I always turn that shit off. Especially bad when it’s a first-person game, as if your eyes were a camera.
I don’t mind a bit of lens flare, and I like depth of field in dialog interactions. But motion blur and chromatic aberration can fuck right off.
I mind lens flare a lot because I am not playing as a camera and real eyes don’t get lens flares.
That’s fair. I usually turn it off for FPS games. But if it’s mild, I leave it on for third person games where I am playing as a camera.
Same same
Shadows: Off
Polygons: Low
Idle Animation: Off
Draw distance: LowPS3-> everything is sepia filtered and bloomed until nearly unplayable.
I will say that a well executed motion blur is just a chef’s kiss type deal, but it’s hard to get right and easy to fuck up
Man, VGCats. Deep, deep, deep cut
I think of that comic every time I see a gritty brown game. I don’t see bloom as much any more, though.
I think maybe that’s part of why The Last Of Us grabbed everyone so hard; it was a gritty, green game. STALKER 2 is brown AF, though. Thank God they skipped the whole bloom fad.
PS3-> everything is sepia filtered and bloomed until nearly unplayable.
That’s just games from that period. It’s not excluse to PS3.
Personally I use motion blur in every racing game I can but nothing else. It helps with the sense of speed and smoothness.
Early HDR games were rough. I look back at Zelda Twilight Princess screenshots, and while I really like that game, I almost squint looking at it because it’s so bloomed out.
The main problem with these is giving people control of these properties without them knowing how the cameras work in real life.
The problem is that I am not playing as a camera, so why the hell would I want my in-game vision to emulate one?
I like DoF as it actually has a purpose in framing a subject. The rest are just lazy attempts at making the game “look better” by just slopping on more and more effects.
Current ray tracing sucks because its all fake AI bullshit.
The only game with Raytracing I’ve seen actually look better with RT on js Cyberpunk 2077. It’s the only game I’ve seen that has full raytraced reflections on surfaces. Everything else just does shadows, and there’s basically no visual difference with it on or off; it just makes the game run slower when on.
But those reflections in CP are amazing as fuck. Seeing things reflect in real time off a rained on road is sick.
I agree with this. That makes it even more jarring to me that mirrors inside of safehouses don’t work until you specifically interact with them. It seems so out of place in a game that has all of these cool raytraced reflections except for a mirror you directly look into.
I just don’t see them as mirrors. They are video screens with a camera in them. ;)
It’s also connected to a performance feature. They can load lower resolution textures for faraway objects. You can do this without the blurring effect of DoF, but it’s less jarring if you can blur it.
The cost of DoF rendering far outweighs the memory savings of using reduced texture sizes, especially on older hardware where memory would be at a premium
I think Halo Infinite has a good example of a limited ray traced effect (the shadows) and an example of a terrible DoF effect (it does not look realistic at all or visually appealing)
Now… in fairness…
Chromatic abberation and lense flares, whether you do or don’t appreciate how they look (imo they arguably make sense in say CP77 as you have robot eyes)…
… they at least usually don’t nuke your performance.
Motion blur, DoF and ray tracing almost always do.
Hairworks? Seems to be a complete roll of the dice between the specific game and your hardware.
Motion Blur and depth of field has almost no impact on performance. Same with Anisotropic Filtering and I can not understand why AF isn’t always just defaulted to max, since even back in the golden age of gaming it had no real performance impact on any system.
I love it when the hair bugs out and covers the whole distance from 0 0 0 to 23944 39393 39
I’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.
Unfortunately that’s not a setting most of us can just disable.
/c/[email protected] sure you can
These settings can be good, but are often overdone. See bloom in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
Yeah, chromatic aberration when done properly is great for emulating certain cameras and art styles. Bloom is designed to make things look even brighter and it’s great if you don’t go nuts with it. Lens flares are mid but can also be used for some camera stuff. Motion blur is generally not great but that’s mainly because almost every implementation of it for games is bad.
Also the ubiquitous “realistic” brown filter a la Far Cry 2 and GTA IV. Which was often combined with excessive bloom to absolutely destroy the player’s eyes.
At least in Far Cry 2 you are suffering from malaria.
I always hated bloom, probably because it was overused. As a light touch it can work, but that is rarely how devs used it.
It’s usually better in modern games. In the 2005-2015 era it was often extremely overdone, actually often reducing the perceived dynamic range instead of increasing it IMO.
All those features sucked when they first came out, not just bloom.
Add DLSS to the list. I’ve never had an experience where DLSS didn’t make my game run better. It always makes the textures worse and the game run worse than just setting it to native resolution and a specific texture quality.
Whaaaa? You must be using some ali express DLSS or something.
Wym? I love DLSS. If I can’t get a solid framerate at native resolution, DLSS really brings a lot to the table with a minor loss of quality imo.
Edit: I reread your message, and I missed the double negative in your sentence. Did you mean games never run better with DLSS?
