Just a little amusing and not that surprising.
It’s like cool, I’m at home and playing video games drunk and my computer is also drunk.
Per-object motion blur is great but it’s a lot more expensive than and screen-space postprocessing effect.
I really liked when the screen would blur if you were suppressed in bf4. Really made it feel intense and actually gave you a reason to pin down someone with an lmg.
Yeah that and other shell-shock mechanics like the audio fading out and ringing sounds replacing them can be really immersive. But if im just looking left or right I dont want to feel like Im hammered.
For me, film grain is the worst. I first came across it in Left 4 Dead and I remember thinking “wtf is this trash?”
You know you’ve made me realise I kinda like it but I’m not sure exactly why. Huh.
Because it’s terribly implemented.
Yep, I usually end up installing reshade to tweak it myself. CShade can look pretty good if you tinker around with it.
Lenses flare and motion blur are some of the first setting I turn off in any game.
It’s mind-blowing that most games still default to motion blur on. Makes me think they’re trying to cover up for something.
Every now and then a game will have it off by default and I’ll be like aw yeah. Seems to be happening more often.
Wardogs! Great game
I hate DOF, too. Your eyes aren’t a camera, any place you look should be in focus!
My eyes will do the blurring on their own, thank you very much. Same goes for motion blur.
Yeah we see non blurred only in a ridiculously small portion we look at anyways, IIRC it’s in a 3° split angle from the centre (yes you read that correctly, a cone at 3 degrees…).
huh? Your eyes absolutely do have limited depth of field just like any camera, and need to focus at a particular distance. Anything as close as your nose will be out of focus, and if you’re reading something close, your distant vision will be blurry.
You usually don’t notice it because the focus immediately follows your active attention.
It looks wrong in games when the game wrongly assumes which item on screen you actually want to be looking at.
I think you misunderstood what they meant. Like you said, your eyes adjust to have anything you’re looking at in focus. This means games shouldn’t use DoF because it makes everything not in the center of the screen out of focus. Our eyes can look at anything on the screen, not just the center. Until the game can track our eyes, not the center point, DoF is doing the opposite of what our eyes do. We can only look at one point clearly, instead of seeing anything we look at clearly.
I wonder if there’s a tech demo somewhere on the Internet of DoF using eye tracking
edit: huh yeah, here’s a video 18 years old. kinda neat https://youtu.be/HdW1v9TPNYw
Their point was wherever we look it is in focus, because our eyes adjust, so the game should not blur anything, because if I want to look at trees down the road they shouldn’t default to blurry because I’m not at the trees.
This is part of art direction and the director is trying to focus the viewer’s attention on a particular area by utilizing it.
I understand where you’re coming from but utilized well, it is a powerful tool.
It’s a movie technique. Makes sense for cutscenes, not for gameplay.
Look, I do hear you, but when there is a director involved and they want to shape the narrative in a particular direction, then that’s one of the tools they have available. It’s just what it is.
Regardless of the reason, on PCs you fortunately usually have the option to turn that crap off.
Screenshake is similarly overused
FPS 16.4->120
What about bloom? That’s another instant “turn off” for me.
Bloom is good so long it’s not overdone. It makes bright lights actually look bright when you can’t physically make the pixels brighter like on an HDR screen
I always imagine Oblivion level of bloom and that’s instant OFF.
Motion blur, Depth of Field, Bloom, Chromatic aberration.
Off, Off, Off and Off.
Vignette, Film grain.
Off, Off.
Film grain and bloom can look nice when used well imo, otherwise absolutely agree.
There are exceptions to the rules
Same. I’m not wasting cycles on this bullshit.
Film grain
Depth of field is actually useful though
Are you thinking Depth of Field or Field of View? DoF just blurs things that the cursor isn’t pointing at, which I find obnoxious.
Depth of field, it can give depth to a game. Yeah not every game utilizes it well, but its still a nice feature for adding realism.
Does…does your peripheral blur on you?
Depth means Distance.
You good dude?
Lens flare doesn’t bother me, but its “Depth of Field” that drives me bonkers. I always turn motion blur and depth of field off.
tf kind of sorcery…this image triggered a weak motion sickness for me
I don’t mind it at like 30fps as it does make it feel better for me but a majority of the time I turn it off.
Because that’s what it’s made for. Hidding motion at frames too low for comfortable viewing.
It’s also completely unnecessary. Motion blur is already a product of your brain not being able to keep up with your eyes and you’ll get a more natural motion blur without adding fake motion blur when the motion is fast enough.
