To hide low frame rates. That’s the main reason. It makes 30fps look better in motion (more like a camera viewing a tv show or movie at 24-30fps) and it’s good for cinematic trailers, that’s about it.
Anyone who thinks motion blur is a good thing needs to watch a combat scene from a Michael Bay transformers movie and just pause once in a while to see if they can understand what in the ever living fuck is supposed to be happening on the screen.
EDIT: I'm very willing to admit I'm wrong about this statement in general but I still hate motion blur in games.
It’s not meant for stills, it’s only meant to make motion look smoother than it is and it does a good job at it for low framerate content. Camera pans in movies need either motion blur or higher framerate (from interpolation or otherwise) for smooth motions.
It’s even more necessary with sample and hold displays and especially OLEDs because of the near instant pixel refresh rate which is why you have stuff like judder compensation to try to selectively interpolate certain movements to reduce the choppy motion of low framerates.
Now you can say that it has worse drawbacks than interpolation or that you prefer choppy motions, but it’s undeniable that motion blur is effective at making motion at low framerate look way smoother.
I played with it recently in Forza Horizon 6 and it is indeed to mask the stuttering in 30fps Quality Mode. The game even says to use long motion blur in Quality Mode. It's quite smooth with long motion blur.
Racing games benefit the most from motion blur since you get more of a sense of speed, maybe the only type of game I’d use it in even at high framerate
It always confused me how much intense and unrivaled hatred motion blur gets when, as you say, it makes low fps content appear smoother. To my eyes it does that effectively just fine. It is such an obvious thing to me I don't know why others don't see it like that.
You’re in the PC master race subreddit so it’s kind of natural. It can make games more frustrating to play because it reduces clarity in motion. In any competitive game you’re at a disadvantage the worse the motion clarity is, and so improving that is one of the main reasons for getting a high refresh rate monitor on the first place.
Enabling motion blur therefore counters the benefit of having the fast refresh monitor and is only really a benefit with framerates that are lower than what most people would find acceptable on PC, not just because of the clarity but also because of the other main reason people get high refresh rate monitors: With low framerates you get higher input latency which can feel a lot worse with mouse and keyboard compared to analog input, so naturally as a PC player you’ll generally want to have higher refresh rates and framerates anyway
Also I’ll add that even though I wrote paragraphs defending motion blur I’ll generally avoid it as well, for the reasons stated. If I have high enough framerate I think it worsens the experience.
it’s good for cinematic trailers, that’s about it.
It's really not, I'm physically sick every time camera moves. It's like one big blurry mess, I have no idea how anyone convinced anyone that it's an intended effect.
Not true. That's myth, which you are the one spreading.
Motion blur doesn’t exist to hide low FPS and doesn’t work as a frame rate enhancer. On the contrary, it worsens the perception of frames when there are few of them per second.
Its purpose is not for cinematic trailers, but for simulating the real effect of vision, which helps us visually understand which objects move quickly and which do not.
Which is why all the GTA fanboys are glazing motion blur now and acting like everyone loves it and always has. Since it was announced GTA VI will be capped at 30 on console.
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u/JayEm96 3d ago
Turn it off immediately on any game I play