Why do modern AAA games look blurry or shimmery at 1080p?
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MellowCedar47
I'm using an RX 6700 XT with a Ryzen 5 5600 on a 24-inch 1080p VA monitor, and nearly every modern AAA game I play looks either soft and blurry with anti-aliasing enabled or overly shimmery with it disabled. I've noticed this in games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, while darker games like the Batman trilogy and Uncharted look much better. 2D games are also consistently sharp.
I usually turn off effects like bloom, film grain, and motion blur, and I've checked the other graphics settings as well. I care more about image clarity than ultra-realistic effects. Could the VA monitor or its motion clarity be contributing to this, and would moving to a 27-inch 1440p display make a meaningful difference?
Answers
A 27-inch 1440p monitor would likely improve clarity because it gives you a higher pixel density and lets you use less aggressive anti-aliasing or higher-resolution rendering. Your 6700 XT should handle 1440p well, though the most demanding games may need a few settings reduced. It won’t completely fix poor temporal anti-aliasing, but it should make the overall image cleaner than 1080p, especially if you choose a display with good motion handling.
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Your VA panel could definitely be adding to the problem, especially if it has slow dark-pixel response times. That can create smearing in motion even when the game is rendering sharply, and it tends to be more noticeable in scenes with lots of movement. A faster IPS monitor would usually have better motion clarity. Check the monitor’s response-time setting too, since an overly aggressive mode can cause inverse ghosting while a weak mode leaves trails.
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Some of this is unfortunately the games themselves. Modern temporal anti-aliasing can make fine details look smeared, while disabling it exposes shimmering on foliage, wires, and other high-contrast edges. If a game offers a native-quality option such as FSR Anti-Aliasing, it may look better than the default TAA, although the results vary a lot. Upscaling can also help in some titles, but it usually costs performance and isn’t a universal fix.
MellowCedar47: I’ve tried FSR in a few games and found it pretty ugly so far. I’m hoping newer versions improve the reconstruction quality.
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MellowCedar47: It’s an AOC 24G2SP or a very similar model. I’m wondering whether replacing it with a faster IPS display would help more than changing game settings.