As a Roblox developer who is into making PBR materials, I find it really difficult to make anything properly reflective. For example, I tried to make this custom water texture below:
Please allow Roblox’s rendering pipeline to have proper SSR instead of creating the matte, plastic look the current engine keeps rendering. I’d love to have sharp light outlines (main priority) and even actual reflections if it’s doable. I understand cross-platform is a priority, so you can always make it fall back to the current system if the device isn’t capable of handling SSR, or you can make it a toggle that the developer can enforce if they prefer to keep the quality.
I apologise if this is poorly explained; I don’t know the exact technical terminology behind this, but I hope the idea came across properly.
I can see the vision. But this does fall down under “High graphics fidelity” and knowing Roblox.. they don’t necessarily prioritize that…
However, they have alreadu implemented a system for a engine to downgrade based on the client’s specs.. In the update where PBR was supported on UGC items. If your device can’t run PBR well, the engine automatically downgrades it to not use PBR materials. .
I would assume they would do the same here
I don’t agree with this. I would have the engine to downscale it rather it being forced. If this is something that was forced onto weak devices. If there’s a game that relies on SSR just to make it look pretty. . Then its rather a massive problem how you developed lighting
I’m not going to get into much further details as I think its obvious what I would say. .
Personally I believe that keeping a toggle for SSR priority is a neat feature but for showcase games or high-fidelity graphics games.
Also, I’d have faith in the developer community for a setting in the game to disable this, and either way if the graphics setting is lower than, lets say 8, the SSR wouldn’t even render anyway.
hey! sorry for the SUPER late response, got tied up as well . i get where you’re coming from, however I feel like it should be up to the dev. maybe i’m not targetting mobile audiences at all, maybe my game is a visual showcase that’s meant to have accurate depiction of what I want to communicate with users visually. why should I let my game suffer visually if my target reason isn’t for reach f.ex but for showcase reasons?
not sure if i’m making sense, would love to hear back
Roblox engine is a unoptimized mess. Even with optimization tools, its still garbage in performance. Now yes, a showcase game shouldn’t be restricted on graphids fidelity. I mean I love graphics especially with reflection and lighting. However, I do prefer consistent frametime and obviously decent FPS.
In the original post, when you said about “Devlopers enforcing it” I processed as “Regardless if you have bad hardware, It’ll be forced to render ___” which is something I whole heartedly disagree with. Hence why I suggested it should be the user to add it.
However I do think developers should have a option of “SSR Support” to allow players to get SSR benefits while also giving developers control. . There are some problems but thats a whole different story.
I do understand that if the game is not targetted to a specific audience, you shouldn’t be restricted. But until Roblox, rewrites their engine to be optimized especially for really intense “High graphics fidelity” features, stuff like this may not see this coming for a long time.
(I mean even with high end PC, some people experience inconsistent performance)
…Yes? Regardless of whatever hardware I have, the newest games released (outside of Roblox, for example) do the same. They have settings, sure, but you cant go beyond the minimum. And if the minimum decides to run poorly, that’s not an issue on the game, but on my hardware. Should we start to completely stop innovating in graphics because oh, you know, it might not run on an iPhone 6? (like Roblox is doing…)
You are not forced to play OPs game. Just don’t play it. I wan’t to play the newest games released, yet can’t due to my hardware, yet I do not contact the developers of the games and say “Can you stop making your game look good for the rest and downgrade it to the worst possible point so I can play too? Oh you can’t? Then uhm.. unrelease the game for everyone. If I can’t have it, nobody can!”.
It is 2026. Roblox has gone a far way but it is heavily declining in alot of ways.
The only real reason as to why I believe it is still favored by some developers is that it does networking for them and also has an entire social/game discovery part. That’s all it offers over other game engines, such as Unity or Godot.
BUT NO, we can’t have SSR because dear Java’s old laptop can’t run a shader that’s been a readily available thing since 2006! Hell, we can’t even have proper anything in this game engine, I’ve been waiting on features SINCE 2009. Have some guts and stand up to this engine. Make them do their job. I feel like they pay their software engineers just to sit around.
You have completely misunderstood my original point and unfortunate disrespectful comments what I said…
That was NOT my point. Yes, Roblox holding back features for sake of older devices. Also, I even said this
But until Roblox, rewrites their engine to be optimized especially for really intense “High graphics fidelity” features, stuff like this may not see this coming for a long time.
(I mean even with high end PC, some people experience inconsistent performance)
That’s one of the reasons why Roblox is holding back on graphical features. Their engine probably needs a full rewrite to ensure these features can run well on higher end devices (take UE 5.0+ as example)
Do you really want a unoptimized/super old engine to attempt supporting/running RTX graphics, reflections? The engine doesn’t even support DX12, multi-threaded CPU support, GPU-related hardware (CUDA cores, etc) and other tools that’s good for OPTIMIZATION)
What? Wait what are you trying to achieve here? I DID NOT made any points about “Developers needs to tune their graphics for everyone to play”. That should be the Roblox Engine Job. Not the developer.
I have never stated that I contacted developers to tune their games down, nor have I ever suggested about it. It is common optimization sense (besides showcase games). Besides that, I stated multiple times it Should be a OPTIONAL feature. Whether togglable for the user or the engine’s responsibility.
Please stop making assumptions because I did not said anything related to what you just said
Thanks for a good laugh, appreciate it.
Anywho, I did not said “SSR should never be implemented”. The only thing I said related to that is this:
If this is something that was forced onto weak devices
I obviously forgot about showcase games which I did corrected myself a bit in my latest response (before this). I’ll still stand on my suggestion, this should be togglable for the player or the engine’s responsibility.
