It's pretty much the norm now and I think late UE4 in AAA games is what really pushed it?
It's cheap and simple to setup, and most games rely on TAA to make it less annoying.
But TAA sucks! And TAA encourages all sorts of extremely lazy workflows and graphical effects because it will clean them up a little, but they look so bad without it.
I hate it. Raytracing is part of this. It's all just really big companies with billions of dollars cheaping out on authoring good visuals.
Microsoft flight simulator has weird sparkly shadows because it's tracing a few hundred rays and expects you to use TAA to cover it up and it's so bad. Same exact story for reflections.
So now companies expect you to buy $800 GPUs that chew through half a kilowatt of power so that they can be lazy and not care how poorly they've authored their assets and don't really have to consider anything about their visuals.
This is what I'm doing for my game, I didn't know it was actually a thing in some big titles too, that's reassuring. I landed on it because it was a huge code simplification compared to every other method of handling transparency, and it doesn't look completely shit in the era of high resolutions and frame rates.
I just implemented it for a VR app I’ve been working on where the semi-transparent objects can appear any which way, intersecting, etc. I didn’t realize how much of an issue that’d be…or how hard it’d be to come up with a shader for dithering in VR that doesn’t look awful. I’m still not super happy with what I have - it moves along with the player’s eyes - but every other solution I could come up with didn’t interact well with two screens, especially at far distances from the object. Moire for days.
First time I saw it was in the original Unreal game (1998) when using the software renderer. It had this very distinct asymmetric dithering pattern.
Can't find a screenshot of it on short order, seems most screenshots are either of unrelated newer Unreal Engine or use hardware rendering which doesn't show this dithering.
