Hey guys. I just wanted to bring up something in relation to the post I made a while ago.

I noticed that I'm able to play multiple titles that aren't made in Unreal Engine.

Namely:

  • League of Legends (ARAM)
  • Fall Guys
  • Guild Wars 2
  • Divinity Original Sin 2

Titles I cannot touch:

  • World of Warcraft
  • Lost Ark
  • Counter-Strike
  • Fortnite
  • PUBG
  • Virtually any other UE game

On the other hand, anything made in Unreal Engine gives me instant mind fog, eye discomfort, etc., as in my previous post. Another revelation/interaction that shocked me was editing videos in Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. It caused exactly the same issues while rendering videos.

Could this be temporal dithering or something that Unreal Engine does uniquely while rendering images? I tried playing around with video settings etc, but nothing works. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has noticed a similar issue.

Out of curiosity and for what I suspect could be useful for empirical testing, are you aware of anything built with Unreal Engine that has an older version that's rendering the same assets, but does not cause eyestrain?

Thanks

    Hi there !

    I noticed a similar issue. I can play some games without any eyestrain. Unfortunately some other games make me suffer extremely after only a few minutes. It's like 0% eye strain vs 100%.

    I don't really know if it depends on the game engine. I have the impression that it depends more on the color palette used by the game (so a dithering thing ?).

    In "good" games i have Rocket League which however runs under Unreal Engine. But a very old engine version i think (UE 3 ?).

      JTL I have not found one at the given moment. I used to play WoW years ago, burning crusade and wrath of the lich king and I did not have the same symptoms, however, that's years before my symptoms flared up(it flared up with MacBook Pro 2014) and also, I believe it wasn't coded in the Unreal Engine at the time.

      Remco I thought about color palette too. I can play League of Legends ARAM mode quite easily but the moment I changed the map to Summoners Rift I begin to have the same issues. On the other hand, I tried playing around with my screen to make it black and white and it didn't work either.

      I also thought about the depth of view and how my eyes focus, but then again, I tried to play the game wirelessly from my bed about 3 meters away from the screen and I would still get the same issues. Another interesting observation that I made is that I can watch all these games easily on twitch and I get absolutely no eyestrain. It has something to do with the way the game is rendered in real time.

      • JTL replied to this.

            I get similar but can only think of 2 games

            Rising storm 2 Vietnam, that uses UE3 but this is ok for me, however the 'last' update (years ago now) added a new map which i cannot play on, even on my good graphics card machines I cannot play the new map as it causes me the same symptoms as a bad card. I assume the new map was made in a different UE engine?- no idea though as I'm not a game dev.

            Hell let loose, unreal engine 4. The entire game is a flickering experience. Sometimes I can play it for 30 minutes before symptoms get bad, othertimes its very immediate. Been trying lately with my 2060 which is better than my 1660 but overall its not playable for me, have read it can run in dx12 which I've yet to try.

            On my PS4 Slim, for me the Unreal Engine games I have played so far have a varying degree of eye comfort. I have looked through the Wikipedia list of Unreal Engine games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games) and compared those that I remember I have played:

            • Little Nightmares 1 & 2: very comfortable
            • Minecraft Dungeons: ouch, this one hurts enough that I don't want to play it.
            • Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden: pretty comfortable AFAIR
            • The Ascent: very comfortable
            • Trials of Mana: hmm, not so good I think (it's been a while). What I remember is I got motion-sick from that one, which may be a different topic.
            • XCOM 2: a little eye strain (one eye only, like the temporal dithering eye strain in Firefox etc.), but playable.

            And on PS3:

            • Borderlands 2: I think comfortable, other than motion sickness.
            • Mass Effect 1-3: very comfortable
            • XCOM: very comfortable

            Interesting, after all, it's probably some rendering technique that UE is using that is disagreeing with my eyes/brain. Shame since I wanted to play a bit of classic. If someone has any solution or trick to minimize it, do let me know. I will update you if I work something out that works.

            Another small update. I noticed that every game that I can play comfortably had anti-aliasing on.

            Infinite JTL I have not found one at the given moment. I used to play WoW years ago, burning crusade and wrath of the lich king and I did not have the same symptoms, however, that's years before my symptoms flared up(it flared up with MacBook Pro 2014) and also, I believe it wasn't coded in the Unreal Engine at the time.

            That is fine. Reason I asked is because if there's one application that doesn't cause strain and one that does while rendering the exact same content between them, it creates an possible research target into the root cause of this issue (in terms of both the code and the video output).

                JTL I will try and spend some time thinking about it and perhaps research what UE does differently from other engines. I tried using AA on World of Warcraft yesterday with no apparent results, perhaps I have to get used to it.

                • JTL replied to this.

                    Infinite If you can't find any its not the end of the world. Someone else here claims to know of several applications (not all games) that allegedly have this new "rendering voodoo" so that could be another starting point for research.

                        JTL I think I might've found a possible solution. I tried out this new setting, and I believe I experienced less eye strain from it. I found an old forum post that got revived stating the following:

                        I'll be doing a bit more testing, but honestly, the change is quite noticeable.

                          a month later

                          This is a useful path. Unreal and unity are both free to play with and have all sorts of different advanced postprocessing options. I was focusing on antialiasing as the problem, but ambient occlusion makes sense too.

                          • JTL replied to this.

                            AA is temporal dithering like font smoothing and there are 5 different versions of it.

                            reaganry If we can get a "good" and "bad" Unreal prototype that otherwise look the same, you should be able to see what is rendered differently.

                              dev