I even said this here:
However I do think developers should have a option of “SSR Support” to allow players to get SSR benefits while also giving developers control. .
If you been waiting for features since 2009, I believe you should know how old the engine was/currently is. . If the engine is not capable of supporting advanced features, then you DO NOT add it at all. (At least IMO)
Thats like implementing hand made RTX-like graphics into your game and expect to run native resolution.. Thats why developers will force the resolution to 144p (or less) for optimal performance.
I believe that’s all I have to say for now. Call me a cry baby all you want but you essentially put words into my mouth, misinterpreted my original point and flatout disrespected me. I know you simply disagree but the response is crossing the line if you ask me.
Sorry that I’ve seemed to direct my complete distain of the progress that Roblox has been doing in the past years towards you, that was my fault.
Roblox is old, you’re right about that. It is not, however, old/unmaintained enough to say this. Roblox is very much capable of running more, what’s holding them back is supporting old devices and their own sloppy codebase. (And their sloppy codebase is not sloppy enough to not support SSR.)
SSR is screenspace. It has nothing to do with RTX graphics and doesn’t require much work to do. While DX12 is the current standard, it is not needed for Roblox and often time leads to less performance than DX11.
The Roblox engine should not govern what and what not a developer should do. If a developer wants to make their game graphically intensive, then so be it. There is a point where the engine cannot “stay optimized” regardless of how well it is written if the developer throws massive graphical workload at the hardware.
The quip about your laptop not running SSR was less directed at you, but more towards Roblox’s efforts supporting long deprecated hardware and graphics APIs, such as GLES 2.0.
Many effects such as Blur, DoF, and other screenspace PostFX already get disabled below a certain graphics level. Surely would be the same case here.
The Kindest Regards to Ever Grace Humankind,
Robin
That’s one of the reasons why Roblox is holding back on graphical features. Their engine probably needs a full rewrite to ensure these features can run well on higher end devices (take UE 5.0+ as example)
Do you really want a unoptimized/super old engine to attempt supporting/running RTX graphics, reflections? The engine doesn’t even support DX12, multi-threaded CPU support, GPU-related hardware (CUDA cores, etc) and other tools that’s good for OPTIMIZATION)
why would they need an enigne rewrite for ssr when the actual performance impact is gpu bound ? cpu side of things is probably only downscaling and binding the textures needed for ssr to samplers used in the shader. gpu side, whatever shader algorithm used will determine if ssr is performant or not
either way, now it has been proven that ssr is possible. it’s not like reshade, someone added a native post-processing instance for ssr with adjustable parameters controlled by scripts:
No worries, I understand. Happens sometimes especially if we disagree. I also apologize on my behalf for taking certain points to seriously (or taking it wrong way)
Good point, considering more bugs (and some critical ones) has been happening. Wouldn’t be surprised if their code is just not well “maintained”. I mean I think the Outage that lasted 3 days speaks it very well
True, it is screenspace. My argument I tried to make was that “Roblox doesn’t support some of these features”. I mean even some beneficial ones that can increase performance, are not yet supported. Hence why I also pointed out that even players with high end pcs.. Could somehow suffer inconsistent performance issues.
Right, at that point it’s practically the developer’s problem. I think I was trying to go for is like, the engine should have some deciding factor on performace based on the user’s specs. I mean even with PBR UGC Items and 4K textures, etc. The engine will downscaled it to make it better for the player. But I can see that the engine shouldn’t “govern” everything related to graphics/optimization.
Apologies on my behalf for taking it seriously. I can’t give my personal opinion since I do not have knowledge about Roblox Graphics APIs. I mean I don’t know what GLES is (I’ll research it).
I do acknowledge that some of my points are inconsistent. I do think it should be togglable but having the basic Graphical system of what Roblox uses isn’t bad either. I had always depised Roblox “Graphics Quality” because its a very old system and some graphics are/aren’t resource intensive. Which I lean more to “Togglable” option rather Roblox’s current system.
The reason why I stated that Roblox would probably need to rewrite their engine because in its current state. There’s a lot of missing features that can benefits one’s performance.
In the aspects of GPU, Roblox has not yet taken advantage of any GPU exclusive features. Regardless if its Nvida, AMD or even Intel. Now granted its for security reasons which is understandable. Roblox is more CPU demanding then GPU even with some games having very impressive graphics (that should lean more on GPU with highest graphics quality)
Also according to @Xtrax42 Roblox uses old Graphics APIs for sake of very old hardware support.
As well since critical bugs are arising faster and even that time where Roblox was down for 3 days. Shows their code is old and yet to rewrite it for long-term stability.
The reason why I stated that Roblox would probably need to rewrite their engine because in its current state. There’s a lot of missing features that can benefits one’s performance.
you need to elaborate?
In the aspects of GPU, Roblox has not yet taken advantage of any GPU exclusive features. Regardless if its Nvida, AMD or even Intel. Now granted its for security reasons which is understandable. Roblox is more CPU demanding then GPU even with some games having very impressive graphics (that should lean more on GPU with highest graphics quality)
again you need to elaborate on said “GPU exclusive features”
Also according to @Xtrax42 Roblox uses old Graphics APIs for sake of very old hardware support.
it doesn’t mean that roblox has to support them
As well since critical bugs are arising faster and even that time where Roblox was down for 3 days. Shows their code is old and yet to rewrite it for long-term stability.
that is completely unrelated because that is their web infrastructure. it has nothing to do with the state of the engine
. i get where you’re coming from, however I feel like it should be up to the dev. maybe i’m not targetting mobile audiences at all, maybe my game is a visual showcase that’s meant to have accurate depiction of what I want to communicate with users visually. why should I let my game suffer visually if my target reason isn’t for reach f.ex but for showcase reasons?