The default settings in Unreal Engine are geared towards high definition 3D games. If we make 2D Games with UE there are a couple of settings we must change to prevent visual artifacts and make the game perform better. By applying these settings I’ve seen performance increases from 160 FPS to 380 FPS in my project.
<aside> ⚠️ This document is specifically for ‘pure’ 2D games, as opposed to 2D/3D Hybrid Games that mix 2D character sprites with 3D backgrounds. Some of these settings might also apply to them, but some don’t.
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All of the following settings can be simply found by opening up the project settings and searching for them.
Disable Auto Exposure, set Auto Exposure to Manual and Auto Exposure Bias to 0.0
All of these settings will prevent auto exposure or eye adaptation from kicking in.
Turn Off Motion Blur. With 2D Sprites motion blur is drawn into the animations by the artist and isn’t something that should be added by the engine since this will just make everything look blurry and unappealing.
Anti aliasing is a technique that enables us to smooth out jagged lines and there are different anti aliasing types which come with their own pro’s and con’s.
For a full on 2D Game we want to set this to NONE, since it can make our pixels look strange.
For a 2D/3D Hybrid we do want to use anti aliasing on our backgrounds, but there is no way to separate this into layers, so we can try using FXAA, which often won’t cause problems with pixel art.
