Always the first thing I turn off, but surely there are some people out there that actually like it. If you’re one of those people is there a particular reason?
Only for very specific games, and only because I don’t have a high refresh rate monitor.
If I’m in Forza driving 200 km/h I shouldn’t be able to see the bricks I’m flying past. With my low refresh rate monitor I can, so adding just a hint of motion blur really helps add that flourish of immersion that I can’t get with my setup. But that’s again very specific games and only because I cap out at 60fps.
So for me though, my eyes add their own motion blur, so why spend processing power on it?
Because at lower frame rates your eyes don’t add motion blur. So you use the processing power to add it. If I had a higher refresh rate monitor I wouldn’t need motion blur.
Your eyes also don’t apply it very consistently to two dimensional objects, like the image on a screen.
what a loser, my eyes don’t even need motion for it!
/s
Eye 2.0 user
Might be an eye 0.8 user
⚠️ Warning: your hardware is not optimized to upgrade to Windows 11 ⚠️
It helps mask frame drops when turning or moving fast if the game is particularly demanding.
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
I also have the impression that motion blur causes frame drops. Then again, some games do seem to hiccup when turning regardless of if motion blur is enabled.
Now I’m wondering if it’s causation or just correlation. Intuition suggests that additional post-processing would at the very least exacerbate frame drops even if it doesn’t cause them itself, but I’ve never done a deep dive to find out.
In my experience it’s correlation. Motion blur shouldn’t be a particularly expensive operation. Objectively, yes, it will cause some degree of slowdown, just by necessity, but it really does do a decent job of masking those brief FPS hits.
My rig isn’t the most up-to-date. I’m also extremely sensitive to a lot of the artifacts that come from not having a consistent FPS. Vsync does a decent job of preventing those issues, but the slowdown dropping from 60 to 30 fps is very jarring to me, no matter how brief, and some light motion blur really smooths it out for me. Now, you can ABSOLUTELY overdo it, and that makes it worse. Usually I use the lowest level available, and the slowdown is preferable to overdone motion blur usually.
In your (n of 1) experience. You’ve answered your question.
You don’t own every system, every monitor, every driver, every eyeball, every visual cortex.
Even how people interpret motion blur is subjective: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1997.0061
A one-size fits all approach to things is rarely accurate.
It’s something I give so little of a shit about that this is probably the first time I’ve really thought about it, ever.
So probably that.
Do you hop around random subs posting about how little you care about the topic?
On Lemmy, yeah, probably? A lot of people just seem to be really angry/annoyed at the dumbest shit that doesn’t seem to bother most other people.
In single player games it gives me this sorta intense action feel, and I enjoy it.
It depends on the implementation. Properly Implemented motion blur can look rather pleasing. Also with new frame generation tech motion blur really helps smooth out the in between frames I’ve found.
I genuinely don’t understand why people use it. It gives me massive motion sickness and so I figure out very quickly when games have it on by default
For some games it improves the feeling of speed. A racing game feels faster with it enabled.
It looks cool as fuck, but only if it blends well with the art style.
Weirdly I think it looks great with Strife: Veteran Edition
It’s on a case by case basis like the lense flares.
Do I want a more realistic experience or a more cinematic one?
Also sometimes it hides some fps drops :p
I dislike it as well, but not as much as Depth of Field.
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.
Motion blur off looks like those high shutter speed fight scenes from the Kingsman movies. Good for a striking action scene but not pleasant to look at in general. Motion blur blends the motion that happen between frames like how anti aliasing blurs stairstepping.
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+.
This is not how motion blur works at all. Is there a specific game you’re taking about? Are you sure this is not monitor ghosting?
Motion blur in games cost next to no performance. It does use motion data but not to generate in between frames, to smear the pixels of the existing frame.
I think you’re right, but this is usually a developer skill issue. This UE developer thread was really useful in understanding the ‘why’ of ugly motion blur for me. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/correct-motion-blur-values-to-use/131392
Wouldn’t high fps resolve this issue at like 100?
No
Some games are designed with motion blur in mind. Elden Ring, for example, looks very unpleasant to me in 60 FPS without motion blur. But I disable it when using a mod that unlocks the FPS.
