Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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.

[LucisBlack]

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.

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

For me, the culprits seem to be:

• Forced upscaling.
• Forced bloom.

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*