ForwardLevelUp

What you get

Smooth edges

MSAA with a wider, smoother resolve. Thin railings, poles and wires stop shimmering.

No halos

Shadows and AO no longer bleed across MSAA edges.

AO that works in forward

Screen-space, distance-field and street-scale occlusion from buildings, all of it MSAA-aware.

Contact shadows

Characters darken the ground under them, using the engine's capsule shadows.

Reflections

Screen-space reflections work alongside MSAA.

World normals

Post-process materials can read SceneTexture WorldNormal in forward.

Decals in the base pass

Decals change base colour, normal and roughness before lighting, so every light shades them, at every MSAA sample.

Bounce light

Coloured light bounced off the buildings and street around you, from the same height capture as the occlusion.

Contact shadows for anything

Vehicles and props darken the ground under them too, without distance fields.

Clean soft particles

Depth-faded particles stop leaving a halo around foreground edges.

In motion

Aliasing is worst in motion. The same gameplay before and after.

NOTE: Video compression is quite aggressive here.

Compare

The same frame in each mode. Pick a view, then click a mode or press 1 to 5. The lower image is a 3x crop so you can see the edges.

Ambient occlusion

Screen-space AO only on the left, plus distance-field AO on the right — Distance-field AO · left screen-space AO only, right with distance-field AO

Without and with height-field AO — Occlusion from buildings · left off, right on. Sidewalks and walls next to tall buildings darken; open street does not

A character's feet without and with a contact shadow — Character contact shadow · left off, right on

The same three decals drawn by stock mobile forward and by clustered decals — Decals · left stock mobile forward, which drops their normals and roughness; right applied in the base pass

Without and with height-field bounce light — Bounce light from buildings · left off, right on at 4x intensity so it shows at this size

A head in front of a depth-faded translucent wall, stock and per-sample — Depth fade under MSAA · left stock, with a dark fringe where the wall fades against the foreground depth; right per-sample

A scene and its world normals read by a post-process material — World normals in forward · left the scene, right a post-process material reading WorldNormal

Set it up

You need a UE 5.8 source build, and a project on the mobile renderer: bPreferFeatureLevelES31 on PC, or a mobile platform.

Download the repository and apply the fourteen patches in Patches/ to the engine, in order, with git apply.
Build the editor. The first launch recompiles every material.
Add the settings below to Config/DefaultEngine.ini under [/Script/Engine.RendererSettings], then restart the editor.

r.Mobile.ShadingPath=0
r.Mobile.AntiAliasing=3
r.MSAACount=4
r.WideCustomResolve=2
r.Mobile.MSAA.EdgeAwareFetch=1
r.Mobile.MSAA.SkipRedundantResolve=1
r.Mobile.AmbientOcclusion=1
r.DefaultFeature.AmbientOcclusion=True

The README covers the optional extras (distance-field AO, contact shadows, reflections, occlusion and bounce light from buildings, decals, soft particles, world normals), what to check when something doesn't show up, and every setting.

Cost

GPU time at 1901x1269 with 4x MSAA, in a city scene in the editor.

Feature	Cost
Smoother resolve	0.014 ms
Edge fixes for shadows and AO	0.003 ms
Screen-space AO	0.07 ms
Distance-field AO	~0.25 ms
Occlusion from buildings	0.18 ms
Contact shadows (one character)	0.026 ms
Screen-space reflections	~0 ms
World normals	~0.07 ms
Bounce light from buildings	0.02 ms
Contact shadows for movables (12 casters)	0.045 ms

Under the hood

What each patch changes

Patch	Stock 5.8	Patched
1 Wide resolve	Mobile gets a 1-pixel box filter; the wider resolve only compiles for desktop.	The wider resolve runs on the mobile renderer (`r.WideCustomResolve`).
2 Distance-field shadow fix	The distance-field shadow pass is dropped under MSAA, with an ensure at startup.	Works under MSAA.
3 Edge fetch and AO	Shadows and AO bleed across MSAA edges. Forward reads AO from a channel nothing writes, and mobile SSAO never runs on PC.	Edge samples fetch from the matching surface (`r.Mobile.MSAA.EdgeAwareFetch`). Forward gets SSAO.
4 Skip resolve	A hardware resolve runs that the custom resolve then overwrites.	Optionally skipped (`r.Mobile.MSAA.SkipRedundantResolve`). Identical output.
5 Forward distance-field AO	Mobile distance-field AO only works in deferred.	Works in forward (`r.Mobile.DistanceFieldAO`).
6 Contact shadows and SSR fix	Capsule sky occlusion is disabled on mobile. Mobile SSR crashes with patch 4.	Capsule occlusion on mobile, optionally cast straight down (`r.CapsuleIndirectSkyLightFromAbove`). SSR safe under MSAA.
7 World normals	Forward has no normal buffer, so post-process materials cannot read WorldNormal.	Optional normal target (`r.Mobile.Forward.NormalTarget`).
8 Occlusion from buildings	Nothing occludes the sky beyond a few metres.	Sky occlusion from a top-down height capture of the level (`r.Mobile.HeightFieldAO`).
9 Tonemap subpass resolve	The on-chip tonemap subpass averages HDR samples, then tonemaps, so bright edges stair-step.	Weighted or per-sample tonemapped resolve (`r.Mobile.TonemapSubpass.Resolve`).
10 Per-sample depth fade	Translucency fades against the resolved foreground depth, leaving halos at edges.	Reads the MSAA sample behind the fragment (`r.Mobile.MSAA.PerSampleDepthFade`).
11 Primitive AO	Contact occlusion needs distance fields, and only characters cast it without them.	Capsules and bounds ellipsoids for any movable (`r.Mobile.PrimitiveAO`).
12 Height-field clipmap	One capture of the whole level.	A toroidal window that follows the camera, captured a few tiles per frame.
13 Height-field GI	No bounce light without baked lighting.	One bounce off the height field (`r.Mobile.HeightFieldGI`).
14 Clustered decals	Forward decals draw over scene colour with their own lighting, no normals or roughness, no local lights.	Baked into an atlas and applied in the base pass from screen tile lists (`r.Mobile.ClusteredDecals`).