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*

[TBerry]

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?

[Renii]

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.

[HauntedLasagna]

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.

[Wind-Krysvein]

*snip*

I'm telling you, the waiting is the worst part.

I can obviously live without playing this game (heck, we all take breaks from it. My longest is 7 months) but the thought of the devs flat-out ignoring this issue and just sweeping it under the rug is causing me no small amount of fear and anxiety. I refuse to let it end this way.

[HauntedLasagna]

I'm telling you, the waiting is the worst part.

Agreed. The feeling of not knowing if you are being heard. I could live with it if they came out and said "we see no issue and aren't doing anything". But the silence? Its not a good feeling. Hell, just knowing they have noticed it is an issue would put me at ease a little bit. I'm on some maximum cope right now that they will announce it is an issue when the EA ends and hopefully fix it soon after.

I've played this game off and on for a very long time, I've enjoyed more than I've disliked. I don't want to have to stop playing because my eyes aren't great.

I hope everyone who is unable to play is having a good one. I've taken this time to knock out some of my backlog. Elden Ring DLC is also very tempting..

[Wind-Krysvein]

Here we bump again.

Same as before: if you're experiencing these symptoms, post it here and, if possible, make a report of the issue in the Square Enix support center. I'd also advice against "toughing it out" and playing the game regardless of the migraines, headache or general eye strain caused to you. It may have permanent effects on your vision.

[KleeneOnigiri]

Here we bump again.

I guess you also tried to change the settings in the PS4 itself?

Do you use a monitor or TV? Could you swap it? (like if you use Monitor, try it on TV)
What if you use a smaller resolution?

And maybe a more crazy idea:
Since it's probably the TAA which makes stuff blurry if there is movement, you could try to make your display more blurry. Idea would be that the difference between sharp to blurry get's reduced.
You could try it with a cheap screen protector or something. Seems some make it look more blurry.
Would cost something to try, but maybe helps?

[LianaThorne]

If a fix is coming it'll be after EA when they do their usual post-expansion fixes. Probably won't hear anything about it until then but I could always be wrong.