Steps to Reproduce: Walk around with a zoi in lowlit areas, or bright lit areas with a dark background. Also move the camera around in doors while focused on your ZOI. Do the same in CAZ.
Please provide the entire save file(s) from the date when the issue occurred.
20260306-081309.zip (4.7 MB) (this is an entirely new save created for the new engine beta)
Details:
This has been a very prominent graphics issue since launch and a known issue for Unreal Engine 5, but I do feel it has gotten worse with the introduction of Realistic Shadows. The shadows in-game are prone to ghosting and look very grainy. I think the videos I took explain it better than me trying to type it out, but I’ve noticed that it happens even in CAZ now with the new engine. I highly recommend prioritizing this graphics issue now that the flickering lights seem to be (mostly) fixed, because it’s the main cause of annoyance for me now as someone who likes to play at top-notch graphics. I’m hoping the engine upgrade will give you better tools to minimize this issue.
Grainy shadows are also especially visible in the really pretty hair graphics of Inzoi, which is a shame:
These are my graphics settings so you can see I’ve set them to the best possible setting to reduce this issue as much as possible. FYI: turning off NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generations or turning off Super Resolution altogether makes no change whatsoever so please don’t recommend this to me.
Unfortunately the flickering, the grainy and ghosting are a ue5 issue. For the ghosting, I had to set the global illumination to medium cause on high or ultra it’s really noticeable and corners of walls get a grainy look for me. You can still see it a little surrounding the zoi themselves but not so much when they walk and the grainy look on corners of walls or for movement disappears for me. The flickering issue was apparently fixed in the 5.6 version
Yeah, ghosting is one of Lumen’s core issues, it was insanely bad back when I was participating in the UE5 alpha testing, and Epic has been fixing it painfully slowly through improvements to Temporal Upsampling across versions, but it’s still unresolved.
switching as much as possible to Hardware Ray Tracing instead of Lumen’s software ray tracing pipeline.
I think it’s worth exposing a dedicated settings section for owners of high‑end GPUs (4080/S, 4090, 5070Ti–5090) with a large number of RT cores, it’s a niche solution, but a very promising one.
I have noticed that setting global illumination to medium fixes this blotchiness for now, but completely removes the warm cozy vibe of the lamps and makes the game very dark.
