Ask Lemmy

DoF is hit or miss depending on the game, for me. I turn it off in games that have rather poor context sensitivity for what it blurs, but I'm okay with it in games where it only applies to, like, ADS. The former I hate because there are so many times I'm trying to get a good look at something, and it constantly blurs what I'm looking at because it's too close, or too far, or the cross hair isn't exactly on the right pixel, etc.

Playing MGS5 again recently and it annoys me that I can't turn DOF off (at least on PS5) because it works the way I dislike.

Bloom is nice for atmosphere. It's not nice when it's 7th gen style and overdone.

70% of the time, bloom is garbage, 25% of the time it's garbage and is covering up other graphical issues. 5% of the time, it gives some nice depth to light and emphasizes brightness differences, even without HDR.

So for me though, my eyes add their own motion blur, so why spend processing power on it?

In my experience it's much more likely to CAUSE frame drops than mask anything in a good way. It sure masks visual detail though

Motion blur in video games doesn't really work for many people. For example, it induces nausea for me. For others, it makes it difficult to identify and analyze a scene properly.

The OP's question asks you why you leave it on. Your answer could very well have ended at "Because I like it", but you chose to read it in bad faith and proceeded to make it about preference bashing, which it's clearly not.

Perhaps the phrasing is wrong, but you could give op benefit of the doubt and think about what you like about it since it's the de facto standard. For example, you could say "it makes me feel like I'm actually going faster, but also I just like it and your question is dumb". Informative and mean at the same time!

If a gay man asked you "what do you find attractive about women" or the N other combos of that question would you helpfully say "get lost weirdo, I like what I like and there is no point in discussing it"?

Note while you're shitting on op, op at no point said your opinion is wrong just that they wished to understand. You're the bad guy here, with unnecessary hostility in response to a question.

So let's just stop talking to each other all together, surely there's no point in gaining other perspectives

Best and most correct answer here ... and this comes from a guy that hates motion blur and lens flare

Motion blur in film does that, but with video games, in every implementation I've seen, you don't get a blur that works the same way. Movies will generally blur 50% of the motion between frames (a "180 degree shutter"), a smooth blur based on motion alone. Video games generally just blur multiple frames together (sometimes more than two!) leaving all of the distinct images there, just overlayed instead of actually motion blurred. So if something moved from one side of the screen all the way to the other within a single frame, you get double vision of that thing instead of it just being an almost invisible smear across the screen. To do it "right" you basically have to do motion interpolation first, then blur based on that, and if you're doing motion interpolation you may as well just show the sharp interpolated mid frames.

On top of that, motion blur tends to be computationally very expensive and you end up getting illegible 30fps instead of smooth 60+.

Wouldn't high fps resolve this issue at like 100?

One other factor that I think is an issue with motion blur: the modeling of shifting gaze in video games often isn't fantastic, due to input and output device limitations.

So, say you're just looking straight ahead in a game. Then motion blur might be fine -- only moving objects are blurred.

But one very prominent place where motion blur shows up is when the direction of your view is changing.

In a video game, especially if you're using a gamepad, it takes a while to turn around. And during that time, if the game is modeling motion blur, your view of the scene is blurred.

Try moving your eyeballs from side to side for a bit. You will get a motion-blurred scene. So that much is right.

But the problem is that if you look to the side in real life, it's pretty quick. You can maybe snap your eyes there, or maybe do a head turn plus an eye movement. It doesn't take a long time for your eyes to reach their destination.

So you aren't getting motion blur of the whole surrounding environment for long.

That is, humans have eyes that can turn rapidly and independently of our heads to track things, and heads that can turn independently of our torsos. So we often can keep our eyes facing in one direction or snap to another direction, and so we have limited periods of motion blur.

Then on top of that, many first person shooters or other games have a crosshair centered on the view. So aiming involves moving the view too. That is, the twin-stick video game character is basically an owl, with eyes that look in a fixed position relative to their head, additionally with their head fixed relative to their torso (at least in terms of yaw), and additionally with a gun strapped to their face, and additionally, with a limited rate of turn. A real life person like that would probably find motion blur more prominent too, since a lot of time, they'd be having to be moving their view relative to what they want to be looking at.

Might be that it'd be better if you're playing a game with a VR rig, since then you can have -- given appropriate hardware -- eyetracking and head tracking and aiming all separate, just like a human.

EDIT: Plus the fact that usually monitors are a smaller FOV than human FOV, so you have to move your direction of view more for situational awareness.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gcrlhn/what_fov_do_humans_have_like_in_video_games_can/

Human field of view is around 210 degrees horizontally. Each eye has about 150 degrees, with about 110 degrees common to the two and 40 degrees visible only to that eye.

A typical monitor takes up a considerably smaller chunk of one's viewing arc. My recall from past days is that PC FPS FOV is traditionally rendered at 90 degrees. That's actually usually a fisheye lens effect -- actual visible arc of the screen is usually lower, like 50 degrees, if you were gonna get an undistorted view. IIRC, true TV FOV is usually even smaller, as TVs are larger but viewers sit a lot further away, so console games might be lower. So you're working with this relatively-small window into the video game world, and you need to move your view around more to help maintain situational awareness; again, more movement of your direction of view. A VR rig also might help with that, I suppose, due to the wide FOV.