AOC makes my eyes physically hurt

With the release of phase three, I've been playing around six hours a day, and my eyes hurt due to the visual style.

I usually spend this same amount of time on the computer, playing other games/doing work, doesn't hurt my eyes. Now the past two nights going to sleep, eyes are throbbing.

Wanted to see if anyone else has the same experience? The main things I can put my finger on is the flickering of the leaves/trees, the general haziness/bloom of the game.

Phase three has been great other than that it hurts my eyes, love the balance of XP to the quests and exploring the most, and the revamp of crafting/gathering. Great job intrepid!

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Ludullu

Is your game running at 60+ fps? Cause mine was running at around 10 and I got a headache after ~3h of playing.

Nerror

I can get it during night time ingame, especially if I run higher than medium settings. My eyes are under constant strain from the fog and TAA and what-not. I have the hardware to run at ultra with good FPS (100+), but my eyes say no. So for now I've resigned myself to run at medium settings (the world is much clearer) with an FPS cap active, so my computer is chilling as well. So yeah, perhaps try running at medium settings? Just turning down global illumination didn't do the trick for me.

daveywavey

Make sure you're blinking enough. It's such a beautiful game that you forget to blink.

AnTicXz

Its the force TAA, that is the issue, I have methods to reduce it or force it off, but that might trigger EAC so I will not be sharing it

I know for a fact the game is amazing looking... however the TAA is so strong that it make the game look awful UNLESS you are on 4k native

Exia

Maybe TAA

Laetitian

Linking this thread discussing TAA, because I'm Abe Simpson.

I'll also take this opportunity to point out a central dividing factor in the debate around temporal AA solutions, and other AA and rescaling solutions that make up colours from objects that don't exist:
The effect is critically more problematic at lower resolutions.

It's fine if you want to say "our game is too new to bother with optimising graphics at 1080p, sorry", honestly, that's probably fair for a new game in 2025. But at the bare minimum, you have to assess complaints about things like AA and rescaling on systems like a 1440p medium setup. If you can see the blur during camera movements there, it needs to be fixed, because at that point 1080p is essentially unplayable, and 1440p would legitimately look clearer with all AA off than the temporal and-AI magic AA solutions.

Volgaris

I had to reduce my shadows and illume settings. TAA is a thing to that affects people.

Esemo

Thank you all for your replies I game on a 34" 1440p curved 165hz monitor. I played around with the TAA/DLSS as you all suggested, I ended up disabling them all together and maybe it's placebo but my eyes did not ache last night. I can deal with jagged edges, I can't deal with my eyes hurting. So is this unfocused look mostly because of their AA tech, or is it also a stylistic thing if you all had to guess?

Laetitian

So is this unfocused look mostly because of their AA tech, or is it also a stylistic thing if you all had to guess?

It's the AA. I'm pretty sure studios are dependent on fancy AA and rescaling tools because they have to cheat a lot to make fancy modern effects like subsurface scattering and similar graphical fidelity toys work without frying your GPU and hogging all your VRAM (even more than they already do.)
And they can't just disable those effects, because the assets have to be designed with those effects baked in, and they look like crap without them.

The industry desperately needs to realise that it needs a solution for lower resolution/settings to look acceptable and clear, though. I personally think the solution could just be to use stuff like TAA, but just make the effect weaker. Use something like an average between the original pixel and the TAA pixel, and err closer towards the original pixel in low resolution, while staying closer to the TAA pixel in high resolution. (Or even fully skipping this step in high resolution, if it's pointlessly performance-intensive. But in lower resolutions than 4K high, you just need something. TAA and its brothers just don't work.)

Now, mind you...I'm having this conversation for you guys, not for myself.
At this point I've pretty much come to terms with the reality that I'll need to pay double the money I'm used to on my next gaming PC, and then I'll be able to tolerate the remaining blur...

In more positive news, GPU prices have been dropping in the past 2 months, especially Radeon.

Child Item