I'll never understand why people want these camera-mimicking effects in first-person games meant to simulate vision. When I look around in real life I do not see motion blur or depth of field the way games mimic them, plus when I quickly move the mouse or focus on one area of the screen my eyes naturally add those effects realistically, there is no need for games to simulate them.

It's probably my number one pet peeve of the last 5 years or so. Blur and depth of field are the first things I turn off when a game allows me to do so, unless the depth of field is used really well and in the distance like The Witcher 2.

And bloom! Turn that shit off as well. Remember when UT3 came out? It was horrible.

samehere first think i turn off is motion blur, i want to see clearly for gods sake,,also bloom sometime, but even sunglass couldnt protect me from the bloom effect of the new syndicate game,

It's similar to the way the camera sometimes bobs too much. When I walk around my eye level is pretty consistent.

Same here. When UE3 came out a few games had something called Glow, it was like an orange version of Bloom. And yes I always turn off any kind of blur and DOF option too.

HDR on the other hand is a lot more subtle, I think both options were available in Dark Messiah where you could spot the difference. Sun/God rays also look more reaslitic, less intense but with an aestatic touch but it's usually one of those settings that kill performance.

I remember firing up Jazz Jack Rabbit a year ago or so. I noticed that between low and high graphics the difference was background objects like a sun that looked like it was done in paint but it disappeared when I chose low. How technology develops.. :-)

The thinking is that games should look like films, rather than like real life. In extreme cases this leads to the inclusion of film grain effects. This has existed far longer than obvious effects like depth of field; even the lens flares we've had since the '90s were made to mimic the effect of light on lenses (rather than the human eye).

Tell that to Vermeer.

Depth of Field and Film grain are the only 2 that annoy me.

I have the same feeling. I always turn them off. It looks like the devs try to make the game more "realistic", but the real reason why they use it so much is to cover the fact how shitty graphics are.

My eyes start to melt after few hours of staring at blurred graphics, so I don't really like it.

same goes with HDR. Everything is so fucking gloomy in HDR. It looks better than bloom though...

They look like shit and make it harder to see what I'm doing. It's lose/lose. I might as well turn my monitor to face the wall.

DoF is completely unnecessary because my eyes are already doing all the work. If I'm focusing on an object or character in the foreground, the background will naturally be blurry or irrelevant. Making them blurry by means of the graphics engine will make my eyes want to focus them, leading to headaches.

I don't mind Depth Of Field so much as it adds to the viewing distance and scale of the world you are immersed in.

I do hate motion blur, first thing I always disable once I install a new game, it actually hurts my eyes and I prefer having clear vision. I also really dislike Bloom and disable that, I believe they started using Bloom when the XBox first came out to hide jaggies on angled straight edges instead of using all the other effects available. It didn't require as much processing and visual power to implement at the time.

I remember seeing Deus Ex Invisible War when it first landed on the XBox and the Bloom levels were horrible making the image over bright for a game that actually needed to be darker and more like Blade Runner.

Shmeh. I have no problems with these effects and people really seem to use all kinds of ridiculous (and often contradictory) excuses to hate them. Sure, there's a fair amount of games where the devs just force such effects into their game without giving much thought to the "how" and "why" but generally I appreciate them.

I don't like DoF since I'm usually not looking at the same point the camera is pointing at.

Bloom and HDR aren't a problem unless they're badly done (which seems to be the case more often than not)

Depth of field make the game look shitty (i'm thinking rage and most newer games like TES 4 and 5) if it's done right it would be okay just not half a friggin metre in front of me (thinking rage again)

Film grain Looks like shit my vision is naturally grainy even with glasses on making it look even worse (my vision mimics bad analog tv reception called Film grain)

lens flare in a first person shooter WTF?!? when the player character isn't wearing glasses or a helmet doesn't make sense

neither does motion blur it looks ridiculous it's like the main character's got concussion FFS I actually Vomited when I first saw that effect in a game I got motion sick so I turned it off and I'm fine.