Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

Unfortunately, reducing the resolution scaling from 100 to 99 helps to sharpen the character gear textures, but the blurring-while-moving issue (especially noticeable on trees with a clear sky as a background) persists.

first post on these forums to unfortunately agree with the people here having eye strain from this.

i use prism glasses and i haven't had issues with any game, or really anything at all, giving me eye strain ever since i got prisms a few years back. with this expac after only a little while of playing i noticed a slight headache, thought it might be a coincidence ... started doing the battle content and it turned into a migraine, i had to stop playing - will try the suggested fix in the graphics settings tomorrow

there's a lot of people who just can't handle the constant motion blurring and i doubt this is intentional at all. i don't wanna be barred out of playing for multiple hours (i raid) bc the new graphics are killing my eyes.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Remember to turn on night-light or something to turn down the blue-light on your monitors.

If your eyes burn after prolonged screen usage the blue-light is often to blame.

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I actually have my glasses coated to filter out a lot of the blue light. Yes it cost more than I was happy about but it helped so much.

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Unrelated: I have already told my sister not to resubscribe until we know what is going on with this and the flying tilt gets either a tweak or on off switch. She had a very serious head injury 20 years ago. She is highly susceptible to motion sickness, eyestrain and migraines. I can tell by how it affects me (and I don't generally have issues) that for her she would be sick in minutes.

Can people who are experiencing eye strain post their full Display and Graphics settings somehow?

I haven't touched my settings since the update and I'm not having this issue (I'm just tired but that's normal).
Maybe it will be easier to narrow down what might be causing it this way.

Well turning the image scaling from 100 to 99 does indeed make the image much sharper. They is a youtube video showing it, quick google search for ''Fix Blurry Default Graphic Settings in Dawntrail 7.0'' will bring it up. Again it makes the image much sharper from the blurry mess it is, but really, shouldn't be having to mess about to such an extent to sort a problem that shouldn't even be their in the first place.

Image scaling at 100: blurry filter
Image scaling at 99: overly sharpened filter

I just want it to look the way it did before.

Adding my support to being able to downgrade the graphics.

There is something weird, very subtle, almost like a flickering, but not.

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Originally Posted by Argantaelle

Unfortunately, reducing the resolution scaling from 100 to 99 helps to sharpen the character gear textures, but the blurring-while-moving issue (especially noticeable on trees with a clear sky as a background) persists.

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Yes I noticed this too, it's upsetting me even more than character appearance changes, I'm really not renovating my suscription soon in the end,.,

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Originally Posted by mayochup

The amount of bloom in the game got ramped up as well, and you can't even disable it (pre DT disabling glare in settings fixed it but that doesn't seem to work here). Been giving heavy eye strain and headaches, borderline unplayable for me. Would be great for a setting to disable it.

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Same here. It baffles me they disabled that option considering bloom can be very aggressive on your eyes.
The bloom/glare is clearly something that should be able to be turned off, specially on a mmo that requires to focus during raids for long hours.

Not suffering any eye strain but I for one would really appreciate greater control over the graphical options. Why cant I jus toggle dlss off? And many games on hover have a robust explanation of what each setting does as well as a little image to show the difference between the two. Ffxiv needs this imo.

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Originally Posted by SchwarzwaelderTorte

Can people who are experiencing eye strain post their full Display and Graphics settings somehow?
Maybe it will be easier to narrow down what might be causing it this way.

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Considering there's almost no proper graphical settings to speak of on the PS4 version (at least when compared to the PC version) there really isn't a whole lot we can determine through analyzing said settings.

I know you're just trying to help, but I think we should keep our eyes on the ball instead of going on a wild goose chase trying to determine what each of our graphical settings are. The cause of this eye strain issue is clearly in the graphics update itself. Something just isn't right.

I don't have any eye strain and usually stuff does give me eye strain if I look at screens too much. But my graphic settings are I have a 4090 and a 1080p monitor at 60hz. The graphics card can keep the game at a stable 60 fps all the time.

Someone said this earlier in the thread, but a likely part of it is what you're seeing is different to what your brain is accustomed to seeing when playing the game. Kind of like how when you get a new pair of glasses and everything is wonky for a couple days. I assume for the overwhelming majority of people, it'll be back to normal fairly quickly.

