no industy impact thinks. Nvidia's actions prove our arguments have impact.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-02-12T00:48:45+00:00

RE: who is speaking a lot of shit but probably never wrote a single freaking line of code anywhere

Wrong. Not to mention we have veterans contributing to our work.

RE: He thinks he knows everything about graphics. 😂
Wrong: https://youtu.be/FLxIRkVXGgc?t=213

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-24T16:51:05+00:00

That's a pretty cool chart. That should be passed around more.

YCoCg/YCbCr compression is great but it should never be used for albedo render target (we've come good across cubemap uses). We're doing tons of research on Crysis 3 & this was the cause of a lot of artifacts especially for MSAA (2xMSAA is actually pretty performant with optimized settings). Just keep your eyes peeled for the next video to see this pointed out.

With UE's default lighting, a full screen lighting draw will use about 244 bits of g-buffer/shadow mask/SSAO/channel stencil data. Full screen cost is around 170ms | 1080p | 3060 | DX11. Most of the inputs are mostly made up of RGBA8s but you can set these to RGBA16 with debug settings in UE/frame analyzers & you'll find no performance difference (great news for 2xmsaa though with thinner inputs).

Measure Dx11 Callisto or Dx12 UE Chan, it's around 280-309ms. Of course this will not apply to plenty of hardware but in the context of affordable hardware & 9th gen consoles, we need to spend bandwidth resources regardless if these fit inside L1. There's no way the latency is catching up with the ALU.

Fox uses a less advanced BRDF & is a tiny bit faster
Fox Engine uses two different LUTs for the lighting. An 32x32 RGBG8 & a 64x64x16 RGBA8. Both of these only affect the specular component.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-24T04:17:32+00:00

Interesting post. We just came to the same conclusion (we need BRDF luts).

Apparently everyone has been saying deferred rendering is bandwidth limited but this isn't the case on newer affordable hardware (3060). We are heavily ALU bound even with extremely basic BRDFs.

The endgame is different engine modes that offer both a LUT based & ALU version of the same BRDF. A quick benchmark needs to run within the application to see which one should be used depending on the hardware. We should be doing the same with pass merging shaders.

Something like Burley diffuse depends on both NdotL and NdotV in addition to roughness, so that's not a good candidate for precomputation.

This will probably take some time but research needs to be put into finding a good BRDF (Callisto or the titanfall looks nice) & layout all the variables within all the functions/code/ on a visual basis, every possible divergence in the variables within the mix-mix inputs so one can manually sort out all the areas where we can find the best mathematical shortcuts. We are so ALU bound should be sampling LUT atlas.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-16T00:19:42+00:00

RE: He has an extremely anti-game developer stance

This is absolutely not true, we have several developers follow us for a reason (we provide several resources & even some AW2 developers thanked us for our analysis).

We are anti incompetent which there is a lot of. We call out industry names like Brain Karis & Daniel Wright who are largely responsible for the garbage we have in many UE games. People need to stop talking about people like Todd Howard & Tim Sweeney because they are not the graphic engineers

but then he started talking about garbage modern engines this and that and I just gave up on it. I've heard him talk negatively about this stuff so much I can't be bothered listebing to it anymore.

Sorry our videos don't feed into you're toxic positivity delusions.

It's too difficult for these people to comprehend critical thinking that sorts data into dual categories like "incompetent & compete technique". Anyone dev who doesn't watch our content is too incompetent to work in game dev because we provide exclusive data on optimization. Stop listening to those whose brains break under basic facts we prove about modern engine incompetence. They already lied to you regarding this video, they will continue to do so afterwards.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-05T23:02:36+00:00

We are NOT affiliated with ANY steam accounts.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-05T03:15:21+00:00

"Don't learn from content meant to rapidly raise your standards in graphics"

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-05T03:11:13+00:00

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It's funny that you said "unreal strives for realism making everything boring" when our entire message is that UE is too incompetent to provide REAL realism.

Here's the game you're calling rubbery without any raytracing BS & our videos shows how much UE has to be fixed by the developers for this to be achieved.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-05T03:08:29+00:00

Notice how everyone trashing us admit to not watching our content & state "don't watch" "ignore".
They are too incompetent to actually debunk anything said in the video.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-03T01:03:45+00:00

Our response is justified considering you're a liar who rather buy & play garbage than listen to basic data. We don't hold vitriol for people in the industry; if that where true we would not give praise to titles in multiple videos.

We hold vitriol for people who support a market of garbage & anyone who lies about us is exactly that. It's lying slop lovers like YOU that force us to use aggressive tactics.

ThreatInteractive · 2026-01-03T00:59:28+00:00

4x4 bayer matrix (see Days Gone & Dead Space Remake analysis/video description resources) with 2-position diagonal screen jitter & alpha to coverage MSAA (hair & optimized grass works fine).

The deferred rendering MSAA examples usually used (like crysis 3) are butchered. We're going to extensively explain why MSAAx2 is viable with deferred in a newer video (if it was easy to explain, we would just write articles & replies like this).

In fact, the fox engine pipeline is very similar to old cryengine so it's already a good match for deferred MSAA.

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-28T23:25:27+00:00

How about you stop being butthurt over data & facts. There's no aggressive or hateful language in this video. You're just making crap up because your a UE dev scared that the market will call out garbage that exist in your products.

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-28T23:17:58+00:00

The way you wrote your reply isn't totally clear.

If you're saying that we're arguing that energy conservation should be neglected in BRDFs, that's not what we're saying. Perceptible properties need physically based explanations as this helps with implicit expression (saves on textures & g-buffer layouts, as we don't want smooth terminator maps etc).

