Ask Lemmy

In single player games it gives me this sorta intense action feel, and I enjoy it.

It depends on the implementation. Properly Implemented motion blur can look rather pleasing. Also with new frame generation tech motion blur really helps smooth out the in between frames I've found.

I dislike it as well, but not as much as Depth of Field.

For some games it improves the feeling of speed. A racing game feels faster with it enabled.

It looks cool as fuck, but only if it blends well with the art style.

Weirdly I think it looks great with Strife: Veteran Edition

Often use it when it's single player and my frames aren't enough to feel smooth.

Some games are designed with motion blur in mind. Elden Ring, for example, looks very unpleasant to me in 60 FPS without motion blur. But I disable it when using a mod that unlocks the FPS.

I usually turn on a light motion blur in games that I f don’t get above 40-ish fps, because the motion blur masks the stuttering. I prefer no motion blur and stuttering to too much or bad motion blur though. I couldn’t play Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 Pro, because the motion blur was really intense, even in performance mode and there was no way to turn it off.

I really like it when games give you an intensity slider instead of just on or off. Spiderman on the PS4, for example runs at 30fps. It looks like a stuttery mess with motion blur off. With motion blur at the highest setting (which is the default I think), you cannot see a thing when moving. But putting it at ~20% or so masks the stuttering very well without being a complete eyesore.

I also like object based motion blur a lot, like the Jedi games have. Instead of blurring the camera movement, it only blurs the movement of objects that are actually moving (quickly), which has a nice effect, in my opinion.

In general though, I prefer having better performance and a clear image, but motion blur is a useable band-aid solution if performance is a limiting factor.

I have similar opinions to the likes of DLSS, FSR & Co. I vastly prefer running games at native resolution but when my GPU can’t keep up, FSR it is. I‘m not yet convinced of frame generation as an alternative to motion blur to get 30fps feeling a little closer to 60 but I haven’t gotten around to testing that yet either. Im not categorically against it in Games, unlike in movies. Motion smoothing in TVs is a pest.

it makes gameplay, not screenshots feel smoother. Screenshots are not playable, no matter how sharp it might look

I use it occasionally, in some games it looks better. Particularly games where the camera doesn't swing around as wildly, meaning NO FPS GAMES! Or any game where you're manually moving the camera all the time. I have yet to see a FPS where motion blur doesn't fucking blind me for every split second I move.

When i enable it, it makes it so blurry that i can only properly see stuff when i stop moving my mouse. Is that because of low framerate? (happens in nearly every game that i try to enable it in, even when setting motion blur to the lowest amount)

It smooths out the framerate, also it looks better to me 🤷‍♀️. I've been playing games since I was little so I don't really get nauseous from it like others in this thread.
I have a pretty high end computer but also keep it on playing games on my Steamdeck too.

I think it depends on the game. Some games, like certain racing games, the motion blur can sometimes enhance the feeling of speed.

Nothing runs at a decent framerate anymore, I have no choice if I want it to look decent. 60 fps isn't that much to ask for.

Only for very specific games, and only because I don’t have a high refresh rate monitor.

If I’m in Forza driving 200 km/h I shouldn’t be able to see the bricks I’m flying past. With my low refresh rate monitor I can, so adding just a hint of motion blur really helps add that flourish of immersion that I can’t get with my setup. But that’s again very specific games and only because I cap out at 60fps.

It helps mask frame drops when turning or moving fast if the game is particularly demanding.

It's something I give so little of a shit about that this is probably the first time I've really thought about it, ever.

So probably that.

I genuinely don't understand why people use it. It gives me massive motion sickness and so I figure out very quickly when games have it on by default

Motion blur off looks like those high shutter speed fight scenes from the Kingsman movies. Good for a striking action scene but not pleasant to look at in general. Motion blur blends the motion that happen between frames like how anti aliasing blurs stairstepping.

It's on a case by case basis like the lense flares.

Do I want a more realistic experience or a more cinematic one?

Also sometimes it hides some fps drops :p

Motion blur is a win if it's done correctly. Your visual system can make use of that blur to determine the movement of objects, expects it. Move your hand quickly in front of your eyes -- your fingers are a blur.

If you've ever seen something filmed at a high frame rate and then played back at a low frame rate without any sort of interpolation, it looks pretty bad. Crystal-clear stills, but jerky.

A good approximation -- if computationally-expensive -- is to keep ramping FPS higher and higher.

But...that's also expensive, and your head can't actually process 1000 Hz or whatever. What it's getting is just a blur of multiple frames.

It's theoretically possible to have motion blur approaches that are more-efficient than fully rendering each frame, slapping it on a monitor, and letting your eye "blur" it. That being said, I haven't been very impressed by what I've seen so far in games. But if done correctly, yeah, you'd want it.

EDIT: A good example of a specialized motion blur that's been around forever in video games has been the arc behind a swinging sword. It gives the sense of motion without having to render a bazillion frames to get that nice, smooth arc.

Because I like it. There shouldn't need to be much more "reason" than that.

People that can't leave others alone for having different preferences than you, why?

That and Bloom. I hate Bloom.