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Originally Posted by Its_Kazzy_D

Someone said this earlier in the thread, but a likely part of it is what you're seeing is different to what your brain is accustomed to seeing when playing the game. Kind of like how when you get a new pair of glasses and everything is wonky for a couple days. I assume for the overwhelming majority of people, it'll be back to normal fairly quickly.

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In the case of minor headaches, yes, but with stuff like generally sensitive eyes, it's sadly not just going to go away on its own.

Letting people downgrade the graphics more via additional options (especially on PS4) would only have positive effects in terms of player comfort, even if just for getting better FPS.

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Originally Posted by mayochup

The amount of bloom in the game got ramped up as well, and you can't even disable it (pre DT disabling glare in settings fixed it but that doesn't seem to work here). Been giving heavy eye strain and headaches, borderline unplayable for me. Would be great for a setting to disable it.

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Yup, the new zone with the glowing plants is especially bad. Everything is so bright and glowy and I can't turn it off. :(

I can't turn off wet surface effects either, it used to be an option but I can't find it anymore. Now everything is overly shiny when it rains. I went to my house in Shiro, it was raining and the beach looked wetter than the sea, lol.

A temporary solution could be messing with the warmth level of your screen. Making it more warm will reduce eye strain.

Not in XIV settings, but your monitor or TV.

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Originally Posted by Turtledeluxe

A temporary solution could be messing with the warmth level of your screen. Making it more warm will reduce eye strain.

Not in XIV settings, but your monitor or TV.

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This may very well help some people, so I encourage to try it if one hasn't already.

For me, though, these settings are already at their maximum/minimum, so going further down isn't even an option.

Having every other setting maxed and then FSR with 99 scaling *is* a little too sharp but I'll take that over my eyes trying to focus while moving around the zones. DLSS looks fine and doesn't cause me any issues while I'm standing still, it's the slight blurring while I move around that seems to be bothering my eyes.

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Originally Posted by Wind-Krysvein

I know you're just trying to help, but I think we should keep our eyes on the ball instead of going on a wild goose chase trying to determine what each of our graphical settings are. The cause of this eye strain issue is clearly in the graphics update itself. Something just isn't right.

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Yes, it's that "something" I was suggesting to narrow down by having people share what their settings look like, and compare them against people who are not having that problem.
A lot of things have been added and/or modified, so "it's the fault of the graphics update" isn't really helping with finding what in the graphics update is causing this, and it would be helpful both for the people having this issue and for the devs so they can find what's going on exactly and how it can be resolved.

But so, just to be clear, you don't have all of this on PS4? (or other consoles?)

https://i.imgur.com/z7c2s6e.png

If so then yeah, that will make it harder to figure out I guess...

I’m running:

Ryzen 5 3600
RTX 3060 (12 gb ddr6 vram)
32 gb ddr4 3200mhz

I have my settings currently set to high desktop. I can run at max but prefer the steadier frame rate of high. DLSS should not be engaging because I never go below 60 fps. However it is almost always running but seems to shut off during conversations with text bubbles. The blurring happens at a specific draw distance. Everything within a few ilms is sharp and clear. This distance is even shorter if I begin moving.

If I turn to FSR and fiddle with the settings I can alleviate the majority of the blur but the textures become way too sharp, shiny, and the light reflecting washes out a lot of the environment especially in the alpaca quest area when the sun is shining.

It all feels like it’s issues that are caused by older upscaling techniques.

Hello! I experienced this issue as well, which was quite bizarre as someone with typically zero eye strain issues. After much fiddling with the settings I pinpointed exactly what the problem is, at least for me. Maybe it can help someone else too.

The main culprit is TSCMAA, the new anti-aliasing solution. TSCMAA blurs the screen to hide the jagged edges of the models and TSCMAA + Camera Jitter blurs it even more in the distance. When you are motionless I think it looks more or less fine, however the issue is that the second you move at all, the image is blurred twice as much.

Here are some screenshots of what I'm talking about. This is with TSCMAA + Camera Jitter and FSR 100. Right click -> Open image in new tab for the full view.

