Anon fixes their games

i like lens flare its pretty

i need some motion blur on otherwise i get motion sickness.

Depth of field and chromatic aberration are pretty cool if done right.

Depth of field is a really important framing tool for photography and film. The same applies to games in that sense. If you have cinematics/cutscenes in your games, they prob utilize depth of field in some sense. Action and dialogue scenes usually emphasize the characters, in which a narrow depth of field can be used to put focus towards just the characters. Meanwhile things like discovering a new region puts emphasis on the landscape, meaning they can use a large depth of field (no background blur essentially)

Chromatic aberration is cool if done right. It makes a little bit of an out of place feel to things, which makes sense in certain games and not so much in others. Signalis and dredge are a few games which chromatic aberration adds to the artstyle imo. Though obviously if it hurts your eyes then it still plays just as fine without it on.

The preference against DOF is fine. However, I’m looking at my f/0.95 and f/1.4 lenses and wondering why it’s kind of prized in photography for some genres and hated in games?

And film grain. Get that fake static out of here

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.

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

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 is essential for a proper feeling of speed.

most games don't need a proper feeling of speed.

I’d add Denuvo to that list. Easily a 10-20% impact.

Has the person who invented the depth of field effect for a video game ever even PLAYED a game before?

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.

Shadows: Off
Polygons: Low
Idle Animation: Off
Draw distance: Low
Billboards instead of models for scenery items: On

These settings can be good, but are often overdone. See bloom in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Taps temple Auto disable ray tracing if your gpu is too old to support it ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

PS3-> 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

I always turn that shit off. Especially bad when it's a first-person game, as if your eyes were a camera.

If only I could just turn off the chromatic aberration in my eyeglasses.

Bad effects are bad.

I used to hate film grain and then did the research for implementing myself, digging up old research papers on how It works at a scientific level. I ended up implementing a custom film grain in Starfield Luma and RenoDX. I actually like it and it has a level of "je ne sais quoi" that clicks in my brain that feels like film.

The gist is that everyone just does additive random noise which raises black floor and dirties the image. Film grain is perceptual which acts like cracks in the "dots" that compose an image. It's not something to be "scanned" or overlayed (which gives a dirty screen effect).

Related, motion blur is how we see things in real life. Our eyes have a certain level of blur/shutter speed and games can have a soap opera effect. I've only seen per-object motion blur look decent, but fullscreen is just weird, IMO.

The title should be "anon can't afford rtx5090".

Don't forget TAA!

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 main problem with these is giving people control of these properties without them knowing how the cameras work in real life.

raytracing's the cool kid, keep him in

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.