Is chromatic aberration good in video games?

Chromatic aberration is a color distortion phenomenon that causes red and blue auras to appear around objects. In video games, chromatic aberration distorts the colors around objects and makes the edges fade away. As a result, objects become distorted and blurry.

Game developers use chromatic aberration to create realistic and cinematic-like effects. Unfortunately, not everybody likes the results. Indeed, the effect looks much better in motion than in screenshots. Chromatic aberration often causes screenshots to look blurry and bad.

Chromatic aberration, blurriness, and motion sickness

Chromatic aberration and many other rendering effects in games aim at making it look like you’re looking at a scene through a camera lens. It’s like viewing the game images in 3D without the glasses. Games rely on post-processing to render chromatic aberration. Some game developers use chromatic aberration subtly, while others use it quite aggressively.

Depending on your hardware configuration and graphics settings, chromatic aberration may actually lower the overall image quality and make everything look blurry. This issue becomes obvious when you look at objects up-close and then switch the focus to a far away object.

Many people feel motion sickness while playing video games. The blurry images generated by chromatic aberration can increase this sensation. As a workaround, play for short periods of time. Take frequent breaks, and check if you notice any improvements.

The good news is most video games out there allow you to manually toggle off chromatic aberration if you don’t really like the results.

Are you a fan of chromatic aberration in video games? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Chromatic Aberration, or CA, is an effect caused by the refraction of light into the lens of a camera. Essentially it’s when a lens fails to focus all the colours into a single point, causing an ever so slight colour shift on the edges of some objects, depending on the brightness of said object.

In photography, Chromatic Aberration is a natural effect that occurs depending on the type and quality of lens used. Since it doesn’t necessarily exist naturally in video games, many developers will just use a simulation of the effect instead.

But why is it used in games in the first place? Chromatic aberration is exclusive to camera lenses, which usually don’t exist in video games. The camera you control in-game does not distort or refract light like real cameras; there is no ‘lens’ to refract light in the first place, so why use it?

Adding Chromatic Aberration will make the game seem as if it was filmed with a camera. These days developers or publishers want certain cinematic effects in their games, making the production value seem higher than it actually is (I’m looking at you, letterboxing) and potentially adding more weight to certain scenes.

How demanding is Chromatic Aberration?

Essentially it is just a cinematic effect, much like letter-boxing or vignetting. This means it is purely for personal preference. Whether or not you want to enable it there will be little to no impact on the performance. If we’re really trying to stretch here and I mean really going for a stretch, you might be able to save a single extra frame, if even that.

Is Chromatic Aberration worth enabling?

Chromatic Aberration is mostly down to personal taste. The main question you should ask yourself is: Do I want my game to look like I’m viewing it through the lens of a camera? Obviously it will make your game look more ‘cinematic’, but is that something you really want in your game about killer bunnies shooting rainbows at unicorns? Maybe in your gritty crime detective story, or a photorealistic horror game. Again though, it’s all down to personal preference.

Here’s a couple screenshots that will show you just what Chromatic Aberration does in-game and help you decide whether or not you prefer it enabled or disabled:

Alien: Isolation

As you can see on the text towards the left side, there is an ever so slight blur and colour shift occurring around the edges of the text 'A01'.

Resident Evil 7

Again you can see here the colour shift and subsequent blurriness along the edges of the lamp and wooden board.

Now it is worth noting that both of these games are first-person horror titles utilising photo realistic graphics. In these types of games you'll notice the difference much more significantly, in others you might not notice it as much.

Our Recommendation:

Since Chromatic Aberration does not affect the frame rate it is all down to personal preference. However we recommend to turn it off if you favour stronger image quality in your games as it can add a slight blurriness to the image.

• Ambient Occlusion
• Anisotropic Filtering / Texture Filtering
• Chromatic Aberration
• Decals / Decal Filtering
• Sub Surface Scattering