Here I am standing completely still. Take note of the trees on the left. They look fairly sharp, right?

https://i.imgur.com/V1GyGKJ.png

This is what happens the nanosecond you start moving. The entire image gets blurrier for as long as you move and becomes sharp again as soon as you stop. This is especially noticeable on trees, grass, and other foliage, but you can also clearly see the difference on the little light posts and the background buildings, etc.

https://i.imgur.com/v0Nze5h.png


Here are some random people nearby while I'm not moving.

https://i.imgur.com/LaNTpKz.png

And here they are as soon as I take a step.

https://i.imgur.com/jeEndDs.png


So the root cause of the eye strain, at least for me, was my eyes constantly trying to focus between the image being not blurry, blurry, not blurry, blurry, and so on every time I move an inch over the course of many hours. This would only be compounded by using DLSS which makes the image even blurrier.

So most importantly, what can we do to fix it? There are a few options, none of which are great.

1. Change your AA setting to FXAA or turn it off completely. This option has the obvious downside of harsh jaggies on everything.

2. Change your upscaling option to FSR and set the resolution to 99. FSR has built in image sharpening, but when set to 100 this is disabled. If you set it to 99 the sharpening kicks in and lessens the motion blur issue, but honestly not by a ton. For me it went from unbearable to somewhat tolerable. The downside to this solution is the image looks overly sharpened, at least to my eyes. Alternatively, you could try using the sharpening built into something else like the GeForce Experience app.

3. In many games it is possible to force DLSS to use a newer version and DLAA. That would involve altering the game files and would be against ToS, so I'm not going to elaborate further here.

Currently I'm using option #2, but I don't like how overly sharp everything looks and it only helps somewhat. I've never seen an AA solution in any other game have this weird on/off blur issue when moving any amount so hopefully it's something the devs can address, but who knows. I certainly hope so because this issue has made it very difficult to enjoy this expansion so far. At any rate, I hope what I've discovered can help someone in the meantime!


tl;dr: Your eyes might be strained because the image is constantly alternating between being blurry and not blurry any time you move. Change the Anti-aliasing to FXAA/OFF or set FSR to 99 resolution to enable image sharpening.

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Originally Posted by SchwarzwaelderTorte

But so, just to be clear, you don't have all of this on PS4? (or other consoles?)

If so then yeah, that will make it harder to figure out I guess...

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Indeed, the PS4 has practically none of those settings. It's almost comical how few options it has. I'd take a picture, if it didn't require me to log in and get a headache.

I wanted to start off by saying I appreciate the folks who offered advice on ways to try easing the eye strain, it helped to have a better idea of where to begin with trying to tweak my settings. Unfortunately, even though adjusting things within the game and in my laptop's display seems to help a little bit with some elements, I STILL cannot play for more than 20ish minutes without pain. I do not have vision problems myself, I have never had eye strain issues with a game (even with some unwisely exorbitant screentime) before, and I wasn't having any in this one prior to the graphics update. Trying to heal through a low level dungeon in FFXIV this morning had me nearly in tears it hurt so much. I was admittedly unhappy with a lot of the visual/design changes shown in the Benchmark, but it never occurred to me that the update would LITERALLY hurt. I hope some adjustments will be offered to fix this for all of us suffering, an optional 'downgrade' to graphics that aren't painful to look at would be so much better than the current situation. I don't think I can play with the graphics as they are, and it seems like I'm not the only person stuck feeling that way.

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Originally Posted by zipkin

I wanted to start off by saying I appreciate the folks who offered advice on ways to try easing the eye strain, it helped to have a better idea of where to begin with trying to tweak my settings. Unfortunately, even though adjusting things within the game and in my laptop's display seems to help a little bit with some elements, I STILL cannot play for more than 20ish minutes without pain. I do not have vision problems myself, I have never had eye strain issues with a game (even with some unwisely exorbitant screentime) before, and I wasn't having any in this one prior to the graphics update. Trying to heal through a low level dungeon in FFXIV this morning had me nearly in tears it hurt so much. I was admittedly unhappy with a lot of the visual/design changes shown in the Benchmark, but it never occurred to me that the update would LITERALLY hurt. I hope some adjustments will be offered to fix this for all of us suffering, an optional 'downgrade' to graphics that aren't painful to look at would be so much better than the current situation. I don't think I can play with the graphics as they are, and it seems like I'm not the only person stuck feeling that way.

