Crosmando: So everyone knows about the three most obnoxious visual effects in 3d video games; Bloom, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur. But are there any other effects that you personally dislike and always turn off when given the chance?
- "Lens defect simulator" (aka Chromatic Aberration) - The only thing CA emulates is something irrelevant to video games (it makes zero sense in a medium that's 100% rendered and has no light capturing cameras, which is what CA requires to exist). The only time you'll encounter significant CA in real life is with heavy magnification related divergence such as like satellites, telescopes and microscopes (and even then most of that too can be corrected in software). So not only is this effect completely unrelated to graphics rendering gaming or what the human eyeball sees (or what your in-game avatar should be seeing), a lens defect isn't even something you'll want to see unless you're actually playing a game with a half-broken robot avatar.
- "Migraine simulator" (aka Film Grain) - Because you just spent $1,000 on a new PC to be reminded that "realism" = ageing defects of a non-existent silver-halide based 35mm film in a rendered game with no light capturing cameras or film somehow makes 'sense'...
- "Monitor Backlight failing simulator (aka Eye Adaptation / Auto Exposure) - This one is so dumb it's actually taken top spot from CA for sheer ridiculousness. You've already got this effect naturally, ie, play a dark game like Thief or a dark cave in Skyrim in a dark room and spend 10 minutes in a dark area, then move to a light one that causes the screen to go much brighter, and your eyes will already be adapting to your own monitor. Why would you want to double up and add a second fake "layer" that's time-compressed by a completely stupid factor of 1000:1 on top of what's happening anyway? Instead of being some "clever" and "immersive" effect, it just looks like the devs are trying to mimic a failing TFT CCFL backlight for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
- "Giraffe with a broken neck / waddling penguin simulator" (aka badly done Head Bob). This isn't technically post-processing, but I still find it quite remarkable that 90's games like Thief got it right that real head-bob = a very subtle "flick" when your feet touch the floor in a full on sprint, whilst after 20 years of gaming evolution, head bob still resembles something with which you'd be immediately rushed to hospital for an urgent neck / spinal operation if you were to actually see the world move like that in real life...
As for the three you mentioned - "Myopia simulator" (Depth of Field), "Crap console simulator" (Motion Blur) and "Supernova simulator" (Bloom), I always turn the first two off and usually Bloom as well unless it's a very subtle effect.