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