I despise motion blur and am always baffled by the fact that it's usually on by default.

Why do they want to make the game look like I bought a cheap monitor? I specifically did NOT buy a cheap monitor, because I don't want everything to be blurry

And film grain

I'll sometimes leave motiom blur enabled... If its well implemented. Usually it's not

Depth of field stays on for me, even in competitive FPS. That's non-negotiable.

Kind of makes sense for something like Halo where your character has a helmet/visor.

BLOODY SCREEN!

So real!

In the same vein, lens flares in FPS games are annoying.

It's meant to represent your character being wet/dirty. Adds to the sense of immersion by simulating the sensation of touch.

I think vignette and film grain can both look great in small doses and in the right situations, but they have to be really subtle. If you can actively see them, it's already far too much. Unfortunately, most games go wayyyy overboard with them.

Film grain has a few psychological effects:

• it can evoke a sense of nostalgia, as if you're watching old footage
• it can add texture, which can stop players from perceiving flat textures as being as, well, flat, stop jagged edges from standing out as much, and adding a sense of depth
• it can make something feel more "genuine" - rather than being clean, edited, almost clinical feeling, film grain can make things feel a little more raw and believable
• it can add a "documentary feel", especially combined with camera shake (another thing a lot of games are far too liberal with, but that can be great in the right moment/dosage) which can make the player/viewer feel more like they're in the action themselves
• a lot of cinematic masterpieces were filmed on analogue film. Film grain is something people subconsciously associate with something being cinematic, to the point where a lot of modern film/TV that's shot on digital cameras (and therefore doesn't have film grain) will have digital noise added to emulate the effect. Games do it for the same reason.

As for vignette, I think this is far more niche and definitely something that isn't used well in a lot of games. The biggest reasons to use it are:

• to draw the player/viewer's eye to the centre of the screen/frame
• to reduce the player's peripheral vision - this can be good for horror games to add a feeling of claustrophobia, or in any genre when the player is wounded (although many games will add fairly distinctive bloody overlays rather than a simple vignette)
• during low-light situations - like above, but it can really sell the darkness a lot more (on top of actual low-lighting effects) if there's a well-done vignette.

The thing is, both things need to be used in tasteful quantities, and ideally done dynamically. Just plastering them over the entire screen all the time looks terrible, whereas using them in specific situations and being more selective with how they're applied - like in low-light situations, certain environments, or specific story moments - can work really well. And most developers simply don't do that.

+1 For "Chromatic Abortion."

Depth of field is an incredibly important tool for photographers? Not sure why you think they try to avoid it 99% of the time (apart from the fact that you literally can't avoid it, but I'm assuming you mean shallow DoF).

I hate motion blur so much. The only time I have ever seen it used properly is in Everspace 2, when you fly into a zone

They did a real good job on the NoS effect in the 2005 Need for Speed: Most Wanted, although it's unrealistic but was cool as fuck.

There is no reason to have these unless you're doing a flashback and want to intuitively imply how much older this scene is versus the other ones.

There actually is a reason for both of those to be used in video game development

You really should do some research on practical applications of both of these features

But instead, video games just turn them on or off, CEOs being too cheap to pay artists to go over the scenes one by one and utilize these effects to their full artistic potential.

And apparently do some research into how these are implemented.

Noise/Grain is used to add texture after using some sharp aliasing, it can subtly help blend things. Similarly aberration can help soften edges that get really sharp when rendering.

Irregardless of what they can practically be used for, they are implemented as simple features that users have the ability to control. Both features are just screen space shaders that take very little dev time and processing power. They are added as an extra little feature that's simple not because the CEO is too cheap. It sounds like you are unhappy with a game you've played and seemingly blamed it on them adding a noise filter, so now any use of it is lazy.

I absolutely hate motion blur in games too. It's usually way too strong and only gets in the way. Not to mention it tends to be a heavy-ish effect on lower-end hardware, and nobody optimizes shit for shit these days.

Me too! Depending on the game and implementation, it can look awesome.

I like chromatic abberation too. And film grain, vignettes, scan-lines, dirty/wet camera effect, lens flares. The lot.

