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Your most hated graphical effect?

Bloom, most annoying thing ever, full screen blur is pretty close though, both can be deal breakers for me.
 
Arghhhh blurrrrr.

1/10
Would not bang.

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motionblurturningd2q67.png

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Volume said:
Motion blur is a HORRIBLE idea when it has anything to do with player-controlled movement. Panning in a cutscene? Fine. Blurring my vision when I'm moving the mouse? BIG NO.
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That is fake motion blur. REAL motion blur will only blur the motion lost between rendered still images. The fake motion blur they put into games is WAAAY overdone, and results in an object having a blurred motion trail longer than the distance it has travelled between frames, which is an impossibility in real-life photography. In reality 'motion blur' doesent blur at all, it actually intercepts motion and delivers that detail to the scene.
 
Don't like motion blur. Seems I'm not alone. I think its just a cheap way for consoles to mask tearing. Then they don't bother removing it for the PC versions.
 
PRogers86 said:
For example, if you are in a dark cave in Skyrim or something, you can only see whats inside the cave (the outside world is bright and blown out). Thusly, less of the environment is visibly exposed at one time (and you have less dynamic range). Less stops of light visibly exposed at once = a low dynamic range.
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You don't lose dynamic range. The output is going to be LDR either way.

The idea behind HDR is to tone map the scene such that what's integral to the player is clearly visible by emulating eye adaptation. Given constant exposure, you can't adequately see detail in very dark areas, and excessively bright areas become too washed out by bloom. Given dynamic tone mapping, the dark details of the cave become more visisble without negatively impacting the darkest sections of the scene. A good HDR implementation actually has genuine technical benefits: merely passing things through a floating-point HDR rendering pipeline gives you greater blending accuracy. It's akin to using high bit depths like 32-bit float or 64-bit int for audio processing: full dynamic range will eventually be clamped, but the internal processes are done with greater precision and with less loss.

A lot of people get turned off by HDR because HDR is rarely done well. Scenes need to be properly sampled to get the best exposure for what the player is probably wanting to look at (non-trivial); the eye adaptation rate needs to not be too fast nor too slow; bloom needs to be not over-applied. Most games get none of these within the right parameters to make HDR work well.
 
wonderfield said:
You don't lose dynamic range. The output is going to be LDR either way.

The idea behind HDR is to tone map the scene such that what's integral to the player is clearly visible by emulating eye adaptation. Given constant exposure, you can't adequately see detail in very dark areas, and excessively bright areas become too washed out by bloom. Given dynamic tone mapping, the dark details of the cave become more visisble without negatively impacting the darkest sections of the scene. A good HDR implementation actually has genuine technical benefits: merely passing things through a floating-point HDR rendering pipeline gives you greater blending accuracy. It's akin to using high bit depths like 32-bit float or 64-bit int for audio processing: full dynamic range will eventually be clamped, but the internal processes are done with greater precision and with less loss.

A lot of people get turned off by HDR because HDR is rarely done well. Scenes need to be properly sampled to get the best exposure for what the player is probably wanting to look at (non-trivial); the eye adaptation rate needs to not be too fast nor too slow; bloom needs to be not over-applied. Most games get none of these within the right parameters to make HDR work well.
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I don't know what you just said, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's wrong.


Seriously though, I'm sure there's some truth to whatever you just said. But isn't it possible to have the dark cave scene perfectly exposed (I use "exposed" as a photography term) and still be able to look outside the cave and see everything perfectly exposed as well? Or at least not completely blown out? The HDR effect in video games only artificially affects the brightness, right? Can't you tone down the brightness of whats outside the cave and be able to both see inside and outside the cave at the same time? The lighting without the HDR affect is "flatter", but it actually gives you a higher dynamic range.


I guess my gripe with HDR in video games is that the term is misapplied. In photography, HDR gives you less contrast, fewer blown out areas, and fewer crushed blacks. An HDR image (before the post-processing) looks kind of flat, but the range of detail you can see is much greater. Much more dynamic.
 
wonderfield said:
You don't lose dynamic range. The output is going to be LDR either way.

Yeah, I understand there's a limit to the color and contrast range of our monitors. But when I say HDR in video games I'm talking about the artificial lighting adjustments being rendered in the game. If a game crushes the detail out of dark areas and blows out the details in bright areas, you've just lowered the range of visible details within the scene. You've just L'ed that DR, yo.
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Nothing angers me more than artifacting. Especially when followed by no display at all.

And yes, motion-blur is clearly one of the more annoying ones.
 
Any kind of drunk/drugged/inebriated only one I can think of off the top of my head is the tranquilizer effect from Perfect Dark on N64.
 
PRogers86 said:
Seriously though, I'm sure there's some truth to whatever you just said. But isn't it possible to have the dark cave scene perfectly exposed (I use "exposed" as a photography term) and still be able to look outside the cave and see everything perfectly exposed as well?
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If you use more of an HDR photo algorithm, sure. The term isn't misapplied, though: it's high dynamic range rendering as opposed to low dynamic range rendering. The processing is done in an HDR space; the final output is LDR. If anything, the term "HDR" is misused to describe what people refer to as HDR photography. A better term would be "multi-exposure blending photography".
 
Lots of people seem to hate motion blur... wouldn't have expected that. I really like it when it's done right. Crysis does it over the top, though.
 
Motion blur and overdone HDR / lensflare, whatever it is that blinds me.

I would not be against motion blur except it noticable degrades the response of the system, even when the system says it is running at 300 fps. It must be input lag or something.
 
