Flickering Material on opengl4+tesselation on Linux

Hi,

I wanted to make a water material with dynamic displacement in UE4 on Linux. But as soon as i am turning tesselation on (both, flat and PN Triangles) the material start to flicker heavily. This only happens in the translucent mode. Not in masked or opaque mode. The translucent materials are okay if i have no tesselation enabled.

Some technical details:

  • UE4.11
  • Nvidia driver 364.19-3
  • Arch Linux
  • started with primusrun (I am on a Laptop) and -opengl4

I attached a picture with the flickering, the states of what is white and what is black change really fast :smiley:

-thanks for any help/fixes if you need more information please comment!

Hey -

Can you add a screenshot of how your material is setup? I tried adding a black base color and a constant value (1) connected to the Refraction pin. The details panel was setup to match what is shown in your screenshot, however the preview was a solid black rather than showing any flickering. Let me know if there is something I may have missed in my setup.

hi, I’ll add a screenshot of the material. Maybe it has something to do with primusrun.

Hello, I’m on my phone so I have to keep this short :slight_smile: There are two things that come to mind that you can try. First, turn your “Max Displacement” setting up. The flickering that your getting…is it your entire water materiel or is it distance based? For example, with landscape tessellation having “Max Diplacement” turned down can give flickering close to the camera. The second thing I would try is using just a single constant for your opacity. I have also had bizarre things happen with normals. For example I have had situations where too strong of a normal map can make it so that even turning the normal intensity to zero does not prevent the normal from displaying. When in doubt go back to the basics. Try just adding a single normal map instead of your alpha setup.

Of course there are other things it could be…I would always first suspect an issue in the material.

Hi, Thanks for the suggestions. I tried both of them. Sadly without success. I think it wight be a problem with the fact that i am running on primusrun. When I have access to a normal desktop I’ll try it without primusrun.

Hey -

I believe this may be related to the normal you’re using. I followed the setup based on your screenshot and do not see any flickering in the preview window, the main difference being that I used the T_Brick_Clay_Old_N for the normal (not sure what your normal is). If you have starter content in the project, can you let me know if using this file produces the same flickering for you? If you don’t have starter content, you can add it by using Add New in the content browser and selecting “Add New Feature or Content Pack” and selecting Starter Content under the Content Packs tab.

Hi, when using the same texture I get the strange bugs as well. I created a new material. When I change the mode to translucent and add tesselation the bugs are there as well (without any actual nodes in the material graph). Do you have the option to test UE4 on Linux with an Intel - Nvidia hybrid laptop with Bumblebee installed? I believe its because I use Bumblebee (more exactly primusrun) to work with the engine.

Hey -

I apologize for the delayed response. I missed that you originally mentioned that you were using Shader Model 5 (openGL4). When I launch a project with this setting I was able to repro the “disco” effect in the material editor. This has been bugged as UE-32865.

Cheers