Agreed. Motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain, and other variants on the theme I just don’t like.
Along with “CRT filter” in some retro-style games. I am okay with them being optional, I just wish they were off by default.
That’s actually the one I’m entirely on board with
Many retro games were designed to be viewed on a composite (or worse) signal CRT (particularly 8/16-bit consoles). They take advantage of the characteristics of those technologies to act as a final expected phase of image “processing”. (It’s a physical effect so not actually processing)
The games were never meant to be played with sharp, hard pixels. The lines were supposed to blur a bit to create a sum greater than the parts and create additional chroma and luma resolution that isn’t possible with the console hardware in isolation.
OTOH it actually has to be a good filter that mimics these characteristics correctly, if it’s just basic 1px scanlines and nothing else I’m probably not gonna use it
I grew up with the CRT scan lines and honestly I prefer the hard pixels. Don’t know I think it just triggers the nostalgia better than the muddied lines that look like a bad attempt at upscaling.
Fair play, people’s preferences are ultimately a subjective thing
I would say when it’s done properly it genuinely looks like the devs have found resolution that doesn’t exist in the image
Here’s a good example that I think demonstrates it clearly (though this is a real deal CRT in this image versus the kind of filters I’m talking about in this thread, though the goal is the same effect)
(Via https://mastodon.social/@ponysmasher/111025666005999438)
CRT filters are just fake scanlines for nostalgia. Blurring the screen does not accurately recreate the way the games were meant to be viewed. This is because CRTs are analog and don’t have discrete pixels at all, the color posphors can be partially lit, resulting in a better looking image. That just can’t be recreated with a filter.
Bad ones are yes, I addressed that at the end
The good ones make use of the higher resolution screens we have today to render the lower resolution images using the real pixels as subpixels to mimic the effect.
1080p is possibly not enough resolution to be convincing if that’s what you last looked at; but at 4K, every 240i/480i console output pixel gets something like 8-16 real subpixels to work with
If you want 1 to 1 accuracy, yes you’ll only get that with an actual CRT. But the modern high quality filters are much, much more than just fake scanlines, and can be pretty effective for the games that need them. You can usually choose the signal path to emulate, choose to use an aperture grille or different kinds of shadow mask, and often even deeper tweaks.
If you’ve not looked at them in a while and you’ve got appropriate hardware to run them well, have another look.
Yup, motion blur goes off, bloom gets cranked way, way down (a tiny bit I’m ok with), chromatic aberration, film grain, or basically any filter meant to imitate the effects of older camera technology gets shit-canned. FoV usually needs to get cranked up, music volume is pushed down to 50% or lower. After that it’s usually a dance of getting mouse/controller sensitivity adjusted and min-maxing the graphics settings a bit to have good graphics and ok framerates. Then there is the final key-bindings adjustments, though those often take a while of gameplay to sort out.
God fucking damn do i hate bloom stop putting bloom dialed up to a million in your game i want to SEE the fucking GAME not the SUN
Motion blur adds a touch of realism to images as it mimics how a camera sensor captures motion according to its shutter speed. It also helps imitating how human eyes work, try to wave your hand in front of your face and you’ll see something very similar to motion blur.
My human eyes create motion blur just by objects moving on the screen, there is no need for additional blur.
I don’t see how it adds realism.
Nothing’s moving on the screen. You’re reconstructing movement from a series of still images.
Motion blur—when it’s implemented with understanding of why it works—provides additional information about speed and direction of movement in a way that your brain is naturally apt to deal with.
Without motion blur, you need at least two frames to figure out direction of movement. With it, you’ll have enough information to start priming response in one frame. And consistent pattern of priming actions and successfully executing them translates into a physically satisfying experience.
My games usually run at least at 2 frames per whatever relevant time measurement, so I don’t need motion blur for my brain to figure out movement.
I always turn subtitles on. I’ve played a handful of games with spatial audio, where NPCs are doing the walk and talk thing, sometimes being far enough away I can’t hear. Subtitles make sure I don’t miss the silly filler dialogue.
Also always invert the camera vertically. Early on, my brother explained how GoldenEye or Pilotwings or something, up looks down and down looks up. Now I’m married to that idea years later. Mainly in first person. I forget which way is natural in 3rd person, so I just invert for consistency there.
I invert y-axis in first person, but in third person with a joystick i invert x-axis too. The way that makes sense to me is the joystick controls the orbit of the camera. I know this is insane, but like you, I’m also married to the idea. I think maybe it depends on if it’s a shooter or an arpg like kingdom hearts where one joystick moves the character and the other joystick moves the camera.
I’ve heard it explained with the joystick controlling the head of the character.
Imagine a joystick sticking out of the back of their head. That’s your controller joystick.
Yeah that’s kind’ve how it works, but for me, I guess the closest I describe how I imagine it is Lakitu from sm64 literally orbiting the player
Mouse acceleration off, mouse sensitivity all the way down, mouse smoothing off, raw mouse input on, dlss off, resolution scale 100%+, anti aliasing off, invert mouse y-axis on.
Why turn aa off?
It makes everything blurry
That usually depends on the specific type of AA.
FXAA (Fast Approximate) is known for looking like vaseline smeared on the screen (used because it doesn’t give much performance hit), but other types are usually effective at removing aliasing on sharp corners without adding a blurring effect.
SSAA (Super Sampling) applies to the entire screen, and in a way is sort’ve rendering the whole game at a higher resolution and scaling it down to your monitor resolution. Downside is that can bring performance down too much if you’re hardware isn’t up for it.
MSAA (Multi Sampling) focuses just on the edges of things, where it’s most likely that the jaggy aliased pixels would be most noticeable. This is much easier for your computer to do, since it’s not doing the entire screen.
Of those, only FXAA should be blurry. However, there are now Temporal AA, Like DLSS, or DLAA. These can introduce a motion-blur effect during movement.
Lastly, FSR upscales a lower resolution to a higher one, which can make things blurry if the base image is too low of a resolution and lacks enough information to guess how to upscale it.
