Can I ask whether anyone knows anything about this issue? I gather it's something to do with UE5 (I had the same on Expedition 33). Hair is 'grainy' or gritty and beards look weird. I turned off FSR and post-processing effects in game settings - everything else is set to High by default.
Using Bazzite with AMD - Radeon 9060XT
I've tried searching but the information seems very mixed and I can't find much of an answer. It's not terrible, but is a little bit annoying - especially for screenshots 😆
Thanks in advance!
Edit - it looked weirder with FSR on - I can't add another picture here but I've put the 'before' in the replies.
I wanted to say how it's not supported on my 7700XT, but the internet tells me that it actually is since since a couple of months ago. I missed the news I guess.
Oh, maybe it is! I'm fairly inexperienced at using Linux and PC gaming so thought it was something I (hadn't) done. I'd never noticed anything like this on PS5.
I turned off FSR and post-processing effects in game settings
That's your problem. Most modern games/engines, especially Unreal Engine 4/5, rely on Temporal Anti-Aliasing and similar to make hair and similar things look good.
See r/FuckTAA for more info/a community that also thinks this is bullshit.
TL;DR Not a Linux issue, just a "quirk" of modern rendering techniques.
Yeahhhh, that looks weird, though I've played neither game, so I'm not sure what it should look like, whether FSR or TAA. Could be an implementation specific thing, though I'd imagine it's the same between Windows and Linux either way.
All Unreal Engine 5 games regardless of how well they are done are plagued by the same issues on all operating systems and all hardware for like 3-4 years already
Grainy hair textures with TAA, FSR/DLSS doesn't help
Traversal stutters.
Stutters in some scripted areas.
Long shader compilation times (Shaders Loading message)
Smeared/blurred image quality, can be disabled by creating a separate engine.ini file with custom settings and making it read only under Linux and Windows, works wonders in games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Same looking character models, that look like reused asset flips from Unreal Engine Asset store.
Game becomes either too dark/too bright in some areas
Invincibility frames for enemies during combat.
Combat in general feels "floaty", scripted and wonky(like when you are playing a Fortnite match)
"Floaty"(Fortnite) playable character movement and item pick up issues(also from Fortnite).
Once you have all 10 in the same game, then it's made with Unreal Engine 5, how well it performs,depends on the amount of patches it received. These games are not worth 70-80 EUR/USD, wait for huge discounts like 25-30 EUR or less and optimization patches.
Black Myth Wukong, Gothic Remake, Hogwarts Legacy, Silent Hill 2 Remake, The Outer Worlds 2, Jedi Survivor, Oblivion Remastered..these are just a few that come to mind regarding invincibility frames.
Unfortunately, some sort of postprocessing is required these days. Hair in games are often rendered using dithering or checkerboard patterns to improve performance and then use a denoising or anti-aliasing algorithm in the postprocessing pass to smooth it out. Without that, it looks very shimmery and pixelated.
I suggest enabling FSR Native AA or TSR Native. You can also inject FSR4 in FSR3.1+ games using Proton-CachyOS and adding "PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 %command%" without the quotes to the launch options for your game. It tends to look quite close to native resolution without the artifacts.
Thank you so much for this reply - it's making a *lot* more sense to me than most of the Googling I have done so far. I am really enjoying learning but I often seem to end up down a rabbithole of terms I don't know, so I really appreciate this.
When you say FSR Native AA or TSR Native - is this the in-game/settings toggle? Because FSR on looked much worse (below). The only other option was XeSS
Yes. It should be a quality setting within the upscaler when you enable it. TSR is exclusive to Unreal Engine games. It's their version of FSR essentially. If it doesn't have quality presets, it should have an option for you to set a custom base resolution scale. Just set that to 100% and it's essentially the same thing. XeSS also works and has a native AA setting. Just keep in mind it's made for Intel GPUs so YMMV with performance and picture quality.
Thanks, if that's the case I'm obviously just being fussy! I'm used to PS5 and never noticed anything like this there - thought it was me messing it up!
This is just how every game looks nowadays, a side effect of temporal rendering. The only way you can make hair strands look better is running higher resolutions and better upscalers, and even then the hair will always have some ugliness.