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That’s a super bummer. I hope for your sake that this is only a temporary issue. Personally I believe if they gave us more options for some of these graphic choices like Bloom, you would be in a much better position. It’s odd to lock us in to settings like bloom but let me toggle the grass interaction dynamic. I assume its going to be engine related design choices but I don’t develop games so wtf do I know lol.

If they don't fix the issue with blurring, then I am quitting for good because the game will be unplayable for me.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

So the root cause of the eye strain, at least for me, was my eyes constantly trying to focus between the image being not blurry, blurry, not blurry, blurry, and so on every time I move an inch over the course of many hours. This would only be compounded by using DLSS which makes the image even blurrier.

So most importantly, what can we do to fix it? There are a few options, none of which are great.

1. Change your AA setting to FXAA or turn it off completely. This option has the obvious downside of harsh jaggies on everything.

2. Change your upscaling option to FSR and set the resolution to 99. FSR has built in image sharpening, but when set to 100 this is disabled. If you set it to 99 the sharpening kicks in and lessens the motion blur issue, but honestly not by a ton. For me it went from unbearable to somewhat tolerable. The downside to this solution is the image looks overly sharpened, at least to my eyes. Alternatively, you could try using the sharpening built into something else like the GeForce Experience app.

3. In many games it is possible to force DLSS to use a newer version and DLAA. That would involve altering the game files and would be against ToS, so I'm not going to elaborate further here.

Currently I'm using option #2, but I don't like how overly sharp everything looks and it only helps somewhat. I've never seen an AA solution in any other game have this weird on/off blur issue when moving any amount so hopefully it's something the devs can address, but who knows. I certainly hope so because this issue has made it very difficult to enjoy this expansion so far. At any rate, I hope what I've discovered can help someone in the meantime!


tl;dr: Your eyes might be strained because the image is constantly alternating between being blurry and not blurry any time you move. Turn off AA or set FSR to 99 resolution to enable image sharpening.

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I started noticing this problem a couple of months ago, when I started playing FF14 (Endwalker), and my own conclusion somewhat coincides with your own. But my main suspect was having a monitor that only goes at 60Hz. Even if I owned this monitor for many years, but I also know that CRT monitors were much better for my sight, since moving images were not blurry at all (it reached 85Hz)

(Well, I'm sure that sometimes I had eye strain very sparsely years ago with this monitor, so I always wanted to try something similar that could reach 85 or 100hz (my GPU can't go faster at high quality))

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Originally Posted by zipkin

Unfortunately, even though adjusting things within the game and in my laptop's display seems to help a little bit with some elements, I STILL cannot play for more than 20ish minutes without pain. I do not have vision problems myself, I have never had eye strain issues with a game (even with some unwisely exorbitant screentime) before, and I wasn't having any in this one prior to the graphics update. Trying to heal through a low level dungeon in FFXIV this morning had me nearly in tears it hurt so much. I was admittedly unhappy with a lot of the visual/design changes shown in the Benchmark, but it never occurred to me that the update would LITERALLY hurt. I hope some adjustments will be offered to fix this for all of us suffering, an optional 'downgrade' to graphics that aren't painful to look at would be so much better than the current situation. I don't think I can play with the graphics as they are, and it seems like I'm not the only person stuck feeling that way.

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You are not alone. From the moment I boot up the game, my eyes almost immediately start feeling tired and like someone threw a bunch of sand at them. In roughly 5-10 minutes, my forehead and temples start burning and, before I know it, there's dull pain behind the eyes. Considering I was able to play this game for ridiculous amounts of time each day without so much as getting teary-eyed, it's clear that there's something very wrong with this graphics update.

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Originally Posted by Nitelancer

If they don't fix the issue with blurring, then I am quitting for good because the game will be unplayable for me.

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Honestly? I have already kind of accepted that the devs probably won't do anything about this and that we simply have to move on from this game, but even so I refuse to go down without a fight. If there's even the slightest possibility that we can get through to them, we need to keep trying. Kinda corny, sure, but it's still friggen true.

