Bloom: looks like you have tears in your eyes. Oblivion is hard to look at as is but this takes it over the top.

Flare: muh Oscar winning Hollywood film simulation. No one else is dumb enough to think a computer rendered image will have lens flare.

CA: never used unironically in film or photography, but lets put it in games anyway. Its cinematic to see the world through a $0.5 magnifying glass.

Motion blur: nice way to cover up your jerky unoptimized mess of a game. The human eye only sees 16 blurs a second.

Vignetting: an option for those who find pleasure in seeing the world through a peephole. May be too immoral for recent games though.

You know one thing a lot of people overlook is good ole Dollycam.

Where your character controls more like a dolly on wheels than an actual person.

As for post processing effects, bloom gets on my nerves first for being a badly applied effect.

I recently played the Tomb Raider reboot from 2013 and the only AA options were FXAA, which was super blur city, and super-sampling, which for some ungodly reason they also put a blur filter on. Both looked like trash. Ended up using nVidia's DSR resolution scaling with no blur to run the thing at 5k and it looked amazing. Doing that with Dishonored right now too. It's an option for titles that came out right when FXAA was the in thing at least.

Today's TAA games though obviously can't run at those resolutions. I bet AA at native 4k isn't really needed though, given how 1440p barely needs it (IMO).

I agree with that. I think it's usually subtle enough for me but some titles go overboard. Oblivion was annoying because if you turned the bloom down it made the grass look super weird. There's probably a mod for that though.

This thread is a great read.

Sleeping Dogs is the fucking worst.

It uses that REALLY heavy depth-of-field filter that does nothing but 1) make everything look like absolute blurry shit - everything that's like 10 meters away looks like it got smeared across the screen with watercolors and 2) absolutely tanks your framerate. And worst of all: The game flat out refuses to let you turn this shit off! I'm confident that if you could disable DOF, this would be a pretty decent looking game that runs reasonably well.

But alas...

As a rule of thumb, I set pretty much all graphics options for any post-2010 game to low or off and it usually ends up making the visuals look a lot better.