Guild Wars 2

If you don’t get eyestrain playing GW2 with vanilla graphics settings (all on high etc.), skip this post. Folks who do might want to try ENBs.

For a few years I didn’t know why i just didn’t want to play GW2. I mean I love it. But I couldn’t play for as long as I wanted to because, somehow, my eyes just couldn’t quite take it.

Put it down for a year or so. Then got into Skyrim, and played for two months almost every day, racking up continuous hours of play (as I was taking a long holiday). I noticed no real eyestrain with or without ENBs. Switching again to GW2 just made the contrast greater.

While I’m not an eye expert, for me the reason appears to be similar to how a camera lens tries to continually auto-focus on a subject that is blurry. We just don’t hear any sound when our eyes do it. It seems my eyes were constantly fighting to focus on objects on the screen, and i didn’t even know it.

Until I also used an ENB in GW2 such as GEMFX (just Google search for it).

And if you want to have a much more eye-friendly GW2 gaming experience, install GEMFX, disable the GEMFX section, enable the SweetFX section and checkmark “LumaSharpen” and “ToneMap”. Then set GW2’s own postprocessing to “None”.

Your eyes will thank you and best of all, there is no performance hit.

Search in YouTube to learn how to install them. Bear in mind that ArenaNet is not obligated to entertain any support issues arising out of the use of 3rd party utilities, such as the aforementioned — but hey, my eyes are more important.

To ArenaNet. Maybe implementing a subset of SweetFX-like controls would benefit more users (like me). I’m also hearing from new-found friends in GW2 of their eyestrain issues ( and they also don’t know why ).

Why is this important?
Because regardless of how much you give (ie. daily rewards, achievement points etc. etc.), people now have a health reason why they cannot play or play for as long as they wanted to.

Like really, stare at this for 1 hour straight. Specifically, home in on the armor details. You know, like the kind of activity everyone does hours on end (ie. checking out other people’s armor). After a while, your eye and brain will grow tired of always having to (re)construct the details “in-brain” instead of just clearly seeing it on the screen.

(This screenshot is from the GW2 website itself btw.)

Oh this actually makes sense. Yes I am one of those people. My eyes are constantly red and tired from Guild Wars but I never understood why. Thank you

Thank you! I’m going to try this out tomorrow. I’ve been having awful eyestrain even from very short GW2 sessions. My eyes have been getting quite sore.

And just to drive the point home. Here’s my before and after screens.
Left = no ENB. Right = GEMFX’s (SweetFX).

Now if the image to the right looks a bit dark and contrasty, it’s my own personal preference. You can certainly adjust it brighter, anyway you like.

Note: Screenshot fidelity has been reduced automatically by the forum upload process but retains about 85% of its original color and detail.

To get rid of most (if not all) of the blur you can also set:
Textures: High
Antialiasing: SMAA Low or None (SMAA High produces more blurry textures)
Render Sampling: Native or Supersample
Best Texture Filtering: On
Depth Blur: Off <- the worst offender

And set the texture filtering options of your graphics card control panel to application controlled or best image quality.

I’m also not a fan of these highly stylized images. They look only cool in a screenshot.

John Fuego.5634:

If you don’t get eyestrain playing GW2 with vanilla graphics settings (all on high etc.), skip this post. Folks who do might want to try ENBs.

For a few years I didn’t know why i just didn’t want to play GW2. I mean I love it. But I couldn’t play for as long as I wanted to because, somehow, my eyes just couldn’t quite take it.

Put it down for a year or so. Then got into Skyrim, and played for two months almost every day, racking up continuous hours of play (as I was taking a long holiday). I noticed no real eyestrain with or without ENBs. Switching again to GW2 just made the contrast greater.

While I’m not an eye expert, for me the reason appears to be similar to how a camera lens tries to continually auto-focus on a subject that is blurry. We just don’t hear any sound when our eyes do it. It seems my eyes were constantly fighting to focus on objects on the screen, and i didn’t even know it.

Until I also used an ENB in GW2 such as GEMFX (just Google search for it).

And if you want to have a much more eye-friendly GW2 gaming experience, install GEMFX, disable the GEMFX section, enable the SweetFX section and checkmark “LumaSharpen” and “ToneMap”. Then set GW2’s own postprocessing to “None”.

Your eyes will thank you and best of all, there is no performance hit.

