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?
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t say I particularly prefer it, but a lot of the time I don’t mind it or notice it enough to turn it off. There have been a few games where it’s been egregious enough to disable it as soon as I can, though.
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
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.
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.
Motion blur is a win if it’s done correctly. Your visual system can make use of that blur to determine the movement of objects, expects it. Move your hand quickly in front of your eyes – your fingers are a blur.
If you’ve ever seen something filmed at a high frame rate and then played back at a low frame rate without any sort of interpolation, it looks pretty bad. Crystal-clear stills, but jerky.
A good approximation – if computationally-expensive – is to keep ramping FPS higher and higher.
But…that’s also expensive, and your head can’t actually process 1000 Hz or whatever. What it’s getting is just a blur of multiple frames.
It’s theoretically possible to have motion blur approaches that are more-efficient than fully rendering each frame, slapping it on a monitor, and letting your eye “blur” it. That being said, I haven’t been very impressed by what I’ve seen so far in games. But if done correctly, yeah, you’d want it.
EDIT: A good example of a specialized motion blur that’s been around forever in video games has been the arc behind a swinging sword. It gives the sense of motion without having to render a bazillion frames to get that nice, smooth arc.
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.
This is exactly why motion blur works in some genres, like racing or fighting games, but not in others, like FPS or strategy.
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+.
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
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.
Wouldn’t high fps resolve this issue at like 100?
No