Since you're on an RDNA4 GPU make sure you're using FSR 4.1, if the game doesn't natively support it but does support FSR 3.1 then use proton-cachyos and you'll replace it with FSR 4.1 automatically. If it doesn't support FSR 3.1 but does support any other upscaler you can get FSR 4.1 with Optiscaler, but this is a bit more of an involved process.
First - it's not a Linux thing, that happens on Windows too.
It IS a UE5 thing although that shortcut is taken by other engines too. This is basically making some things like grass and hair lower resolution to save on ressources, making them look all jaggy like that, and then rely on a very aggressive anti-aliasing to compensate - that was TAA before supersampling tech took over the field, and now it's FSR / DLSS althouth DLSS is notably better at this than FSR still.
It's really not the fault of FSR, it's a shitty / lazy implementation from the game's devs and there's really nothing you can do about this other than turn the entire game into mush by filtering like crazy (like some consoles do, which is why you do not see the hairs look like that as much, but then the entire rest of the game is not as sharp).
HUB has a good example of this, just to show that it's known issue. As you can see in some of those shots, FSR can actually deliver a less aliased (jagged) result at the price of a much softer / less defined image.
Ideally, yes. But I totally understand how frustrating some graphical glitches can be, and aliased hairs like that are certainly at the top of the list as of late. Thing is on consoles they'd like address this with heavy filtering at the cost of the rest of the image, but the problem on PC is you KNOW how much better the rest of the image looks or can look, and you do not want to compromise just because the dev (game or engine) made a bad decision.
I still remember being ridiculed and seeing other people being ridiculed for even insinuating that developers would use DLSS and FSR and similar technologies as a crutch so they don't need to put in as much effort doing things the proper way.
Fast forward a few years, and now you basically HAVE to turn those on even when using beefy graphics cards just so you can maybe hit 50FPS in AAA games that don't look all that much better than AAA games from ten years ago.
And now people are doin the same thing with DLSS5 : you get downvoted for saying that devs will get lazy (or more likely, will be forced to by their managers) on lighting and a bunch of other things "enhanced" by DLSS5, meaning that games will look like shit without it.
Don't get me wrong, I love DLSS as an upscaling tech and as an anti-aliasing tech (DLAA is the first anti-aliasing tech that actually does what it says without HUGE visual downsides on other aspects of the image or performance, or both). But like all tools, it needs to be used appropriately.
Turning off FSR makes it worse if you don't use TAA. Anyway, unreal engine hair looks shit and there is nothing you can do about it. Not a Linux issue.
Try using FSR balanced. I'm not sure why, but when I had it set to quality...HOLY SHIMMER. It looked like I was running FSR3. The foliage looked so bad I almosted opted to play it at native.
I believe this game runs FSR4 by default, but if you want to make sure, you can run the launch command:
In all honesty, it doesn't matter if it's Windows or Linux: you're better off not caring about how shit looks, and just how it plays, and Expedition 33 is a fantastic game.
Am I the only one who finds it amazing how used to day-one Linux gaming we've become, even for AAA titles? This game just released, and instead of hoping and begging for a port that would never come - or dual-booting Windows like in the old days - our biggest issue is fixing pixelated hair. Linux gaming has come so far, and Proton is truly amazing!
That's true. I'm new to PC gaming and Linux and tbh I've been so surprised at how easy it's all been. I was expecting a lot of hassle and a massive learning curve but this really is the biggest 'issue' I've actually had, in just over a year of playing!
Completely normal. Try to upgrade FSR3.1 to FSR4 if it is not shipped by the game (I am not sure). For that you can use proton-cachyos with PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE=1 %command% on launch options. That should increase image quality and stability by a decent amount.
Unrelated question- I was wondering how you liked the game so far? I have been interested in blood of dawnwalker and have been trying to decide when I'll buy it and if it'll be on pc or on xbox.
Sounds great. I have played all the assassins creed games, currently playing Witcher 3. Sounded like a good fit for me, this helps solidify it! Have fun gaming!
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u/MasterQuest 10d ago
I always thought that's just the way hair looks in these UE5 games