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Originally Posted by Wind-Krysvein

Honestly? I have already kind of accepted that the devs probably won't do anything about this and that we simply have to move on from this game, but even so I refuse to go down without a fight. If there's even the slightest possibility that we can get through to them, we need to keep trying.

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them never fixing it is my biggest fear with the eye strain problem some of us are having. i wish i could say it's just because of certain eye conditions (i have strabismus for example, but that's what prism glasses are for... they aren't helping at all with this update, but i admit i already am prone to eye strain i guess) but many people who have never had any vision problems are having unbearable eye strain from the graphical update.
i hope that manually altering the graphics to some really specific setting to take away the blurring is enough but i don't think it will be for everyone, including myself. out of all the reasons i'd quit this game i didn't want it to be over something like this. i wonder if JP is having similar complaints of eye strain? if people are complaining on both sides maybe they'll do something about it?

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Originally Posted by Wind-Krysvein

Indeed, the PS4 has practically none of those settings. It's almost comical how few options it has. I'd take a picture, if it didn't require me to log in and get a headache.

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they would sooner cut ps4 support than allow a second texturing pack they have to balance light bounces aorund

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Originally Posted by Kefzka

I’m running:

Ryzen 5 3600
RTX 3060 (12 gb ddr6 vram)
32 gb ddr4 3200mhz

I have my settings currently set to high desktop. I can run at max but prefer the steadier frame rate of high. DLSS should not be engaging because I never go below 60 fps. However it is almost always running but seems to shut off during conversations with text bubbles. The blurring happens at a specific draw distance. Everything within a few ilms is sharp and clear. This distance is even shorter if I begin moving.

If I turn to FSR and fiddle with the settings I can alleviate the majority of the blur but the textures become way too sharp, shiny, and the light reflecting washes out a lot of the environment especially in the alpaca quest area when the sun is shining.

It all feels like it’s issues that are caused by older upscaling techniques.

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Yup upscaling always on seems to be the issue. Fortunately I don't get eye-strain but I don't like the vaseline effect of the backgrounds. I have a computer with slightly better specs than yours and DLSS should never be kicking in but even with the options toggled so it only engages under 30fps (it never does), I still get the vaseline effect. Just give me an on/off toggle.

I am also getting eye strain. I play on the PS5. I noticed it as soon as I got to the character select screen that something was off. I barely played for an hour before my head started hurting and I had to log off. I've played since the ps3 beta and never had any issues with the game until yesterday after maint was over. Its a shame too, because I think the game looks great now from what I was able to see.
Best case scenario, its just some weird bug that they will fix. Worst case scenario, they wont ever acknowledge its an issue and ignore it. If that happens I probably wont be able to play anymore.

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Originally Posted by zipkin

I wanted to start off by ...

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I didn't like the blur so I tweaked my settings to go back to FXAA (Fast approXimation Anti-Aliasing) and that fixed it. I'm fairly certain it's being caused by the excessive blur from the new AA options that seem to be on at max. For you and others suffering pain, have you considered playing at the very lowest settings and doing setting-by-setting incremental changes to find out what exactly hurts to be doubly certain? I've had to do this in other games and reported back to the developers about it. I too don't like some of the changes but I'm not surprised that one of the settings I just found visually annoying is actually causing physical discomfort to people.

Prior to 7.0, there were some textures that were not being picked up and anti-aliased at all via the FXAA standard that this team used. Examples that made it very clear were most of the two-tone hair colours + hair style options. Those have seemingly been alleviated with attention on the raw texture quality of the hair and other parts, yet as others have pointed out in other threads etc, there has almost been an introduction of new, very low quality textures in other places like Au Ra scales. I bring this up only because texture and geometry boundaries and how those are rendered on our ultimately square pixel grid is what drives the need for a really good anti-aliasing. SSAA (Supersampling Anti-Aliasing) has always been the best AA in my opinion although historically it has a heavy cost on the GPU. All AAs are some sort of sampling blur so maybe you can try other games to see which kind doesn't hurt your eyes then push for that one to be in this game or use it at the driver level (on PC). If you look around online, there are a few websites which show many different types of AA side by side for comparison. Full scenes matter for the end result. And also, keep in mind that 1 developer's AA can be very different from another developer's. Texture filtering settings can also affect the "blurryness" of the final image, amongst a few other things like tessellation. Best of luck

Another thing regarding blur. If you don't want the screen to become blurry from combat effects.

