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?
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?
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
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.
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?
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 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
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.
