I’ll bump this topic because I already talked about it very briefly but without much effect.
TL/DR: This is not blur, it’s actually the EXACTLY OPPOSITE PROBLEM, which causes a problem even more distracting then blur for some, this “gaps” between frames. The solution is Blizzard introducing an good Motion Blur per Object to solve this, like Doom 2016 does.
Motion blur is one of those “stigmas” on gaming community, like gyro aiming for example. But it is actually NEEDED to make motion “believable”. The “soft solution” for this is going for higher refresh rate and higher FPS, This will rise the cap that this effect will start to happen (you’ll need to pan faster the camera to see gaps).
This happens because the frames from games is “instant snapshots”, and our eyes doesn’t actually “see” in frames in the actual “reality”. On the real world, you see an infinite amount and your eyes naturally “blur” then. In movies we “simulate” this effect changing the shutter speed, so the “gaps” between images are glued together in a way that our eyes can perceive and correlate as “natural”.
You can easily notice this changing the “shutter speed” on videos. The faster you’ll go, the more “jittery” the image will be. This can cause some artifacts like syncing the RPM from an helicopter rotor and the shutter speed from your camera. In the recording, the blades will be “static”. It is easy to find videos about it, but I can’t link it here so you’ll need to search.
Since we can’t have “infinite” amounts of frames on games, the only solution for this is a combination of various things.
First, this sounds “strange”, but you actually want the least amount of MOTION BLUR caused by your panel, in other words, fast response time and higher refresh rate, or a good MBR implementation. This type of motion blur (sample and hold effect) will not help to solve the gaps and it will actually make then even more annoying.
A high enough framerate to have a high sample rate for…
A good per object motion blur. The best example that you can correlate with Overwatch is Doom 2016. Just set motion blur to the highest quality and turn on it even on the “low” amount. You’ll see this problem doesn’t happen, and the movement is very focused, natural and “glued” together.
I can talk much about this, but Digital Foundry already made an EXTREMELY good video on the subject, you can search for [Tech Focus - Motion Blur: Is It Good For Gaming Graphics?
And a good site for fast tests for this type of problem is this: [UFO Test: Ghosting testufo dot com.
Go to the Ghosting / Pursuit Camera test.
For curiosity, try UFO separation on 160 pixels and speed at 7680 pixels per sec. If you’re into a 240Hz Panel you’ll se a bunch of static “UFOs”. This is a perfect example why id doesn’t matter how “high” our FPS or frequency is, to solve this problem and make motion “believable” we NEED a good implementation of Motion Blur.
So BLIZZARD, PLEASE. Do an option for this , in Overwatch we have way to much movement and almost instant acceleration, so this problems pop like no other place. It’s EXTREMELY distracting. At least bring it an option for Overwatch 2.
Ps. I know a lot of people aren’t “prepared” to discuss motion blur in games. It’s ok, a lot of then doesn’t actually understand what it is. For anyone who still “hate” motion blur. I can’t recommend enough the video from Digital Foundry and Doom 2016.