Is Threat Interactive's (YT) game optimisation channel a long con?

Dev Zone Game Development
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Does anyone have an opinion on Threat Interactive?
I recently stumbled upon his/their channel (on YT) which has grown rapidly over the last month. They’ve passed 100k with a channel that specialises in explaining graphical rendering, with a healthy side of berating Unreal Engine.
They lay unwanted effects like ghosting, flickering and blurring at the door of Unreal, explaining how the processes have been done better elsewhere and why these processes can’t currently be done with Unreal; typically because it wouldn’t help Fortnite.

Here’s their latest…
When Sony Made Optimized Realistic Graphics By Fixing UE4 | An Urgent Frame Analysis

The video looks at frame-time budget of a scene from Days Gone, and did good job of showing the layers of computation and the cost that goes into rendering a 3D image in real-time; well, good enough for a complete layman such as myself to grasp the basic concepts.
However, I’ve no clue if he’s legit, talking BS or just as clueless as I am, hence the post.
At the end of his presentation, he wraps up…
(at 14:57)) "I’m not sure if this is obvious, but my plan with Threat Interactive is to start dispersing Unreal material templates and resources that align with the topics we present in videos like this one.
"We want to bring awareness to development such as engine patches which could end up being more economic in terms of project integration than a full-fledged fork, and development such as the new SMAA plugin (which still needs some work but is a step in the right direction.)
“If you’ve developed shaders, patches, or Unreal code that relates to fixing the issues we speak about, contact us with your innovations because we might be able to push your important developments out to the industry with our videos.”

This would all be fine, but the video left my spidey-sense tingling in that way it does when someone has devised a devious marketing campaign and is pulling every thread it can tug on.

  • Threat Interactive are Under Attack
  • ...because big business don't like them.
  • Urgency - he speaks fast.
  • Annoyed - he’s irritated, and you should be too.
  • Othering - “They’re not listening.” - They being Epic presumably.
  • Being censored - “shadow banned posts on social media for reasons unknown”
  • Boombastic language “… to fight fake optimization in modern games.”
  • User led revolution - the SMAA plugin featured looks like any mod from Nexus with a perfectly generic username attached as author (sorry nicholas477 if you’re reading :face_with_thermometer:)

The biggest red flag is the fast pace of success - the explosion of popularity on YT is sus. People spend their lives trying to game the algorithm, so to randomly have an autistic-level genius developer be diagnosing and solving all of modern graphics’ foibles, who’s young, smart, presentable, fast-talking and motivated, and who’s spent a good while building a channel to then suddenly figure out how to get recommended on YouTube.

Lastly, I can’t understand the motivation as such. If I’d figured out how to do all this stuff that my contemporaries were oblivious to, I’d keep that to myself and profit from it. Why is this company not angling to be in direct competition with Unreal, rather than trying to make Unreal better?

Is this YT channel about trying to sell a package of plugins and mods to Epic under the guise of a grass roots movement?
I presume Epic already have a pipeline for external development such as plugins. Is this a play by Threat Interactive to insert themselves between Epic and their development community as a middleman?

Your thoughts welcomed…

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I’ve watched a couple of his videos the past month as YT started putting them on my recommended feed. They seemed fairly informative as to there being a problem, but his “now look at my fixed version” didn’t give any details on how it was fixed just that it now has higher fps through something he did. I didn’t subscribe and haven’t watched any after the second video because there didn’t seem to be any real details, and the guys attitude through the whole thing came off as a pretentious douche bag. He may be right, and he may have some great fixed to underlying UE problems, but with an attitude like that and no details to share I just don’t care.

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Me feeling is, that if this would be an improvement in a meaningful way, Epic would happily pay Thread Interactive.

He isn’t wrong, but the majority of consumers don’t care or even like it.

Not really. He makes emotional videos and posted them on the right subreddits like /motionclarity or /fucktaa/ and 4chan.

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I can’t vouch for his accuracy, but I can confidently state this shouldn’t be what makes you doubt him. That’s definitely how youtube works. The algorithm decides to bless you and shoot you into the stratosphere. Of course savy people know how to maximize their chances of this, but ‘sudden success’ is the ONLY way people who DON’T do that make it big.

from someone who knows absolutely nothing, he seems like someone who IS genuinely mad at the state of the industry/unreal, and wants it to be better. that surely could be him carefully crafting that persona for people like me who can’t know better, but then I’d have to ask why? I have to think he’d know his videos aren’t for us anyway (I checked out pretty quickly - boring as shit having no idea WTF he’s on about).

