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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Graphics Effects, Love em or hate em.

 

Most hated effect?

Chromatic aberration 35 21.47%
 
Motion blur 39 23.93%
 
Bokeh depth of field 9 5.52%
 
Bloom 15 9.20%
 
HDR 2 1.23%
 
God rays 7 4.29%
 
Lens flare 12 7.36%
 
Dirty lens 16 9.82%
 
Film grain 15 9.20%
 
CRT effects 11 6.75%
 
Total:161
AZWification on 10 May 2014
Lafiel said:
motion blur, depth of field and any kind of screen obscuring when you get hit is taking the cake for me

what is this obession with not letting me see the game? are devs that ashamed of what they have created?

I wished games like Sonic 06 had effects like motion blur!



                
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_mevildan on 10 May 2014
SvennoJ said:
_mevildan said:
A lot of these come down to whether you think game views should be virtual windows to another world, or simulations of cameras. For 3rd person games... surely we should consider the view as a camera of sorts. First person... debatable.

My take...

Chromatic abberation:
That image you show is really horrible, but this effect is good for refractive surfaces and can add realism for sure.

Motion blur:
I think this is a good effect. It's a necessary effect to attain the realism. Of course it's overdone in a lot of cases, but for camera simulation, it will add realism.

Bokeh depth of field:
Your example image is an example of non-Bokeh. Proper bokeh is what is used in games like Killzone: Shadowfall and looks miles better. Again, this is a good thing camera simulation is the desire.

Bloom:
Realistically, should only be used for overbright situations in combination with HDR.

HDR High dynamic range lighting:
Your description here is actually just for iris adaptation simulation. HDR lighting typically describes (in graphics terms) lighting with greater than 8 bits per channel (16 bits at the lowest). This is VERY important for graphics realism.

The rest... not much to say really.

Even in 3rd person it's more immersive to me imagining I'm there to watch what happens, not that I'm looking through a viewfinder while filming the action. I prefer 1st person for immersion, kinda ignore the person walking in front of me in 3rd person action games.

Chromatic Aberration can add realism for sunlight hitting and reflecting of water, but I haven't seen it used that way yet. The full screen effect is usually done as some kind of full screen distortion, more similar to a crt projector's beams going out of alignment than anything realistic.

Motion blur doesn't add realism, cameras can get rid of it too with high speed shutters. Which looks really weird when filming helicopter blades, but the rest looks fine. For rotational elements, sure that's a limitation for humans as well, anything not moving fast enough to follow with your eyes shouldn't blur.

And yes HDR 16 bit rendering or more adds a lot and makes it a lot more realistic. However games always forget the last step, which is scaling the final image down for proper viewing on an 8 bit display, which is what HDR photography does. Instead It will simply take a threshold and make anything black below and white above. Or at least they could scale it down to a more realistic range for the human eye.

Well we can disagree about motion blur, but blur from a moving camera really can add realism. Look at the first person sequence from the amazing spider man. Without the blur, the scene wouldn't look as good. People have done bad motion blur... that's the problem. Crysis 2 had good blur though. Done in linear colour space. I've done scenes with adaptable shutter speeds and you can get really good results. With better hardware you can have higher shutter speed and more image samples and it will look almost perfect really.

As for HDR, i seriously doubt that a single game is just colour clamping instead of transforming the linear -> non-linear colour space. I remember even the earliest DirectX SDK examples used a simple Reinhard tonemap. Clamping the colours above 1.0 would just produced a non-HDR or over saturated image depending on the actual range. Where it goes bad is where the bloom percentage threshhold is too low so bright arears are almost doubled in intensity when bloom is added to the scene (like the Lost Coast).



TheLastStarFighter on 10 May 2014

I like graphic effects.  I've enjoyed high dynamic range lighting for years...

 

I like how all I can see is white light coming out, knowing that I've finally found the exit.  I can almost breath the fresh air!



Egann on 10 May 2014

All of them can be good when done smartly and with a sense of restraint. Dirty lens, however, is the worst. If it's done as a HUD overlay to convey information without a health bar, it's usually fine, but usually it's used to cover for the engine being bad at weather effects. Unless your viewpoint character has glasses and the weather is truly apocalyptic, never use dirty lens to showcase weather.

I actually kinda like motion blur, as many games use it to drastically cut down on tearing. Granted, compressing the textures which are flying by would usually do just as well, but it helps.

It's all about using the effects without over using them.



SvennoJ on 10 May 2014
_mevildan said:

Well we can disagree about motion blur, but blur from a moving camera really can add realism. Look at the first person sequence from the amazing spider man. Without the blur, the scene wouldn't look as good. People have done bad motion blur... that's the problem. Crysis 2 had good blur though. Done in linear colour space. I've done scenes with adaptable shutter speeds and you can get really good results. With better hardware you can have higher shutter speed and more image samples and it will look almost perfect really.

As for HDR, i seriously doubt that a single game is just colour clamping instead of transforming the linear -> non-linear colour space. I remember even the earliest DirectX SDK examples used a simple Reinhard tonemap. Clamping the colours above 1.0 would just produced a non-HDR or over saturated image depending on the actual range. Where it goes bad is where the bloom percentage threshhold is too low so bright arears are almost doubled in intensity when bloom is added to the scene (like the Lost Coast).

I haven't seen the amazing spider man nor played crysis 2, maybe I've never seen well implemented motion blur in games. I simply don't like blurry things :) The only time motion blur makes sense to me is the road right in front of you in a racer. That is motion blurred in real life as well, too fast to keep track of.

Obviously you know more about HDR in games than me. I would like it to work as in digital photography where it attempts to create a naturally lit scene. For example it's almost impossible to get a sunset picture to look right with a digital camera, yet I've no problem looking at the sun set and see the sky in full detail as well as the darker ground. Too many games use the bad form of HDR where details disappear in a bright white wash.
Human vision doesn't really work with a full scene brightness level and static contrast, as your gaze is only on certain parts at a time, which boosts the perceivable contrast range by a lot. Maybe things will get better with 12 bit OLED panels.