Motion Blur Reduction (abbreviated to MBR) is a (now common) technology on modern gaming displays. Because of what we call “sampling and holding,” frames are displayed until the image is refreshed again (see “Frame Rate”), which when displaying fast moving images can lead to blur. Note that we are not talking about intentional motion blur, which adds to most games and is a simple setting that you can turn off. This type of blur is more like halos.
When you play a game (for example), your display actually shows you a whole bunch of still “pictures” made up of all the individual pixels on your screen, at a rate, which is equivalent to the refresh rate of your monitor, assuming your computer, can run the game at your monitor’s refresh rate.
A 60 Hz monitor will display 60 frames (“images”) per second, for example, a 120 Hz monitor will display 120 frames per second. These images displays so fast that our mind interprets them as motion. However, because of the very modern displays work, individual pixels cannot change their brightness and color instantly, and most conventional monitors have a response time of a few milliseconds. Usually this is not a big problem; when you are just browsing or watching a movie, it does not really matter, but when you can and will cause a blurred image when playing a fast-paced game,
The way to solve this problem is to use a monitor with a higher refresh rate (as shown in the image below, from blurbusters.com), but modern gaming displays also have their own technology to limit motion blur.
Motion blur in games
When you play a game (for example), your display actually shows you a whole bunch of still “pictures” made up of all the individual pixels on your screen, at a rate that is equivalent to your monitor’s refresh rate, assuming your computer can run the game at your monitor’s refresh rate.
A 60 Hz monitor will display 60 frames (“images”) per second, for example, a 120 Hz monitor will display 120 frames per second. These images display so fast that our mind interprets them as motion. However, because of the very modern displays work, individual pixels cannot change their brightness and color instantly, and most conventional monitors have a response time of a few milliseconds. This is not usually a problem; when you are just browsing or watching a movie, it does not really matter.
The way to solve this problem is to use a monitor with a higher refresh rate (as seen in the image below, from blurbusters.com), but modern gaming displays also have their own technology to limit motion blur.
How does motion blur reduction work?
Motion blur in gaze tracking reduces by limiting the time the frame displayed one the monitor. As mentioned earlier, increasing the monitor’s refresh rate works for this, as well as introducing a strobing effect, which you can achieve by turning the backlight off between refreshes, rather than turning the backlight on all the time. Here is how all these MBR features work.
This effect is not visible to the naked eye, but it reduces the amount of time you actually look at each pixel, further reducing the display time of a particular frame. This is not much different from those old CRT monitors (which some of your old school gamers will remember fondly) which, because of the way their technology worked, had a built-in strobing effect that made the image they displayed look and feel much smoother to the human eye.
A good (moving) example of how inserting a black frame (i.e. “Strobing”) can help smooth out an image, you can go to the UFO Blur Buster test here.
These blur reduction features are usually optional, since you will need a powerful graphics processor (or at least one that can maintain a constant, high FPS) to make strobing work. Another disadvantage of these techniques is that screen brightness reduces because the screen backlight turns off for (very short) periods.
Common gaming brands for MBR
- DyAc – Dynamic precision from BenQ Zowie
- ULMB – Ultra Low Motion Blur from NVIDIA
- LightBoost – from NVIDIA
- ELMB – Extreme Low Motion Blur from ASUS