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So does Louis Rossmann, non-issue in my book.

Rightfully so. When the original Nvidia Titan came out, 4k was suddenly possible. Games looked sharp (and still do). Years later, 4k60 remains reserved for the biggest few GPUs on the market, and GPUs did not get slower since 2013. So, where did the performance go?

Look at the state of the gaming industry, Ubisoft did not listen (and found out), EA, etc. they are indeed not listening to customers (they are to shareholders though).

Life is unfair and the mighty algorithm giveth.

Because wandering into the game engine market like “here we are, buy our shit that does mostly the same as your existing stuff except none of your tools work and all workflows are new” is not how to sell product.
Fixing the really common UnrealEngine is hard, but not “new to market”-hard.

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I gotta push back a little on the YT success being sus point I made. By sus I meant not completely organic. Over on r/motionclarity and r/fucktaa, with a combined user count of 22k, people are mixed on him in general and echoing a lot of my reservations. Over on 4chan there are a half a dozen posts referencing Threat Interactive, which are again mixed. The company website is a wordpress page, their email is a gmail, and as people have pointed out elsewhere there isn’t a great deal to show in terms of demos of the tech he’s working on.

Meanwhile, his YT game is on point. Great titles, thumbnails, and engagement all around.
I use YouTube’s recommended page a lot and can attest there are certain channels that will flood your recommended section when watched just once. I’ve always assumed that kind of permeability of the market is something you pay for, like for instance how all the formerly cable news stations show up in every search result they get paired with. e.g. with the ongoing fires in California, it’s impossible to find things like satellite feeds because those results are crowded out by rolling news channels coverage.
It doesn’t feel like an accident that Threat Interactive has gained 100k subs, it feels like a marketing campaign.

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Another thread on this topic: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/insanely-great-video-explaining-current-gaming-trends-that-are-from-satans-rear-end/221013

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I watched one of his videos after seeing it linked on this forum, and he didn’t seem particularly knowledgeable. An absolute deluge of jargon thrown out with very little explanation of relevance.

While the information he shares might seem groundbreaking to a younger audience, it struck me more as a barebones summary of Google search results. There was no original information, and so I’d rather consult the referenced material if I was interested in the subject.

My doubts about his sincerity were amplified by the video starting with an “URGENT WARNING” (emphasis not added), and ending with “The Truth People NEED to Accept” (again, emphasis not added). I can understand that he found some cool graphics technology demos online, but there are more productive ways to share that.

Is the jargon and surface level knowledge meant to dazzle viewers into buying a product? Time will tell.

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I don’t use Unreal so don’t have too much opinion there, but I am not a fan of the idea of generating a bunch of fake AI frames in place of optimization. I would prefer raw rasterization performance to DLSS that feels like an (expensive) bandaid solution.

This:

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the post below yours kindof illustrates my point. that thread is where I saw him. Stuff like that gets posted in a few places, gets a bump in views, making the algorithm pick it up and serve it more, and as you point out he’s good at playing the clickbait game. that doesn’t mean one way or the other the actual content is more or less trustworthy, his expertise in gaming youtube and the content of his videos are not correlated.

i seriously doubt youtube actually takes payment to be promoted, if they ever got caught that would absolutely murder their constant claims that they don’t pick, the algo does. I do believe it’s readily apparent that it is built to select “trustworthy” msm channels more heavily is why you see them so strongly (and therefore more people click them, feedback loop they can rely on to claim it’s not artificially elevated). This would not apply to some dude making rants about unreal engine.

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I think you can pay to promo? This guy was playing around with it:

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Wow, that’s magnificent and terrifying

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Not only can you promo your own video. It seems you can promote any video including other channels that are not your own.

He explores the idea of promoting other channels videos in the wrong category so they will have low click through rate. And this harms “the algorithm” for that video.

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Regards the other thread, I apologise for not finding it and adding to that. Typical eh?
MazeFrame’s Titan X story reminds me of Total Biscuit always crowing on about how poorly a game was optimised if his dual SLi Titans couldn’t cope.
The Jonathon Blow and Casey Muratori pieces on software bloat are also interesting.
This is just all above my paygrade but as you can imagine the comments section attached to Threat Interactive’s videos might be the hottest places for bias, and I figured the furthest place from it that I know of is here, so thank you gents and ladies.

