Gaming, displays, and eyestrain

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PhlegmMaster

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Hello,

I'm not sure where to post this but I figured this was as good a place as any.

I've played many 3D games on my HDTV (a Panasonic 32" LCD), but I've never experienced eyestrain until a few days ago when I started playing World of Warcraft. After barely an hour I noticed my eyes were getting tired. After 3 or 4 hours my eyes hurt so badly that I had to stop playing. So I haven't played Wow since last Monday, but the symptoms didn't go away. And today I had to take a day off work to allow my eyes to rest!

What really puzzles me is that there is only one game that tires my eyes like that. Does anyone have any guesses as to what WoW might be doing that other games don't that might be causing this? Perhaps something to do with the refresh rate? I doubt it's anything I'm doing. Once I noticed my eyes were getting tired, I pushed the screen ever further away from me than it usually is, I started looking away from the screen for 20 seconds every 20 minutes, and I made sure the game's refresh rate was at 60hz, but none of that helped at all.


Any guesses or suggestions will be appreciated.
 
Well when i played WoW I got use to the eye strain but it took me a few months to be able to crank in a sad amount of game time (9+ hours a day at the worst easy).

I think with WoW it has to do with all the items/buttons/hotkeys you have to keep your attention on , plus chat text , questing managers and more and more. Not many games require the constant attention span WoW does. And failure to pay attention in WoW gets you or everyone killed.

However playing a larger screen with bigger pixels can cause a fair amount of eye strain if you are too close to the set and not at the correct viewing distance. I played WoW for 6 months on a Samsung A650 40 inch set and I sat about 3 feet from it. I ended up having to move back another foot and that did the trick for the majority of my eye strain. I would suggest you experiment with the viewing distance and see if that helps.

Also turn down the brightness of the display and make sure its a low level as a super bright display can lead to eye strain as well.
 
eyestrain/headache everytime i play Badlands. still have no idea why.

my eyes are fine on Crysis, etc.
 
I suspect movement when there is a lot of "fine lines" are screen, such as text in MMOs and more solid colors (less "noise) such as the art style in Borderlands (and Wow to some extent), due to the response time issue of LCDs. Your eyes maybe adjusting more to compensate for the blurriness, causing eyestrain.
 
That's an interesting hypothesis, limitedaccess. What would the solution be if you're right? Going back to a CRT monitor? My TV has a pretty high response time for a LCD.
 
PhlegmMaster said:
That's an interesting hypothesis, limitedaccess. What would the solution be if you're right? Going back to a CRT monitor? My TV has a pretty high response time for a LCD.
Click to expand...

I would imagine if its the color and brightness of the fine text perhaps blowing up the text and lowering the "pop" of the colors via contrast or brightness might help out.

Taking the drastic step of going back to a CRT probably won't solve it.
 
Asumming you are using shutter glasses to acheave the 3D effect, then you have 60 Hz flicker right in front of both eyes. When you add focusing on fine detail to that, you have a high probubbly of head-aches. Polarized 3D glasses would eliminate this, but they are not available for home use, so as mentioned above crank up the text size. Smaller text forces you to sit to close to the screen and looking at anything that is grainy or blurry can cause head-aches as well.

If you are playing in a dark room add some defused bias lighting, that can make a big difference too.

Dave
 
Does your television do 4:4:4 color, Phlegm? If not, it could be that some of the 2D images (inventory screen, shortcut bars, etc) and likely the text (of which there is plenty in WoW) are not being displayed properly. They might be have a subtle fuzzy quality, one you may or may not consciously notice from your viewing distance. Same could be said of Borderlands as it has a flat, 2Dish art style imposed over a 3D landscape and plenty of text. You likely wouldn't notice or be bothered by the subsampling in a game like MW2 or other shooters, where you aren't so much forced to focus on 2D/text for any length of time.

Just a guess, but the vast majority of HDTVs only do 4:2:2 (I think) under normal circumstances. Chroma subsampling is one of the main reasons I have yet to successfully find an HDTV I'm willing to use as a PC monitor.

Should be noted, some TVs offer a "PC mode" that eliminates subsampling, but it usually introduces at least 20ms input lag. YMMV
 
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Deeky said:
Just a guess, but the vast majority of HDTVs only do 4:2:2 (I think) under normal circumstances.
Click to expand...

Ummm, I've never heard of a TV doing chroma sub sampling. There would be no reason at all to do so. It would literally have to resample the HDMI signal, since HDMI is RGB or YUV 4:4:4 natively. HDMI is uncompressed, no subsampling, that's kinda the point (remember that the video part of HDMI is the same as DVI, even electrically).

Now chroma subsamling is used heavily in videos, almost all compressed video (DVD, Blu-ray, web, etc) are 4:2:0 sampled (which more or less means half vertical and horizontal chroma resolution with respect to luma). This allows for better compression and not a lot of quality loss.

However TVs don't deal with that. The DVD or Blu-ray player decompresses the stream to uncompressed video and sends that. The TV then just outputs it. There would be no reason not to. Every pixel has all the subpixles for colour so to not use them would be stupid.

My TV has no loss of colour definition at all from a computer source (yes I've tested it).
 
Not sure what to tell you. I run across buckets of reviews and users complaining about subsampling on even the newest 2010 HDTVs. I was just discussing it with one of the reviewers on AVForum, actually. I'm typing this from my iPhone, so I can't really track down links, sorry. That said, I'm not here to argue about it. Just passing on what I've learned as a possible explanation to the OP's issue. UNNECESSARY subsampling appears to be a common practice/problem on HDTVs unless one uses a specific PC mode. I'm no expert, I could be wrong, but it seems to be a point of contention on the forums I frequent (AVForum, AVS, etc).

Actually, one guy uploaded a pic he created in MS Paint that highlights the issue. If you switch between your standard game/movie mode and PC mode while looking at the image, there is an obvious difference. I'll link it when I get home.

EDIT: Used my buddies lappy to track down the link: http://www.avforums.com/forums/13209678-post634.html :p In this particular case we were discussing the Samsung LE32C530.

Earlier in the discussion, one user details his experience:

I dont do any color critical work so I cant really answer in regards to that, im pretty much just interested in getting the image as clear as possible. the lack of 4:4:4 is noticeable to me where some color combinations appear blurry or with a glow type effect. Im sitting quite close to screen (3-4ft) so any defect is quite noticeable. Its still very usable but once I found the 444 mode I just couldnt go back.
Click to expand...

In an effort to keep the thread on topic, that's all I have to say about that. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I'd LOVE to be wrong, actually! Good luck sorting out your issue, OP.
 
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Well, I've tried playing WoW with a 120hz monitor (instead of a HDTV), and my eyes still get a bit tired after half an hour and extremely tired after two hours. Still no problem with other 3D games, including ones with quite a bit of text, like RPGs. I'm not sure what else to try. Are there some in-game video settings I could mess with to see if they make a difference?
 
Do you play in a dark room? Bright room? Try adjusting the contrast and brightness to help reduce eye strain. I suspect that it's probably from reading 'floating' text though. There really isn't much you can do about that other than taking frequent 5-10 min breaks from the computer to let your eyes focus on something else.

How does the game run? Smooth framerates?you're not using a CRT are ya?
 
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