Guild Wars 2

I installed a new graphics card for the computer in the living room, and my fiance says it’s almost too glamorous and it gives her a headache. I also switched from DVI to HDMI which helped a little.

I’d like her to be able to enjoy the game. Has anybody else encountered symptoms like these and are there any graphic settings you’d recommend to remedy them?

If by “motion sickness” you just mean a bad feeling while playing the game:

Turn off depth blur and maybe even FXAA, both sometimes dramatically blur the game (Settings, graphics tab)
- switch on supersample instead

Playing with the ingame Camera position als makes me feel uncomfortable while playing the game, maybe she can find something shes comfortable with(Settings, general tab)?

You could try to turn off “Enable Camera Shake” too (Also under camera settings)

I am susceptible for motion sickness as well, and I suffered from it very badly in the first months of GW2 after release. After the game FOV and some camera handling was changed in an update, and it got much better.

A major aspect for motion sickness in game for me is the lag between an input device and the game reaction. If I move the mouse and there is significant delay between this movement and the actual movement of my character, this makes me nauseous. This mouse input delay makes the camera sway and my character stagger back and forth in larger fights with fast movement, and this swaying is exceptionally bad.

For myself, I got rid of it when I upgraded my computer. My new machine is able to display GW2 at 60 fps in every area except for big zerg fights. The higher the fps, the lower the input delay, because games check mouse movement once for every frame displayed. The higher the frame rate, the lower the time between mouse position checks, getting a more immediate feel of mouse and camera movements.

So you might want to check the fps of your machine. Turn down the graphics settings to achieve a higher fps. Try to get over 50 fps to minimize motion sickness. It’s more important to get the fps higher than good graphics quality, because the game is useless if you cannot play it.

And turn on vsync. The screen tearing that is happening with vsync off was also a big source of motion sickness for me, because it makes the picture appear to distort, billow and swell in an unnatural way. Vsync reduces fps, but must be on absolutely. Activating triple buffering in the graphics driver settings of your GPU (possible at least for Nvidia cards) remedies this.

In contrast to lsmet, I don’t felt any difference at all by turning on or off depth blur or fxaa. If you deactivate both, the fps gets a little bit higher, which may reduce your sickness because of the fps, not because of the graphical effect.

Turning on supersampling was exceptionally bad, because it significantly lowers the fps and this is what makes me feel even more bad. Instead, I recommend turning on subsampling if your fps is low! This makes the picture a bit blurred, but the fps is much better, thus less input lag, thus much better feeling.

The camera shake setting is very important of course. This must be off.

Experiment with the mouse sensivity setting in GW2. If it is too high, you may produce camera swaying and staggering while turning the camera. If it is too low, you may feel not enough feedback by moving the mouse. Both extremes added to the motion sickness feeling for me.

Thanks for both of your suggestions. I do notice a slight increase in FPS now!

Silmar Alech.4305:

The camera shake setting is very important of course. This must be off.

Oh yeah .. that one is really bad.