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I think it’s important to take critical views at any underlying tech infrastructure. But several of this channel’s videos are filmed with an air of superiority, self-victimization/validation that isn’t helpful for the consumer. It rings of insecurity and a burning desire of proving ones self that doesn’t actually relate to the subject matter being covered.

In order for this channel to grow into something with higher quality content and long term value for viewers, I think there needs to be more slow, thorough demonstration around the insanely complex world of graphical programming. Scoffing at a lighting model and interpolating a different solution doesn’t improve everyone’s work in the field.

I have a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, have worked and studied Numerical Methods for years, and took every course I could on the subject during my days at University. Many of these topics are still incredibly complex and require multiple re-reads for me to achieve comprehension. I don’t think a YT channel talking from a perspective of superiority is how we help raise the bar for all consumers.

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multi GPU setups are finicky… it’s tricky to split the work load and make them synchronize with each other. It’s not a plug an play situation, game developers or the engine must intentionally support these setups to see any real benefit.

and with how few people run dual GPU, its often not worth the hassle.

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I dont think his content is aimed at the typical layperson, I think its aimed at the more technical audience in the field of game development. I am a layman too I dont really understand the technical jargon he is spewing a lot of times and I do not really watch his content but I feel like its not in me to judge.

I do not understand the sentiment of thinking that it is a long con.

I think the channel is doing a push back of the recent “technological advancements” in terms of hardware and software fake optimization and demand that actual work be done to optimize a game rather than slashing staff in favor of the generative AI frames or whatever topic he is complaining about.

Well you said it yourself. The creator speaks to a younger audience and is charismatic and just want his games to look good and perform good like the one we had a few years ago. Games feel cheap and less pretty these days.

I think the sentiment is for the game companies to rehire actual employees to do actual optimization and not rely on Unreal and Nvidia for in-engine or in-hardware optimization.

Thats the impression I got from the few episodes I have watched.

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TL;DR: If he’s genuine then he is very naive about the current market.

I’m not quite sure what to think about his channel. After watching a couple of his videos, I was quite entertained by his rampant bashing against the industry. However I do question his motives now.

It makes me wonder if his original intent was developing a game engine, realized he wasn’t capable of pulling it off, and decided to make videos picking apart major game releases instead. Especially now that there’s the rampant over-reliance on HW ray-tracing, Nanite instead of LODs/impostor models, and DLSS.

In the video where he claimed he was being attacked, he mentioned something along the lines of developing a tool to interactively generate mesh LODs using AI.

Now I’m no machine learning expert, nor am I experienced in real-time graphics programming, but the graphics programmer in me physically recoiled upon him mentioning this. Getting lower-detail meshes is usually done by using the earlier stages of box-modeling, or through re-topology when sculpting a model.

Using AI seems like a typical “Tech-Bro” solution to a problem that never existed before. We’ve had mesh sub-division and decimation methods for this in the past, and even rendering models into 2D billboards for impostors.

If this has always been done in the past, why the shift away from it now? Threat Interactive likes to point at NVIDIA and Epic Games as the culprit, but I think this is just a red-herring. The real culprit is that studios are given virtually no budget to optimize their games.

It’s not that they don’t know how to fix it, it’s that the people in charge above them don’t care about performance when it doesn’t lead to profit. Graphics don’t sell anymore now that we’ve reached phtotorealism.

Unfortunately, enough people either don’t know or don’t care that a hardware upgrade should be optional to run these games. Yeah, you may lose out on some performance, or some cool feature, but we’re not in the early days of 3D acceleration anymore.

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TLDR: no he’s legit however his standoff attitude is detrimental to his cause imo, who knows if his studios game or “AI LOD” software will ever materialise.

I’m only a noob hobbyist recently getting into the Godot engine but I’ve messed around with unity and UE (mostly ue4) in the past and for the AAA world there’s a large issue with crunch/unrealistic deadlines

combined with Epic themselves marketing various “one click solutions” ‘nanite will solve all your optimization problems, no more making LODs it’ll handle everything!’ making it worse.

but yes he has shown replicable cases where nanite creates significant overdraw or overly aggressive lumin settings and extremely dense meshes causing massive performance hits

i think the bone he has to pick is in the past bringing up legitimate performance issues and receiving very dismissive “what have you done kid you dunno what you’re talking about” type responses,
i recall one video he highlighted an Epic dev claimed he “watched” his video and doesn’t know what hes talking about and when pushed for further comment replied with “i used chatgpt to summerize the videos transcript” its… yeah some epic dev responeses are very all over the place.
that and he said the UnrealEngine subreddit moderators are blocking any of his videos which is excessive as he does demonstrate replicable optimizaton scenarios

i do understand his more fed up hostile attitude that may be driving some people away and diluting legitimate concerns.