When done properly, it plays a similar role to antialiasing, which is also an artificially added blur to cover up rendering artifacts.
Depending on the monitor ghosting will be there for you as well. Lol
Don’t even need a crappy monitor anymore; they can artificially add ghosting via DLSS/FSR if it’s not implemented well.
Motion blur is great in racing/driving games, but that’s largely it. BeamNG.drive added it a couple updates back and it improves the looks a lot in my opinions. Makes speed feel actually fast.
That’s because that’s a scenario where motion blur is needed the most: when things are moving so fast they might move several pixels within one frame.
100% agree, that update made a dramatic improvement to the sensation of speed in Beam.NG.
Maybe because it matches the motion. High blur in a game where you’re just turning or moving around on foot shouldn’t distort vision so badly.
Good motion blur is actually pretty decent but games seem to always use shitty implementations, had to use reshade for it
The problem with motion blur is that game developers look at the basic physical cause of it, think they understand it, and then implement it.
Motion blur shows the motion that occured while the camera was capturing a frame. Game devs tend to interpret this one of two ways:
- Apply blur from the last game frame to this frame. This makes motion blur change length depending on frame rate, which makes stutters impact the rendered frame visually.
- Go for a ‘cinematic’ look by making the motion blur show the last 1/24th of a second of motion regardless of actual frame rate.
In reality, most cameras aren’t capturing data 100% of the time. Film cameras couldn’t because they needed to move the film. Most movies are only capturing a frame a quarter of the time or less. A proper implementation is like design 2 but with it set to 1/96th of a second or even shorter for action games.
I always thought Crysis 3 did it well, and that came out 13 years ago!
and DOOM 2016
If your character is drunk, drugged, or otherwise impaired, yeah load up the motion blur.
Besides that, I don’t get why it’s there. Stuff just kinda naturally blurs when you turn fast if your eyes can’t keep up. If your eyes can keep up, why would you want it blurry?
per-object is nice. Tip of your sword blurring when swung feels right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZldCfYGb54c
I just don’t understand why it is usually on by default.
Because it’s ✨cinematic✨
Never mind that you’re playing a game, not watching a movie!
This, and film grain and chromatic abberation, I immediately turn off. And maybe reduce screen shake if it’s too high. And increase the FOV because usually it’s set low for console gamers on the couch.
It’s only “cinematic” in movies because of limited tech. I made the mistake of watching The Hobbit in HFR. It was only a mistake because I’ve seen what we could have, but again idiots said no because it’s new and different.
Personally I prefer the cinematic muddiness for movies, at least for now. I watched one of the Nolan Batman movies in 60fps hdr and you could see the wires and the winch and other set equipment when they did stunts.
There needs to be an awkward time. It was the exact same way when higher resolution first took off. I thought the Prestige looked bad because you could see the set work. The high resolution stayed though and they figured out the tricks to make things look good. High frame rate never got that chance
What did you see it in HFR? I would like to experience that again
I saw it in theaters at release. I think AMC carried it? The first one only, I don’t think the others had them, though not sure as I didn’t see movies then (no money).
In my experience, these are often tuned for the trailer, or tuned for someone watching the game played, rather than tuning it for the player. The game is experienced very differently from those different perspectives, and it’s sometimes difficult to keep them all in mind when making a large game.
It makes lower framerates look a bit better. I think that’s mostly it, especially considering 30fps is still the default on consoles.
Maybe I overlooked it, but I didn’t see anyone here mention per-object motion blur, which does look pretty good in some implementations. Obviously it shouldn’t be overdone, but iirc FromSoft games tend to use it and I quite like the effect.
yea, quite like per-object motion blur. Dont mind the tip of my sword bluring when i swing it… but i hate when it ALL becomes a smeared mess.
I thought that just existed to hide the fact games were only running at 30fps.
Yeah, it does help to hide low frame rates.
Also, Temporal Anti Aliasing (and TAA-on-steroids, aka. DLSS) work by jiggling the camera by less than a pixel every frame, and blending the results of previous frames into the new one. If things were on-screen before, but have moved, can use its colour from its old position - computer knows where things used to be. Cheaper than other AA methods, good results if there’s little movement on screen, and handles deferred lighting and transparency well, which other AA can struggle with.
If there is a lot of movement on screen? Big motion blur in post-processing to hide the fact there’s no AA till it can build back up again.
