Bug 2021.3 - instability and varied bugs (TAA broken / Visual Environment breaks)

Hey
So we just upgraded to 2021.3 LTS and the latest HDRP

There seem to be quite some instabilities, while 2020 was HDRP wise pretty flawless

1. TAA does often bug out and adds strange blurring and has instabilities



This is while standing, its like a sine wave of stability and complete blur. No motion blur nor DOF is enabled.
It shifts between semi blurry and super blurry and never want to stabilize. Ive also seen blotches of complete blur, like a blob that was heavily blurred. The settings are exactly the same. It also dosnt seem to happen all the time.

It might be related to camera changes or the new dynamic resolution / DLSS (none of which we touched)

Here is how it should look (2020 LTS)



There is clearly a bug and it seems kind of totally busted
Also if you add DOF it gets even worse it seems like.



2. TAA Ghosting outlines
Image: Never fully sharpens, also big ghost outlines
There is definitely something strange happening. I just noticed big outline issues, then I alt tabbed to put a screenshot and now they are gone. Maybe I need to update graphics drivers but still. The ghosting ring seems to be related to the blue glow particle effect behind, this was not the case prior.

I added another image in the comment afterwards. There is a clear white outline on everything.

Another observation, it seems like "Quality preset: low" is the sharpest of them all?

2. Changing visual environment can break volume profile
Ive had multiple times where changing the visual environment (maybe related to testing SSGI) sky types
broke the post processing volume and required a restart.

If this happens, your visual environment stays black and only physically based sky works, gradient and HDRI dont work anymore and just show pitch black. Also all other post processing effects in the volume don't work anymore, or only partially work still.

This is fixed after a unity restart but happens quite often. It is likely related to gradient sky as I use this the most, or maybe toggling sky + SSGI on and off.


3. Using the search in the hierarchy does strange things with volumes now
If you use the search in your scene, it disables the volumes, even in play view
There is some strange behavior going on there

(Bonus: Prefab preview scenes ignore post processing / tonemapping entirely even the default! This was already not working in 2020 tho)

 

Please see here, upon inspection on TAA there are this white fringes on every contrasted separation now

Confirmed: This is related to the sharpening factor (history sharpening does not cause this however)
Both images show a factor of 1.5

 

Make a bug report if you want to have a 5% chance of this getting addressed, although at this point I think we can file TAA in the list of post processing effects that Unity are simply unable to do well (like SSR, any kind of motion blur, most of their attempts at tone mapping, their color correction tools etc).

 

TAA worked quite well on 2020 with no real issues.

 

Yes, well the planets do align in just the correct way once per 100 years. It won't happen again.

 

I can confirm that the white outline effect that is around contrast areas values fully depends on the sharpening. A value of 2 shows very strong white outlines.
This was not the case before. Both of these screenshots show 1.5 sharpening, history sharpening at default of 0.3







This I could not replicate right now but it depended on a glow particle plane behind being visible or not. This also didnt happen before, also it dosnt happen right now, but im on a different PC now.

Here are the settings (pretty standard aside of contrast higher)
Turning up history sharpening does not show a white edge effect in comparison.

 

Ill try the coming week

There is also such a strange ghosting fringe instability blur going on sometimes, its very odd



Its an interaction with DOF. Somehow this does not happen all the time tho. Turning off DOF removes it. Its not incorrectly set DOF, its the same as usual and works perfectly fine on other AA or 2020.

Playing with any of the TAA settings had no effect.

No AA:

 

Here is a gif:



Depth of field is set to manual so nothing dynamically changing. No camera change nothing.

Also if I switch the pixels TAA renders (like switching character) the DOF goes crazy.
TAA does blur the character entirely with DOF on and then stabilizes over like a second. Super weird.

Turning off TAA or taking SMAA removes all strange blur.
This is being displayed from a render texture, however ingame the TAA also goes crazy.

I can not send over this huge project for varied reasons but ill see if I can do something in a empty project, however we really use very standard camera and settings.

- Playing with all material or mesh renderer settings also has no effects.
- Using custom camera frame settings and turning on every checkbox no effect.
- Changing Layer on character has no effect
- Using HDRP lit shader has no effect
- Removing any custom post process passes has no effect
- Anything in the camera settings has no effect

Also these seem like multiple separate issues at the same time.