Adding grain is as annoying in games as it is in movies, same with other 'artistic' features such as grey-scaling or altering the colors. I like my images crisp with true to life color that will make the IPS panel shine. Not using the entire screen... for example in bioshock/bioshock 2 when you have the big daddy mask on a 'feature' of that is you get to see through a glass mask which obscures the corners of the picture. blah

Other then that, the '30FPS is good enough' console crowd and games fixed at 30 FPS.
 
stockwiz said:
Adding grain is as annoying in games as it is in movies, same with other 'artistic' features such as grey-scaling or altering the colors. I like my images crisp with true to life color that will make the IPS panel shine. Not using the entire screen... for example in bioshock/bioshock 2 when you have the big daddy mask on a 'feature' of that is you get to see through a glass mask which obscures the corners of the picture. blah

Other then that, the '30FPS is good enough' console crowd and games fixed at 30 FPS.
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A lot of film grain isn't added to movies. The film used to shoot movies has grain. Film grain.
 
I hate film grain. Worst effect ever imo.

I like subtle motion blur, I find it makes 60hz feel far smoother.
 
PRogers86 said:
A lot of film grain isn't added to movies. The film used to shoot movies has grain. Film grain.
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I'm not saying I'm in favor of degraining old films, but I'd prefer they use filmstock that has less grain in modern films, but others will disagree and think that grain makes for the 'experience' .. similar to how people like vinyl records (on equipment that doesn't cost $20,000) I certainly don't want to see it in a game where I'm supposed to be seeing with my own eyes into the environment at high framerates unless it's there for a purpose IE the Stalker games, wandering into radiation and whatnot.
 
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Motion Blur, Bloom, and all the texture filters they like to put on shit now to grey-out the colors or put a blue-tint on everything, or sometimes both (BF3).
 
All current foliage tech:

- Grass: 2 sprites sticking out of the ground. Yuck.
- Leaves on trees: ugly flat textures with transparancy that look fake when viewed from an angle
- Foliage-sprites that turn as you change position. It's not 1995 anymore guys!!!
- Static grass and bushes. I want to see moving branches when I walk though it, dammit!
 
Bloom and Blur

I generally dislike all effects game devs are using to cover the low base quality of their work e.g. low res textures, low polygon count objects. Add some excessive bloom here, deph of field blur there and suddenly (some) people say its awesome graphics.
 
Motion blur, when done right, looks amazing. Team Fortress 2 is a good example, it's subtlety adds a touch of realism to the otherwise cartoonish graphics and has next to no impact on framerate.

Some games, the motion blur cuts my framerate in half and make the game look like absolute garbage. Dead Rising 2 in particular looks like absolute shite with blur on.
 
Oh, by far my most hated effect is Depth of Feild... FFS let me focus on what I wish to!
 
Many effects like motion blur, depth of feild, bloom/over-exposure, grain, water/blood dripping down screen, lens flares, etc.. are appropriate if you are looking through a camera, but not much else...
 
PRogers86 said:
How does turning HDR off compress the dynamic range?
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Computer monitors are often limited in how black that blacks can become, and how white whites can become. In addition, they are often only 8-bits, so you only have 256 brightnesses. (10-bit gives you 1024 brightness levels, but that's not often done for 3D games). Trying to compress your entire's video game world into only those ranges, may benefit online FPS gameplay because you see everything better, but it ain't "photorealistic".

When the goal is to render a videogame to make it look as realistic as possible, like a very realistic photograph, you're going to include black crushing and white clipping. Even a professional Canon SLR can't simultaneously take a photograph directly of the sun and a cave at the same time, and reveal detail at the same time.

The goal, thus, is to be very careful in proper usage of HDR. There's good HDR, and there's bad HDR.

[QUOTE}For example, if you are in a dark cave in Skyrim or something, you can only see whats inside the cave (the outside world is bright and blown out). Thusly, less of the environment is visibly exposed at one time (and you have less dynamic range). Less stops of light visibly exposed at once = a low dynamic range.[/QUOTE]We're viewing it from a different perspective. Dynamic range from the perspective of the monitor? Dynamic range from the perspective of the internal graphics storage? Dynamic range from the perspective of the human eye? We are both right, just viewing it from totally different angles/perspective.

Compressing a high-gamut real world into a low-gamut monitor, is full of compromises. Good usage of GPU based HDR can improve the experience.Turning off HDR benefits competitive gaming, while turning on HDR can benefit immersive feel of photorealism during solo gaming, because you have the same limitations with your human eyes and with photography.

Turning off HDR sometimes makes video game images look "dull colored" on many monitors. It looks more realistic with HDR when HDR is done properly and it also helps if you don't spread the internal logic dynamic range too far beyond the monitor's gamut (otherwise it causes excessive amounts of white clipping and black clipping). You're compressing the wide internal dynamic range of the internal game graphics into the visible dynamic range limitation of your computer monitor (contrast ratio, black level, peak white level and all). This can result in less photorealism when you're able to see the details of a sun and the details of a cave simultaneously. It looks cartooned/gamey rather than photorealistic. Likewise, obnoxious HDR looks like a poor quality cameraphone. Instead, HDR should be tweaked to simulate the dynamic range behavior of a professional high-end SLR camera. That's the *perspective* I am talking about. As Einstien says, it is all relative. We're viewing things from different frame of references when we're saiyng "compressing the dynamic range".

The big problem is when games become a bit obnoxious with HDR, to the point where it annoys the user.

Since we look at video games through a screen, they look more "realistic" when they emulate other media we consume through a screen (TV and film). This is why HDR in video games is often exaggerated, as it's meant to emulate auto exposure setting on a low-latitude video camera.
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Which comes to "good HDR" versus "bad HDR". You need to emulate a high-quality camera, not a low-quality camera.

HDR is not always good, but I do like well-done HDR, at least for solo gaming.
 
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