Unreal Engine Screen Flicker Draws Advice From Doom Creator John Carmack
The thread shows how a common Unreal Engine 5 rendering issue draws technical responses from across the industry, including from foundational figures in game programming.
Key Facts
- Indie developer Tonokuji posted a video on X showing a white flicker in his upcoming action game Gothic Scythe, caused by Unreal Engine's occlusion culling.
- John Kinzel of Raven Software, a Call of Duty artist, replied that the flicker is a known Unreal Engine issue and recommended expanding mesh bounds.
- Rendering engineer Sebastian Aaltonen, who worked on Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin's Creed Unity, described a GPU-driven pipeline he developed to solve the same flicker problem.
- John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead programmer on Doom and Quake, joined a related thread about binary space partitioning (BSP), a spatial division method used in early 3D engines.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Indie developer Tonokuji posted about a screen flicker bug in his game Gothic Scythe, caused by Unreal Engine's occlusion culling. Veteran developers including Call of Duty artist John Kinzel, rendering engineer Sebastian Aaltonen, and Doom co-creator John Carmack offered solutions and sparked a wider rendering discussion.
Indie developer Tonokuji, creator of the free soulslike KANNAGI USAGI, posted a video on X showing a white flicker that appears when the camera moves between rooms in his upcoming action game Gothic Scythe. He identified the cause as Unreal Engine's occlusion culling, a technique that skips rendering objects hidden behind walls but introduces a one-frame delay between GPU visibility checks and CPU rendering.
John Kinzel of Raven Software (Call of Duty series) replied that the flicker is a known UE issue and recommended expanding mesh bounds so rendering starts earlier. Rendering engineer Sebastian Aaltonen, who worked on Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin's Creed Unity at Ubisoft, described a GPU-driven pipeline he developed to solve the same problem by keeping all visibility processing on the GPU.
John Carmack, co-founder of id Software and lead programmer on Doom and Quake, joined a related thread about binary space partitioning (BSP), a spatial division method used in early 3D engines. Carmack's comment pushed the conversation beyond the immediate bug into broader rendering history.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.