Eye strain and mild dizziness after playing recently (veteran player)

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(My original post from about 2 months ago when I resubbed)

"Hey y’all –

I was thinking about resubbing for Shadowlands after not having played since early Legion, so I went and played on a starter account for poops and giggles. The game almost immediately gave me some eye strain and made my head feel weird within the first five minutes, which is odd because I’ve been playing off and on since Vanilla through Legion and this is the first time I’ve had issues. After walking away from the computer, I felt fairly light headed and kind of out of it.

I started messing with my settings and turned down my brightness, digital vibrance, gamma, contrast, and even pushed my monitor back farther. I turned down the View Distance to 1, depth effects are disabled, messed around with the AA settings, and also changed my fov so I can zoom the camera way out. This seemed to help, but I still didn’t feel amazing after playing for about a half hour.

I already have prescription glasses for the computer with blue light filters, and went to the optometrist on Tuesday to make sure my eyes haven’t gotten worse because I was a little freaked out (my eyes were the same and everything is all good). WoW is pretty much the only game this happens with, although sometimes I do get a tad motion sick while playing games with head bob like Dying Light (I had to refund) and games with crazy movement like Doom (also refunded).

In between now and early Legion I have gotten a better computer and a different monitor. I went from a 1600x900 60 hz monitor to a 1920x1080 144 hz monitor. I tried playing on 60 hz with 1600x900 windowed early this evening to see if that was an issue, and still felt weird afterward.

I guess my question is: is there a possible setting in my monitor that could be messing with me? Is it the new res? Will I just eventually get used to it? Does anyone have ideas? I would really like to resub to WoW but if I’m going to feel awful every time I play its obviously not worth it.

I’ve played thousands of hours of FPS games like CSGO, Valorant, Apex, PUBG, and Overwatch and never had any issues. No other screens or anything in my life cause this issue. I’m looking for help so I can come play WoW again and feel safe and healthy!

Thanks!"

I decided to try again now that pre-patch is out, and even with some of the new motion sickness accessibility settings, I still felt a little odd afterwards. Whats bizarre is some characters/zones seem to make it worse than others. I leveled a Worgen rogue (in the Worgen starting zone) from 1-8 and felt completely fine afterward. However, I made a Troll druid and did the Broken Isles starting zone and felt a little eye strain immediately.

Could it be a possible Nvidia setting in the control panel? I’m REALLY trying to get to the bottom of this because its bugging me A LOT. I cannot believe that after years and years of playing this game all of the sudden my brain flips a switch that doesn’t allow me to play it without having issues.

I want to blame it on some new setting in WoW that made the camera different or some new setting on my PC. I’m fairly desperate at this point as I really want to replay old content in Shadowlands with the level squish. If anyone has ANY ideas PLEASE help!

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Hi Imdaddy

I could call myself Imgrandpa. Eyes are bad the whole nine yards. I find the same thing if I’ve been away from playing for a few days. Takes me an hour or two before things feel normal in my head.

One thing comes to mind here - there is a subtle effect called Full Screen Glow. That affects some folk. They need to turn it off. There was a setting years ago. Now it seems you need to change it in the Config file. Recently I have seen that that change doesn’t stick upon logout.

Try this - open chat box then type:

/console ffxglow 0

That is a zero not O

Hit enter afterwards to run it - like I said that setting will reset once you log out.

Someone made a simple addon you might try:

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/glowoff

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This did seem to help a little! I played for about a half hour and barely felt weird! I will definitely try more later when I have more time. I’m just playing on a starter account right now so its kind of a drag to not be able to play my real characters and test on them but such is life.

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There’s quite a few other things that could be factoring into the equation as well though, glow is just one of them. With the game pushing higher and higher quality, it can increase the frame times, but in a weird way.

Check to make sure vsync is turned off. This got enabled by default for many players this patch and can cause a lot of disconnect between hand-eye perception.

Another thing, let’s say the game is showing that it’s running at 60fps. This is a running average, accumulated over a short period of time. Might be 1/2 second, might be 10 frames, etc etc, depends on the game. If your game spends half its time running at 75 fps and half it’s time running at 45fps, you will still average 60fps. And by time, I mean on a frame to frame basis. 60fps=16.7ms per frame, 45fps=22ms per frame and a 75fps=13ms per frame. So what you might end up with is a “square wave” of frame rendering times where they are fluctuating wildly on a frame to frame basis. Jumping back and forth from 13ms per frame to 22ms per frame can be jarring. This kind of visual lag is extremely noticeable for me and gives me pretty bad motion sickness.

This is known as microstutter. A big contributor to it can be outdated addons. Try renaming/deleting your WTF/interface folders, within your wow\retail folder, and delete your cache folder. Once you get back into the game, redo your graphics settings and make sure vsync is disabled. Also, under advanced options, turn off the target FPS option just to make sure. Play the game for an hour or two and see if the problems persist.

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I think you said you are playing the starter edition so no subscription correct?

I was thinking you should try launching the classic client (if you have a subscription, you would need to download the client version of the game as well) and see if it affects you the same way… while it does use the same engine under the hood, not all the bells and whistles are in play.

And you can set your frame rate… sometimes the issue is your system can’t handle the FPS that you are asking it to do. If you lower the set frame rate you can get smoother play.

Maybe post your system specs to see if your hardware is choking to keep up. Shadowlands changed the graphics load on the game, so did BFA, as did Legion… since you have been away a fair amount of time… a whole lot has changed under the hood.

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I was told by a number of people to turn v sync on because that would help. I will try later with v-sync turned off and see what happens. I turned my graphics slider all the way down to 1, and with v sync on with my 144 hz monitor, the fps meter never drops below 144. However, with what you were saying about the microstutters/the meter being an average, that leads to some questions for sure. Should I still cap my fps in game at something or should I just let it run as high as it can go?

It did happen with classic WoW. This is when I first noticed it being an issue because I resubbed to play classic and it made my head feel a little funky. That’s what lead me to believe its a computer or monitor setting that is tripping me up.