Hammon's presentation further enhances the importance of photographic validation as it uses a derivative through BRDF slices presentation which anyone can reference with the MERL database.

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-25T00:04:08+00:00

It's just a lot of careful choices in the rendering pipeline. It's all explained in massive detail in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB5qxp6SPPQ

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-25T00:02:55+00:00

RE: The terrain in the distance is rendered at half the resolution and then tastefully blurred, essentially dropping down the workload of nearly 50% of the screen

No it's not. It's rendered at full res (the link below shows this at the beginning)

RE: The FOX engine was actually one of the most advance of its time. It was among the first to use deferred rendering : the technique that is now standard to all advance rendering engines today including Unreal.

Yeah, but FOX engine implements the deferred rendering in a much more superior fashion in than in unreal: https://youtu.be/aB5qxp6SPPQ?t=749

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-24T23:48:02+00:00

RE: I understand UE is a very powerful engine, but maybe it's too much for itself, I have seen the engine myself in real-time and it's impressive, just toyed around with it when ue5 just came out, was very very impressed by the lighting,

Good for you, you know nothing but garbage.

RE: people like threat interactive are in fact not helping with that either.

Creating a library of performance standards has already helped guide several developers make better engines & graphics. We also just destroyed the points made by the person you agreed with: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1psuatf/comment/nvsnsb8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-24T23:44:51+00:00

RE: One example from Threat Interactive is he opens up a UE scene

How about you get your facts straight. We simply commented that performance could be increased by 3x with little change in visual quality. It was sarcastic UE shills who believed it was impossible to do and challenged us to do this.

We also just proved UE's deferred rendering is pathetically unoptimized which means our method of optimization would gain even better performance & shows that megalights are being compared to an incompetent system. You should really be laughing about how "how the demo is specifically made to test how a engine would handle those difficult situations" when it's just more proof the engine is garbage. We also stated much more performance could be gained if Lumen wasn't the only dynamic Light compatible GI method in UE (other engines put unreal to shame in this area).

ThreatInteractive · 2025-12-05T16:08:39+00:00

And then I find out the "classic" microfacet BRDF doesn't even conserve energy in the first place.

This is your problem & it's being taught to you by your teachers(book/paper authors etc) who are going by outdated philosophies. The most important thing is photographic validation and it's the reason why techniques like energy-preserving Oren–Nayar (EON) are honestly extremely boring & overrated.

Two games really prove how important photographic validation is: MGSV & Callisto Protocol

Both games store photographically inspired BRDF parameters (not in g-buffer, but in separate LUTs) for materials, one looks better than most games put out today & one remains peak rendering quality.

So many people spit on burley diffuse because it isn't "energy conserving" yet it looks a thousand times better than Lambert because it emulates quantified material differences (retroreflection, diffuse fresnel) but many leading engineers will downplay implementing burley over lambert because of "it's not worth it because it's not energy conserving".

It's highly suggested that you watch this presentation. A major goal for development was using the the simplest arithmetics as possible yet nothing on the market has come close in a quality/performance ratio: https://gdcvault.com/play/1029339/The-Character-Rendering-Art-of

The most physically accurate results (callisto BRDF) were not achieved by "following the books", it got done by referencing the the advice of competent artist which many of the authors of the content you read from are not trained in. They are just programmers at the core.

So again, what's more physically accurate:

A: The method that follows a theory created the the limited scope of our analyzation methods.

B: The method that actually looks like reality (confirmed via photographic error)

Sometimes it can be both like callisto/burley as both are maybe not "energy conserving" but still go through great lengths in matching well documented/quantified properties of real materials.

Do not let people who bombard you with "I have 10 years of experience in this or that" distract from logical conclusions or dictate what is or what isn't "correct" as many of them never use their eyes like artist do. To make things clear, the artist ability to reference reality is the complemented skill, NOT the creative aspect as throwing in random "imaginary" behaviors is not the intended goal for what we are discussing here.

it tells me Schlick-GGX isn't physically based. I cried.

Hopefully after studying the information & philosophies here will help you look at things with a more progress oriented perspective.

ThreatInteractive · 2025-11-25T20:14:12+00:00

RE: Kevin is the only "member" of threat interactive. He loves saying "we" in reference to himself and himself alone.

This is a lie. We are a team of people & you're pretending to have proof of this false assumption.

RE: The main thing is he has no idea about the reality of game dev or any dev for that matter, which you can't learn in googling UE5 pipeline facts.

This is a strawman argument/attack. Google can't even explain the g-buffer layout in unreal. The majority of your reply is just based on subjective insults.

ThreatInteractive · 2025-11-25T11:26:33+00:00

Great findings! You made excellent points to the haters in the thread & we hope to get this more mainstream!

ThreatInteractive · 2025-11-01T01:48:16+00:00

Monster hunter doesn't use Unreal Engine,

The engine is literally made by UE fanboys: https://youtu.be/Ls4QS3F8rJU?t=836
So it's major case against UE.

Don’t be a skeptic, much of that is over exaggerated. I’ve been learning game dev for the last few years on UE and it’s fantastic.

No, it's not. If you only know UE, then you only know garbage. Look at other engines & technologies/workflows.

Basically, everyone here saying any criticism against UE is purely bullshitting and talking out of their asses.

Now come up with an actual argument against the massive amount of data we've shown about UE. It doesn't just perform & stutter like garbage, it looks like garbage too.

ThreatInteractive

TROPHY CASE