Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[lolnotacat]

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.

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.

[HauntedLasagna]

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.

[Guasta_Ryets]

I wanted to start off by ...

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

[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.

[Erinellza]

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.

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

[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.

[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?

[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*

[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.