Modern video games provide a myriad of settings and parameters you can tweak to get the best possible experience. Heck, even the accessibility and gameplay options can take a couple of minutes to fully explore, and that’s before we include the sheer number of graphical settings you can tweak in most games these days.
Although settings like ray tracing, tessellation, ambient occlusion, and volumetric fog can be draining even on high-end PCs, they add some graphical fidelity, making them more of a double-edged sword. On the other hand, there are several options that, when enabled, can make the game look worse instead of adding anything meaningful to the visuals.
5 Camera wobble
The dizziness-inducing head bobbing
Often used as a way to depict impact, camera wobble is exactly what it sounds like: the camera moves back and forth to add a sense of “realism” when you perform certain actions in games. Although the camera wobble setting is somewhat tolerable in third-person games that use it a bit sparingly, it becomes really annoying when the camera continues to shake just for regular movement.
Unfortunately, first-person shooters tend to add some form of camera shake, with many prominent games in this genre adding constant head bobbing while walking, which can be rather disorienting. If camera wobble is implemented especially terribly, it can be nausea-inducing and can lead to motion sickness after prolonged gaming sessions.
4 Lens Flare
No reason to get blinded by in-game light sources
Lens flare is the first of the many lens-based effects on this list that I turn off to avoid degrading my visual experience. Sure, a little bit of halo and scattering around a bright light source can make the graphics look somewhat cinematic. But my biggest gripe with lens flare is how overblown it is in modern games.
Action-heavy first-person shooters are a genre where I abhor lens flare because this "feature" not only blinds me but also blocks my field of vision anytime there’s a remotely bright light in the surroundings. Leaving my personal preferences aside, lens flare is one of the worst graphical effects for those with epilepsy.
3 Film grain
I'd rather not have this noisy, reel-like filter in my games
Film grain is a post-processing effect that adds noise or a grainy effect to games, making it look as though it’s viewed from the lens of a camera. Although it’s meant to be a feature to improve the aesthetics of a game, most implementations of film grain tend to come off as amateurish. It’s especially bad in games that push for realism, as all the grainy effect does is reduce the graphical fidelity of said games by washing out the colors.
2 Chromatic aberration
Another terrible lens-based effect
For the uninitiated, chromatic aberration is another lens-based effect that adds color distortion around the edges of characters and even surrounding objects. Sadly, it looks as bad as it sounds and actively detracts from the “realism” aspect that many graphically-demanding games seek to achieve. Typically associated with old cameras, chromatic aberration has no place in modern games because seeing weird color outlines around objects dampens the overall visual appeal.
I'd easily rank the annoying discoloration caused by chromatic aberration as the most awful effect, if not for the blight that is motion blur...
1 Motion blur
Enable it if you want to make the visuals messier
Motion blur is pretty self-explanatory: the surroundings of the player character become blurred when you move the camera. Often implemented in games released in the early 2000s, motion blur was used to compensate for the weak hardware of the bygone era by making the camera and character movement less jittery.
With the superior computing prowess of modern-day GPUs, there’s really no reason to enable this option, unless you want the visuals to become a blurry mess. Similar to camera shake, excessive implementation of motion blur can lead to discomfort, headache, and motion sickness. I’d go so far as to say that motion blur is so distracting that I actively seek out ways to disable it: be it by tweaking values inside configuration files or by downloading mods that help me turn it off.
Improve your personal gaming experience
Video games are constantly improving. In the past, it was impossible to imagine developers implementing so many graphical settings and sliders in games. But that doesn't mean every addition is worth it. The lens filters, post-processing settings, and other options mentioned above are a testament to the fact that more effects don't always equate to better graphics. There are a couple of other settings, like bloom and depth of field, that fit the criteria for this list, but they can be somewhat tolerable and, dare I say, impressive if implemented properly.
That said, most of the options I've mentioned in this post aren't very taxing on your system. So, if you're looking for ways to get better performance from your games, you should check out our collection of the best settings you can modify to better optimize your favorite games.