Just a little amusing and not that surprising.
It’s IMO not the effect itself but how it’s used. Way too often game devs use it to mask low FPS and visual artifacts of incompetent graphic pipeline (usually Unreal Engine)
I just launched Valheim again and disabling DoF and motion blur were both ‘accessibility’ settings. Rustled me jimmies good.
MY EYES ALREADY MOTION BLUR! THE GAME DOESN’T NEED TO ALSO BLUR!!!
They don’t do motion blur on monitors tho
End thread
It’s like cool, I’m at home and playing video games drunk and my computer is also drunk.
Lenses flare and motion blur are some of the first setting I turn off in any 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…).
Realism first! Foveated rendering for all games, not just VR! I only want the center of the display anyway!
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
Just to back up your edit, the tech has been around for decades. Only really reached consumers properly a couple decades ago, and has had no real adoption beyond the novelty. VR has brought it further into adoption, since you can render things at lower quality where the user isn’t looking. Further development of course depends on the adoption of VR which is slow at best and stagnant at worst.
I feel like this is sort of how foveated rendering works now in VR with eye tracking. Rendering only what’s directly in the center of your view at full resolution to reduce the rendering workload and boost performance. Since you’re not going to actually view all that a full resolution anyway in your peripheral vision.
It should be a lot harder than foveated rendering. For foveation you need to know the position of the eye, but for dof you need the shape of the lense inside the eye.
You could try estimating the focus based on what the eyes together point at, but the eyes don’t actually focus in perfect match with their stereo vision.And then if you do manage to track it, you need to undo the eyes lense too, since it’s naturally trying to blur the screen away from being in focus.
Currently vr just ignores it and the eye just doesn’t focus like it naturally would, but if you wanna have say the ability to focus between two overlapping things with the other blurring out of the way, you need that lense input, so you need the eye to focus, so you need to let the lense squeeze while the screen stays in focus.Tracking lenses seems so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if we get light field displays first. Which sidestep the whole problem and are really the right way to do it. Proper sharpness and blur on a passive screen even without tracking. For a good looking blur you probably only need a handful angular pixels, since you know the exact location the eye is at.
Yeah, VR doesn’t need to fake it. Foveated rendering does fake it to an extent, but it’s purely at a detriment to image quality, but it’s out-of-focus anyway, so that doesn’t really matter, but the performance increase does.
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.
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.
the Michael Bay of video game settings!
Film grain and bloom can look nice when used well imo, otherwise absolutely agree.
There are exceptions to the rules
Film grain
Same. I’m not wasting cycles on this bullshit.
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?
Screenshake is similarly overused
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
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.
Per-object motion blur is great but it’s a lot more expensive than a screen-space postprocessing effect.
tf kind of sorcery…this image triggered a weak motion sickness for me
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?”
L4D has a big b-movie theme going. That’s why they use filmgrain in places
The first setting I look for in every game
O.o How many games do you play that have film grain?
You know you’ve made me realise I kinda like it but I’m not sure exactly why. Huh.
Wild someone downvoted you for such a benign comment.
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.
Depends on what type of AA we’re talking. Old style geometry based tech is actually increased resolution at the edges. New temporal tech tho…
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.
BeamNG.drive is never going to have huge speed impression because it’s actually realistic.
Racing games cheat in all sorts of ways to make it feel faster than it actually is.
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.
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.
Next you’ll tell me you can’t get tinnitus from falling rocks.
100% agree, that update made a dramatic improvement to the sensation of speed in Beam.NG.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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.
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