Disable Radial Blur under System Settings -> Graphics -> Effects near the bottom.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Another thing regarding blur. If you don't want the screen to become blurry from combat effects.

Disable Radial Blur under System Settings -> Graphics -> Effects near the bottom.

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This is disabled for me but the screen is still blurry when I move.

I'm getting eye strain too, and I had an eye exam come back clean a few months ago. (Technically I'm slightly photosensitive, but at the "my body will remind me to wear sunglasses" level rather than anything remotely limiting day-to-day.)

For me, the culprits seem to be:

• Forced upscaling. The blur causes my brain to attempt to refocus my eyes by reflex, and of course fail because my eyes are already correctly focused on the screen. Lots of wasted eye muscle work. This is especially true because my character model often gets blurred while moving, and that's exactly when I usually need to look at my feet / the arena floor. Seeing a blur right in my central vision really invokes that refocusing reflex.
• Forced bloom. The aggressiveness of the bloom trips my photosensitivity, despite my monitor already being set at minimum brightness and playing in a well-lit room. This is particularly so when the heavy glows are close to low light, either in space (e.g. the Allagan / Garlean magitek aesthetic) or in time (e.g. cutscenes with explosions). Plus, the bloom obscuring whatever's around the light source often gets processed as blurry to me - and invokes the same refocusing reflex - because I'm a disabled raider and I need to process visual cues fast in order to respond on time.
• Relative saturation between new and old textures. Some of the new textures, such as those for housing yards, are quite grey compared to older ones... including my armor and my HUD. I've tried adjusting the gamma, but every possible setting either undersaturates those new textures (making them process as blurry, or at best a dying lawn) or oversaturates my HUD.

I've already turned Radial Blur off, and I've tried Anti-Aliasing on both FXAA and off entirely.

Hopefully we can turn off upscaling soon, in addition to regaining the option to turn off bloom. That and a texture saturation pass would fix my personal eye strain issues.

Strange for me it was... less sharp, and more pixellated yesterday. Still an eyestrain though. It was better after I set it to High (Laptop), though.
Still straining, though.
Did you check the graphics setting?

For me the cutscenes and movement seemed to strain me. Especially when moving the camera.

Does that make sense?

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Originally Posted by Klauth

Same here. It baffles me they disabled that option considering bloom can be very aggressive on your eyes.
The bloom/glare is clearly something that should be able to be turned off, specially on a mmo that requires to focus during raids for long hours.

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I think the bloom not being something we can disable now is possibly a bug. There was a post made on day 1 that appears to have been moved to the "Accepted Bugs" forum. https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-as-expected

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Originally Posted by Aurelle_Deresnels

For me, the culprits seem to be:

• Forced upscaling.
• Forced bloom.

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I've personally noticed the above too. I've tried tweaking literally every graphical setting I possibly can, and all of them just look bad because of the forced upscaling and the forced bloom. If these issues are bugs, they need to be fixed relatively quick because it seems like quite a number of people are having a hard time playing due to eye strain (myself included).

Seems crazy to me if these settings were a poor design choice and not a bug though. But as I mentioned above, since the bloom issue was moved to the Accepted Bugs forum, hopefully they're fully aware and working on a fix. *fingers crossed*

I was having a fine time and then I tried to solo titan ex for my Khloe book and the DLSS fried my eyes, I couldn't even look at the screen.
I lowered DLSS to half but having no way to TOGGLE a lighting effect is insane. It's not like it requires any more game files, it's a simple as turning a light on or off.

Man, another day and SE still hasn't even acknowledged this is an issue. I know the majority of people are fine but there IS an issue here that some people are having. I've tried every suggestion I can get my hands on but nothing fixes it. Console players can't adjust any settings beyond a gamma slider and turning LoD off.
It feels like this update wasn't tested at all when it comes to consoles. You have reports of people's consoles over heating, xbox players can't even play the game for any meaningful amount of time without crashing. I guess fuck us for playing on console? I'm at a loss of what to do now. I'm just glad I didn't preorder dawntrail. I would be even more sour if I did.