Not all at the same time and not on max settings. But when having a helmet equipped or using something like a Scanner or spectacles in a game, why not? If it suits the purpose and / or the aesthetic, I'm fine with it.

Personally I draw the line at motion blur, which simply makes me sick.

Depends on the game. A fast paced FPS, sure that would be bad. A story driven detective noir, that could look great.

Because le Reddit army hates it so they do too. Half of these nerds get all their opinions told to them

What's fascinating is that lenses for photolithography, the process used for projecting the patterns of the mask on the silicon substrate in the manufacturing of integrated circuits, have almost no aberrations, or at least their effect is negligible! That's due to the awesome engineering behind modern lens manufacturing. These were brought about, for the most part, by growing automation and computerisation and subsequent gains in precision. This means that imperfect lenses were once used for photolithography to make ICs, those ICs were then used to make better lenses, the resulting better lenses could make better ICs again, etc. We owe so much to computers!

Even object based I found myself disabling in like third person game if they applied it to the character model too with movement coming across blurry. I prefer crisp visible animations overall.

Instead of file grain they should use dithering if they want to remove banding.

The film grain doesn’t really hide the banding that well.

I think the film grain is just to make it look like a film not to hide color banding.

Especially for steam deck. Wish there was an option to have a community preset you choose replace the settings.

That would be a fantastic feature, and valve is worker directed - if you convince a valve dev to implement it, it could easily catch on

How is Andromeda these days?

Considering giving it a go next sub $10 sale.

Motion blur is fine if you're consistently getting 60+ fps, but is awful with lower fps in my experience. Mostly looking at you Cyberpunk on Steam Deck.

Hdr = less color banding

Sadly hdr is still new and not done right in games the past several years

limitation of lens physics

Hi Margot, that's an interesting observation. Those kind of artifacts have been associated with the big screen for so long that they keep persisting in the public consciousness, even though digital production is now the norm. I think we forget sometimes that these were not stylistic choices but the result of the limitations of film equipment. Nostalgia can be a weird intoxicating thing, I wonder if we'll ever feel the same way about AM radio?

Oh, and I'm sorry to do the "akshually" thing, but adjusts glasses some directors have been known to shine flashlights into the camera while filming to create intentional lens flare effects. So, like, it does happen in the film industry too. Sorry, wasn't going for a "gotcha" moment... I akshually did have to adjust my glasses just now and felt obligated.

Exactly.

In film and picture, all of these features are things you want to avoid. A lot of effort goes into avoiding chromatic abberation and motion blur in particular. Depth of field is used on purpose, sure, but in a very controlled manner.

So what really does a video game then want to tell me if it has all of these + film grain and some other shit? "Our graphics are bad"? Because that's what I associate with these effects, bad cameras or bad filming.

In fairness, movies also insult the games industry by nearly constantly portraying gamers as shut-ins who play mindless killing games.

Never once have I seen a casual game like Slime Ranchers or Animal Crossing in a movie. Not that I'm not expecting to, I'm just tired of seeing Generic Shooter #3663749.

not all options are given menu options or ways to be disabled, even worse some are enforced without a way to disable them at all.

M8 you hate OP but you couldn't be bothered to even readthwirpost right. You just posted cringe, straight trash

Also head bobbing, some games make me nauseous.

I just genuinely do not see the difference except in my frame rate.

Perhaps whichever game you tried it in had poorly implemented RT, or maybe when you tried it there were simply not many reflective surfaces around (which is where the most drastic effects of RT are most visible).

Add motion blur to that list too.

what kind of psycho turns off ambient occlusion? it has zero impact on performance.

Long story short, you have a shallow perception of the world, and you seem to want your games to be also as shallow. Something causes you to see these effects when they're on an LCD screen, but not in the real world, and the disconnect bothers you.

Or you just have some narrow perception of the world where you think games only do this in places where it would actually happen. There are literally 3rd person games that have this. But I'm sure uhh, let's see here.... Yeah it's a camera is following you around and that camera has a lens with poor chromatic abberation. Yup. That's it.

Get off your fucking high horse.

I was with you until that second paragraph.