Search in YouTube to learn how to install them. Bear in mind that ArenaNet is not obligated to entertain any support issues arising out of the use of 3rd party utilities, such as the aforementioned — but hey, my eyes are more important.

To ArenaNet. Maybe implementing a subset of SweetFX-like controls would benefit more users (like me). I’m also hearing from new-found friends in GW2 of their eyestrain issues ( and they also don’t know why ).

Why is this important?
Because regardless of how much you give (ie. daily rewards, achievement points etc. etc.), people now have a health reason why they cannot play or play for as long as they wanted to.

Like really, stare at this for 1 hour straight.
(This screenshot is from the GW2 website itself BTW)

Hello there brother.

When i played other MMO game,i had same issue.My eyes were pulsing,and every time i close them,i have feeling they are going to pop out.It is most annoying thing ever,besides tooth hurting.

Now,recently i did some GW2 graphic testing,and i notice,every time i change settings on max,that eye pulsing thing start again.

I had monitor which i bought 3 years ago,and i had issues with native resolution,which made my graphikittentle bit blurry in game.Nothing big,but that made my eyes hurt.I had monitor 5 years old,but resolution is higher than on my previous one.I replaced it,and eye-issue vanished.I am enjoying game now,and its like i am playing different game.

Try to enable option Light Adaptation.Play with graphic settings and see what does suits you best.

Also,i asked my doctor why do i have issue with eyes,and that pulsing feeling and she told me " when you focus on game too much,you do not blink enough,and your eyes are dry" Ask in any drug store for liquid “fake tears” .Tell them your problem.Also,if you have low resolution monitor,change it.I paid mine 15 euros,second hand,and it was much much better than 130 euros previous one.

Resolution i am using atm is 1280/1024

Kiza
Sure wished that was enough. But nope. “LumaSharp” actually sharpens the image (highly adjustable). There is no such setting in GW2 (see pic. and the comparison). I’ve intentionally left the settings open for reference.

(Just wanted to reiterate, it looks even better than it does in this forum)

Werdx
An ENB can emulate the qualities of another monitor by tweaking DirectX pixel shader hardware directly. The result is practically the same as getting another monitor that has extensive color/image controls (if not better).

I agree with you that once you get the right “fixes”, it’s like playing an entirely different game :-)

John Fuego.5634:

Kiza
Sure wished that was enough. But nope. “LumaSharp” actually sharpens the image (highly adjustable). There is no such setting in GW2 (see pic. and the comparison). I’ve intentionally left the settings open for reference.

TBH, I find the right version overly sharpened. To the point it even hurts a bit. The contrast is extremely high, too. Try SMAA low instead of FXAA on the left, but it won’t produce a much clearer image I guess.

Do you wear glasses and are you shortsighted, btw? If yes, they may be too strong/overcorrecting. Human vision is not really perfect, but if you’re used to extremely sharp images it might cause problems with eye strain.

I, too, had such problems. Until my optometrist told me that my doctor always set the lens correction to an almost perfect value. Since I changed the doctor and have glasses that don’t correct 120% I have much less problems. (I’m sorry if things sound awkward, medical terms in english are not really my speciality)

Kiza.5630:

TBH, I find the right version overly sharpened. To the point it even hurts a bit. The contrast is extremely high, too. …

I know what you mean and I agree. Again, if you upload a screenshot to this forum, you’ll see how bad the re-compression and loss of image fidelity is like. It’s better on screen and running in realtime.

EDIT: Here’s a setting (gosh, need to reset to my favorites again) to show the granularity and how subtle you can apply the sharpness (below). You can also do things like lower the color saturation a bit at the same time.

The over-sharp look is just a personal preference. The sharpness setting is as granular as Photoshop’s smart-sharpen and while I used a more subtle setting before, it didn’t apply to all cases/scenes in GW2 say from the vast expanse of white in Northern Shiverpeaks versus the dense foliage of Maguuma (HoT).

I simply decided to set it for what looks best for Core Tyria as I still spend most of my time there than HoT. Yes it looks a bit too much but I didn’t want to always fiddle with the sharpness configuration (so, small price to pay). Besides, like the sharpness settings on a regular TV set, it looks just fine once the image is in motion. Not okay when just a still-frame capture.

Am I shortsighted? Left eye is far-sighted. Right is short-sighted :-\

Which is okay, since when I lean forward, the right eye is just perfect and when I’m tired and lean back on the chair’s head-rest, the left eye is perfect :-)