Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[CidHeiral]

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?



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.




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



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




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.