-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Do you hate lens/camera effects in games?
- Thread starter DonMigs85
- Start date
When i play on PC i always turn off all these dumbass effects if possible. They are just annoying as all hell.
Unfortunately you can't do this in console games which in turn make me get headaches when CA is in full effect in certain games, looking at you BB even if i love you.
Unfortunately you can't do this in console games which in turn make me get headaches when CA is in full effect in certain games, looking at you BB even if i love you.
don't @ me, but I think a lot of people just pick on CA because everyone else is doing it.
It never bothered me before, not even in Bloodborne, feels like some people tend to exaggerate here
It never bothered me before, not even in Bloodborne, feels like some people tend to exaggerate here
Generally speaking, I was never a fan of Chromatic Abberation, Lens Flare, Motion Blur, Film Grain and Color Filters and I probably never will be. I don't mind the effects, with the exception of CA, if they are done mildly, though. Nothing worse than overdone effects, especially in MP games, where one team is being blinded by things like Lens Flare, while the other team isn't. Makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever.
They should always have options to turn them off, if they bother to make them available, in my eyes.
They should always have options to turn them off, if they bother to make them available, in my eyes.
Yes.
I get motion sickness pretty easy from games, so a lot of the lens effects make me horribly ill. Division 2 has been pretty bad for the chromatic aberration for me... I just wish I could turn it off.
Also never getting drunk in any video game ever.
I get motion sickness pretty easy from games, so a lot of the lens effects make me horribly ill. Division 2 has been pretty bad for the chromatic aberration for me... I just wish I could turn it off.
Also never getting drunk in any video game ever.
Around 5-10% of people have major issues with motion sickness, just because it doesn't happen to you, doesn't mean you can say that we're "exaggerating" it.
I can't stand Chromatic Aberration, and I try playing with it on in every single game before turning it off. I just hate it.
Everything else I either don't mind or even like, but Chromatic Aberration always ends up turned off. Even if I have to mess with some ini files or whatever because the game won't let me turn it off.
Everything else I either don't mind or even like, but Chromatic Aberration always ends up turned off. Even if I have to mess with some ini files or whatever because the game won't let me turn it off.
On the other hand, I always feel like a lot of developers add it just because everyone else is doing it. I can see the case for a game like The Order, but Darksiders Remastered having Chromatic Aberration I just can't wrap my head around.
I've spent good money on expensive lenses for my camera. Only to see the fucking chromatic aberration I've been trying to avoid appear in so many videogames. It's a horrible horrible effect. Camera lenses and firmware, and photo editing software, have pretty much eliminated it from photography.
Yet games developers are bringing the horrible thing back. As are some TV shows/films - Netflix's Sex Education is riddled with it.
Lens distortion and chromatic aberration are seemingly used in games to show this thing is being shot with a camera rather than rendered, but the only result is great graphics are made to look like they've been shot with a really shitty camera.
Yet games developers are bringing the horrible thing back. As are some TV shows/films - Netflix's Sex Education is riddled with it.
Lens distortion and chromatic aberration are seemingly used in games to show this thing is being shot with a camera rather than rendered, but the only result is great graphics are made to look like they've been shot with a really shitty camera.
I mean it exists to emulate an undesired effect from old/bad cameras. Seems pretty stupid to me.
I can tolerate Film grain and some lens distortion when it adds to the moment. Distortion especially when you're trying to convey height and distance. Chromatic abberation more like abhorration amirite?!
The other is motion blur. My own eyes catch blur when turning quickly. I don't really need the game to do it for me. and I really don't need it when I'm panning a camera to search for something
I think I've spoken about this elsewhere but from a performance engineering perspective it's very frustrating to me to spend GPU time on effects that "remove" or modify rendered detail (e.g. film grain, lens aberation) or that simulate a camera which is to some significant extent "unnecessary" or even misleading/incorrect. But there's only so much sense in arguing with the art director...
I think that the reason why a lot of us don't like blurring and image clarity-degrading effects even though they can look nice and "artsy" is because video games are not a static artform but a functional one: the player needs to be able to gather data from scenes to make proper inputs. A lot of these effects make it more difficult to quickly identify objects from an informational perspective, particularly distant ones, thus many of us have a desire to make game images as sharp as possible.
I will always disable or mod out chromatic aberration, vignetting, lens flare, and screen effects like a 'dirty lens' when possible.
Film grain generally doesn't bother me, but it depends on the implementation.
In Resident Evil 2, the 'film noise' option is used to dither the output, so disabling it severely reduces image quality.
The output would ideally be dithered regardless of that setting, but I can see why it would be done in a single processing step.
There's a lot of banding/posterization in the shadows with the film noise option disabled (the image was brightened to make the difference more obvious).
Some games manage to implement film grain in a way that does nothing to improve image quality, and only adds noise on top of an image with banding, which does little to help.
Post-process temporal anti-aliasing techniques blur the image, especially at lower resolutions, so post-TAA sharpening is required to produce a sharp output.
Ideally it will be a slider as seen in Ubisoft games, rather than a toggle. Many other games don't even give you the option and either force it on or don't sharpen the image at all.
I think Fable may have been the worst offender for over-use of bloom lighting. "Migraines in 60 seconds or less, or we'll give you your money back!"
Chromatic aberration simulates low-quality lenses which cannot focus all wavelengths of light to the same point.
Photographers and film makers spend a lot of money on lenses to avoid this artifact.
Chromatic aberration from a simple, low-quality lens design:
A high quality, complex Apochromatic lens design focuses visible wavelengths to a single point (the film plane or digital sensor):
Interestingly, the human I has chromatic abberation, hence the red-green test at the optometrist.
OT: what game has true chromatic abberation though?
One more reason there's no need to double up with the effect in games. It's even worse if you wear glasses.