 

Hey, no this was not enabled. Changing it does not change the effect.
disabling physical camera also did not do a thing



Im noticing that putting quality to high makes the strange blur effect take much longer to resolve
before it goes to a more normal state. It also makes it noticeably worse in general

 

HDRP's DoF runs after TAA but uses the jittered depth buffer that was generated before TAA was applied to that frame's color buffer. So it would add a lot of flickering at object edges when the pixel jitter causes the depth buffer at those pixels to have the depth value from whatever's behind the object (or vice versa).

HDRP's method of dealing with that is to run an extra TAA pass on the depth of field output to stabilize it. But it adds a ton of blur ghosting at medium-and-higher DoF blur amounts.

In my own project (which does not use the physically based DoF mode) I had to completely disable that DoF TAA pass (by modifying HDRP's code) and just deal with the extra jitter because the blur ghosting was so bad - and because it increases the amount of graphics memory HDRP uses. It kind of sounds like that's what's happening to you in some of your examples.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...ipeline/HDRenderPipeline.PostProcess.cs#L2701

 

I did have no issues in the 2020 LTS version of TAA HDRP and no noticeable flicker or jitter so I don't think this is it

 

Same here, except I just hard disabled DOF completely.

But other than that Unity motion vector breaks randomly. I just live with it.

 

I have found another issue with materials and motion vectors which might be related
If the material has motion vectors enabled it throws this issue:



Maybe its amplify shader related but likely not

 

This problem is still present. The dof mixed with TAA broke in 2021.2.9f1 when HDRP changed from 12.1.3 to 12.1.4 and it is still visible in 2021.3.6f1. Changing anti-aliasing to another option (smaa or fxaa) fixes the problem. You can reproduce this by opening sample hdrp project and turning on Depth of Field. I recomend those values to make it more visible.

Next frame when camera was moved -1 on HDRP 12.1.3
Next frame when camera was moved -1 on HDRP HDRP 12.1.4+ (unblured background behind the sphere)

In the engine, this is more visible, but difficult to catch due to the accumulation

I think TAA is responsible for this. Qualiy of aliasing is much worse than it was in 12.1.3. We switched to LTS and now I don't know what to do. I don't know what has been improved, but a lot has gotten worse.

 

Yes the TAA still has varied issues on 2021.3.5 and should really be fixed

 

Still bugged on 2022.1.10f1 and 2022.20b2.2700

2021.2.8f1 in motion

Maybe its not a bug, but a feature. It worked well for a long time... and then 2021.2.9f1 update came in.

Could you please share your solution? My game look like $@#!@# right...I just commented out

Code (CSharp):

1. // if (taaEnabled)
2. {
3. ReprojectCoCHistory(dofParameters, cmd, dofParameters.camera, prevCoCHistory, nextCoCHistory, motionVecTexture, ref fullresCoC);
4. }

But maybe there is a more elegant solution.

 

General 2021 is in a very messy state, we have a lot of issues

 

any particular feature you need in 2021? Otherwise, honestly, your better off staying with 2020 if it's causing you many issues.

2021 LTS also has the longest playmode wait times, and possibly other issues, 2022 is already better in that regard. Unity planned many 'hold on' improvements, very few made it to 2021, mostly in 2022.

 

my god new version 2021.3.7f1 has lots of bugs , editor crash so many times.

 

Unfortunately we also have issues in 2020, less overall though.
We run an early access and want to do the full launch also eventually, sticking with 2020 will present the risk that we loose support around launch.

Examples of issues that are fixed for us in 2020:
Decal projector mono updates eat 5-10% CPU main thread performance for no good reason,
Simple edits to Addressable groups break the addressable file in ~50% of cases and are only fixable by rolling back in git

 

I just checked 2021.3.9f1 and DoF is still blurry and changes very slow. TAA is still worse than it was.1. Sometimes DoF becomes completely black, sometimes loses resoultion and renders in half of the screen (similar to custom pass, which breaks every time I see scene view and game view at the same time, or when I render to a texture that is larger than the camera). It's all just all over the place.

Unfortunately we can't go back to older versions, and upgrading to newer versions is too rsky (not sure what problems will be introduced). I would like to be able to switch to what was in 2021.2.8f Is there any chance to get an older solution?

 

Now after the latest upgrade to 2021.3.9f1 the Depth of field is broken
If you use physical then it works, otherwise it completely breaks render textures and probably more