Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[Wind-Krysvein]

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...

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.

[4clubbedace]

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.

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

[Toontown]

as an update for anyone on PC.. after lowering my settings to AMD, 99 resolution, and changing the anti-aliasing, much of the blur is gone. the game looks awful and pixelated which i hate, but it's better than the migraines.

the blurring does persist even with these settings when i zoom my camera in/out. like others theorized it's probably baked into the graphics somehow.

i do feel a slight eye strain still when i play but it's nothing compared to the horrific pain i had on the first day. unsure of how i'd feel on long raid hours of the same flashy lights over and over.

unfortunately this fix doesn't work for console players so the issue still needs recognition for those still suffering or unable to play.

[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.

[Kefzka]

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.

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.

[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

[Nitelancer]

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

[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.

[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.