That is odd. DLSS should definitely net you a handful of frames. Games often run better with ray tracing on and DLSS on quality vs native without ray tracing, sometimes doubling it. Some newer titles I find are only playable (at the very least 60 fps) because of DLSS (which is a whole problem in and of itself). I absolutely prefer running without any sort of temporal AA because of smudges and ghosting.
motion blur is essential for a proper feeling of speed.
most games don’t need a proper feeling of speed.
Motion blur is guarenteed to give me motion sickness every time. Sometimes I forget to turn it off on a new game… About 30 minutes in I’ll break into cold sweats and feel like I’m going to puke. I fucking hate that it’s on by default in so many games.
It really should be a prompt at first start. Like, ask a few questions like:
- do you experience motion sickness?
- do you have epilepsy?
The answers to those would automatically disable certain settings and features, or drop you into the settings.
It would be extra nice for a platform like PlayStation or Steam to remember those preferences and the game could read them (and display a message so you know it’s doing it).
Motion blur + low FOV is an instant headache.
… What?
I mean… the alternative is to get hardware (including a monitor) capable of just running the game at an fps/hz above roughly 120 (ymmv), such that your actual eyes and brain do real motion blur.
Motion blur is a crutch to be able to simulate that from back when hardware was much less powerful and max resolutions and frame rates were much lower.
At highet resolutions, most motion blur algorithms are quite inefficient and eat your overall fps… so it would make more sense to just remove it, have higher fps, and experience actual motion blur from your eyes+brain and higher fps.
my basis for the statement is beam.ng. at 100hz, the feeling of speed is markedly different depending on whether motion blur is on. 120 may make a difference.
You still see doubled images instead of a smooth blur in your peripheral vision I think when you’re focused on the car for example in a racing game.
There is always motion blur if your monitor is shitty enough.
Just turn on TAA and free motion blur in any game!
Or your brain slow enough
Or the drugs good enough
Damn this Panzerschokolade be hitting different.
yeah the only time I liked it was in need for speed when they added nitro boost. the rest of the options have their uses imo I don’t hate them.
Out of all of these, motion blur is the worst, but second to that is Temporal Anti Aliasing. No, I don’t need my game to look blurry with every trailing edge leaving a smear.
TAA is kind of the foundation that almost all real time raytracing and frame generation are built on, and built off of.
This is why it is increasingly difficult to find a newer, high fidelity game that even allows you to actually turn it off.
If you could, all the subsequent
magicbullshit stops working, all the hardware in your GPU designed to do that stuff is now basically useless.What? All Ray Tracing games already offer DLSS or FSR, which override TAA and handle motion much better. Yes, they are based on similar principles, but they aren’t the mess TAA is.
Almost all implementations of DLSS and FSR literally are evolutions of TAA.
TAA 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, whatever.
If you are running DLSS or FSR, see if your game will let you turn TAA off.
They often won’t, because they often require TAA to be enabled before DLSS or FSR can then hook into them and extrapolate from there.
Think of TAA as a base game and DLSS/FSR as a dlc. You very often cannot just play the DLC without the original game, and if you actually dig into game engines, you’ll often find you can’t run FSR/DLSS without running TAA.
There are a few exceptions to this, but they are rare.
Honestly motion blur done well works really well. Cyberpunk for example does it really well on the low setting.
Most games just dont do it well tho 💀
But why did you buy a 1800€ video card then?
So you can use a more demanding form on anti-aliasing, that doesn’t suck ass?
Like rip maps instead of mip maps? Or is it some AI bs nowadays?
Unreal doesn’t even have other forms of AA iirc. It’s up to the devs to implement
farming bitcoin. Duh.
Chromatic aberration and Motion blur are the absolute most important to turn off right away for me, but DoF is a close second. I don’t mind the other stuff.
Don’t forget TAA!
Worst fucking AA ever created and it blows my mind when it’s the default in a game.
Step 1. Turn on ray tracing
Step 2. Check some forum or protondb and discover that the ray tracing/DX12 is garbage and gets like 10 frames
Step 3. Switch back to DX11, disable ray tracing
Step 4. Play the game
Best use of ray tracing I’ve seen is to make old games look good, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft. Newer games are “I see the reflection in the puddle just under the car when I put them side by side” and I just can’t bring myself to care.
I don’t even check anymore lol.
True, I’ve had very few games worth the fps hit
If I know a game I’m about to play runs on Unreal Engine, I’m passing a -dx11 flag immediately. It removes a lot of useless Unreal features like Nanite
Then you get to enjoy they worst LODs known to man because they were only made as a fallback
Nanite doesn’t affect any of the post processing stuff nor the smeary look. I don’t like that games rely on it but modern ue5 games author their assets for nanite. All it affects is model quality and lods.
Lumen and other real time GI stuff is what forces them to use temporal anti aliasing and other blurring effects, that’s where the slop is.
what’s wrong with nanite?
Nanite + Lumen run like garbage on anything other than super high end hardware.
It is also very difficult to tweak and optimize.
Nanite isn’t as unperformant as Lumen, but its basically just a time saver for game devs, and its very easy for a less skilled game dev to think they are using it correctly… and actually not be.
But, Nanite + Lumen have also become basically the default for AAA games down to shitty asset flips… because they’re easier to use from a dev standpoint.
