A guide to making translucency cheaper in UE, with examples from Valorant, Baldur's Gate 3, Half-Life Alyx and more

I am a graphics programmer, and while consulting studios, I noticed that performance often suffers from translucency. I put together these performant approaches I know and like.

They are:

• Avoiding transparency creatively
• Masking and dithering
• Tight fitting meshes
• Using cheap, order independent blend modes, like Additive
• Simplifying transparent shaders

Last one is lowering rendering resolution, but there are downsides to this one. Things like DLSS and TSR are helpful, but I noticed cases where TSR takes longer than transparency itself, and becoming the bottleneck. It can be worth a try but its important to measure.

Here is full article with images, I try to keep things simple and approachable, rather than a paper on rendering: https://fps.fish/blog/fps-deep-dive/5-techniques-for-optimizing-transparency-in-unreal-engine

Did I miss anything?