I usually turn on a light motion blur in games that I f don’t get above 40-ish fps, because the motion blur masks the stuttering. I prefer no motion blur and stuttering to too much or bad motion blur though. I couldn’t play Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 Pro, because the motion blur was really intense, even in performance mode and there was no way to turn it off.
I really like it when games give you an intensity slider instead of just on or off. Spiderman on the PS4, for example runs at 30fps. It looks like a stuttery mess with motion blur off. With motion blur at the highest setting (which is the default I think), you cannot see a thing when moving. But putting it at ~20% or so masks the stuttering very well without being a complete eyesore.
I also like object based motion blur a lot, like the Jedi games have. Instead of blurring the camera movement, it only blurs the movement of objects that are actually moving (quickly), which has a nice effect, in my opinion.
In general though, I prefer having better performance and a clear image, but motion blur is a useable band-aid solution if performance is a limiting factor.
I have similar opinions to the likes of DLSS, FSR & Co. I vastly prefer running games at native resolution but when my GPU can’t keep up, FSR it is. I‘m not yet convinced of frame generation as an alternative to motion blur to get 30fps feeling a little closer to 60 but I haven’t gotten around to testing that yet either. Im not categorically against it in Games, unlike in movies. Motion smoothing in TVs is a pest.
it makes gameplay, not screenshots feel smoother. Screenshots are not playable, no matter how sharp it might look
Because I like it. There shouldn’t need to be much more “reason” than that.
People that can’t leave others alone for having different preferences than you, why?
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.
I’m fairness, I also never explicitly said anything that op said was wrong. Or anything explictly about op at all for that matter.
Any hostility you can infer from my comment can be equally be inferred from OP’s title.
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.
So let’s just stop talking to each other all together, surely there’s no point in gaining other perspectives
That’s exactly what my comment said! Good job 👍🏽
OP’s title, and similarly phrased ones for other commonly disliked settings, aren’t actually looking for dialogue… they’re just “hey guys, light mode, amirite?” jokes phrased as questions
Why can’t it be a real question?
The same reason mine can’t; because I didn’t care to phrase it as such. If I were actually interested in starting a dialogue, I wouldn’t have phrased the last line of my parent comment the way I did. I would have asked the question in a neutral or positive tone to show the reader that I’m not attacking their position, explicitly or implicitly.
“People that XYZ, why?”
This phrasing is automatically othering anyone that would be able to respond. Without any other context, it can easily be interpreted with more hostility, especially online.
“What are the benefits of using motion blur?”
This phrasing puts no implicit judgment on the person, and instead seeks to find positive attributes of the subject in question. Any bias that can be inferred is positive.
While I concede that op certainly could have asked the question in genuine earnest, my time on the Internet has taught me that the likelihood of that is far less likely than that of op asking a sarcastic question.
It’s something that I really dislike on the internet.
We lose a lot of cues because writing and empathy due to not being in same physical space. In the end we tend to assume the worst about each other and react much more agressively.
Imho it’s kinda similar to how road rage or videogame flaming work.
quick edit: I agree that OP’s question could be loaded otoh not that we assume it is with such a limited context.
Then don’t engage?
So… Let’s stop talking to each other altogether…?
Don’t actively discourage discourse
That… I… but you…
You told me me not to engage in something. I quoted you to show you that you were discouraging discourse. How is this lost on you?
Best and most correct answer here … and this comes from a guy that hates motion blur and lens flare
The best and most correct answer is “let’s just sit in silence and not discuss why we like or dislike things”?
Are you from the Midwest? That’s a super duper Ohio answer right there.
Why Midwest or Ohio?
My general life experience since leaving the east coast is that westerners would rather talk about hiking and farmers markets than anything that is actually real and Midwestern folks would rather avoid conflict at all costs to the point of being somehow more passive aggressive than people from Seattle. Ohio, specifically places like Cincinnati, is the poster child for the Midwest.
If you want “more of an answer” this question is already loaded to be implying that leaving motion blur on is the wrong answer. What kind of discussion could you possibly have around this? “I like how the blurred images fly past me” vs “I think you are wrong, clear images only club!”.
This isn’t something that will grow someones understanding or open up a whole new idea to them. Anyone can go click the button on and off, compare, and make a choice. If you were discussing what preferences someone had for a receipt and how they substitute ingredients for more/less savory, that makes sense for discussion. This does not.
Also, Canadian originally from Ontario and currently living in Alberta.