his other video “Challenged To 3X FPS Without Upscaling in UE5”
is legitmate I’m not a professional but I’ve had to cleanup similar horrid performance scenes for university projects like that before to get the framerate above a crawl.

one sticks in my mind was on a 2.5d platformer someone on our team scuplted a shipping container that was imported straight from zbrush and had 2million+ tris he spammed over the map in the background and it completely tanked performance.

in other words imagine what is meant to be a simple 4 sided mostly flat oblong shape that was instead excessively hyper detailed unoptimized dense mesh

another video ThreatInteractive showed off was Silent Hill 2 remake when you disabled the fog you had full detail environment assets in the distance that you’d never see with the fog on throughout the game and honestly id get chewed out by a teacher doing that in uni let alone at a professional studio.

there’s zero reason to be rendering such insanely high detailed assets that are completely obstructed by fog, ironically thats the reason they used fog for Silent Hill 1 on the PS1 due to limited hardware you had to get creative with such a limited polygon budget.

But this all brings up another side issue: Marketplace assets and the film/tv world of UE5.
with virtual video walls as seen on mandalorian
there’s tons of marketplace assets with insane detail that are utterly unoptimized for consumer hardware.
they’re usually for offline rendering or realtime on enterprise grade gear, Not for typical real time video games running on consumer hardware.

The Witcher 3: Optimizing Content Pipelines for Open-World Games
this video is a perfect example of how bad things can get if nobody is paying attention to optimization you get chicken buckets with 1.5million tris and meshes 95% below ground etc
huge wasted performance and if you’re not careful you can end up in stutter town.

tons of game asset stores are not optimised or some packs claim they are but have overlooked mistakes, or an artist thinks their environment is optimized because they ran their scene on a 4090 at 60ish fps so no need to check for optimisation right? after all it was running fine until you added various NPCs, AI, code, various interactive mechanics, navigation meshes etc

yet another issue being AAA studios can churn through veteran staffs or simply not have much in the way of pay benefits to retain vet staff and if you end up with too many newbies and nobody to teach em a lot of very important steps can be overlooked.

the holy grail of real time games asset creation for artists is they can slap their raw sculpted high poly model right into a game, no need for retopology or creating 3-5 versions that have lower levels of detail.

in reality lods and other optimizations technique still play a very important role and a lot of devs are either forgetting that or aren’t given the time or are using assets they think or are told are optimized or using engine features that claim to optimize everything when in reality can only get your mess a project so far.

as to ThreatInteractives products i dunno, he claims his team is making a game i dunno what size their team is but if they’re indie and small you really shouldn’t be chasing the “hyper realism” route as its very expensive and time consuming over a stylized approach.

ontop of that he claims they’re working on an “AI auto LOD” tool which yes as mentioned prior retopology tools or auto LOD/decimate tools exist but they’re not really a catchall one click solution that i think hes trying to achieve? so that all remains to be seen

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To play devils advocate here, some people try to drown you in long videos.
The format of a video is probably the wrong format to begin with for any serious technical discussion. So I am not defending his use of chatgtp, but I get it.
Also people sometimes forget that just because someone works for a company that does not make him or her a spokesperson for that company.

Probably a mixture of both. Some don’t have to knowledge and others might have it but don’t have the time. Yesterday I discussed this with a friend of mine. His company does emergency coding and devops for other companies. These are companies that have their own huge IT but are in trouble so they pay a lot of money to hire them. A bank hired them to optimize code. He said that since 1y, he is basically only putting out fires. Never has he optimized anything.

I am no game dev but this sounds very funny to me.
So just that I get this straight, the main problem we have, is that game devs don’t optimize enough nowadays?
That is because Epic makes it easy for them to use tools that create unoptimized code and devs not having enough time to create optimized code.
So instead of using less wasteful tools, have more time to optimize code, learn deeper basics to understand how to even save GPU cycles, he tries to solve that introducing yet another tool that helps devs to not optimize the underlying basics but just sprinkle Ai over it?

This seems even more hilarious when I think that most of the Threat Interactive crowd rightfully dislikes how DLSS has led developers to depend on Ai instead of optimizing code :joy:

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