POE2 Eye Strain: Am I the Only One?

I turn off blue light on my monitor. This game is quite bright.

Buy monitor where u can set low blue light

Same here.

Can't play a game for now because of how hard it is for an eyes. I am 33, my vision is okay. Didn't had this problem with other games.
I hope devs will see this and fix it.

Help. At this rate majority of us won’t be able to continue playing unfortunately.

Turn your blue light down.

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ReaktorDTR#3459 wrote:

Hey Exiles!

I’ve been playing POE2 for 2 weeks now, and every single day I’ve been going to bed with eyes that feel like a Terminator's — completely red and burning. I decided to take a break for a day and played other games. My eyes felt fine again.

But then I went back to POE2 and... "Ah sht, here we go again". Just half an hour in, and my eyes are on fire.

It’s odd because visually, POE2 looks amazing, and I don’t see any blinking frames or frame drops. I’m running at a solid 120fps the whole time. But something about it feels off just for my eyes and I cannot tell what.

I’ve been gaming for years and have played a variety of games without ever having issues like this. I’ve put over 2k hours into POE1 and never had any problems with eye strain or discomfort, even when playing builds that turned my monitor into a stroboscope with all the crazy effects.

Is anyone else dealing with this? What do you think could be causing it?
I’m curious to hear if others have had a similar experience.

You are not the only one.
So, back in December when I first started the game, the first thing I noticed was that something was strange with the graphics and it bothered my eyes. The textures were distorted.... kind of blurry and sometimes pixels moving around like TV white noise dots. I quickly found out that it happened because of the Dynamic Resolution setting and turned it off... but that is just the beginning.. the eye strain is real and here are some of my opinions..

There is a problem with environments using bright colors, because they have very low contrast with some elements, and that creates eye strain ...

1. Bad contrast of the overlay map on bright color environments (Oasis, Crimson Springs, etc), making it hard to see the path.

2. The way all armor items look is ugly and bland, I think because they want to stimulate sales on premium armor sets.. most of the times I found my character was kind of camouflaged into walls, rocks, vegetation, and so on.
This makes it hard to follow at times.

3. Then, there was the mouse cursor, which I often lost track of during sessions... I fixed this by setting my cursor to high-contrast and very large size

4. I also have a problem with the way item tooltips show prefix/suffix and generally all the modifier information in a dim grey color over a transparent background... many times, when there's a bright environment, I struggle to read that information..

5. I really think they should upgrade item tooltips and add some color based text hierarchy between prefixes, suffixes, higher/lower tiers, and stuff like that.. Now don't jump on me for this, I just think it's 2025 and the UI is old and outdated ..

6. Watching your step for ground effects on maps with delirium fog is ... wont' say more here..

7. Some elements and visual feedback in combat is out of focus (buffs, enemy health bar, ailments, damage numbers... constantly moving your eyes up and down to check those also contributes to the eye strain.. .

8. Last, but not least, are all the lights from the spells, especially when mapping in a party... I found that turning Number of Lights to medium, slightly reduces the eye strain caused by this

Playing on a GeForce GTX1070 OC 8GB. I use Night Light in Windows and IPS monitors @ 75hz with good color calibration.

For me going for very blurred dlss intentionally helped a lot. Native 4k is just so crisp that paired with spark destruction (and high res textures + a lot of details in game) make your eyes strain quick. Blur helps to save some 'processing power' of your brain :)

Turn up the brightness including the UI. Dont increase the UI as much though. It is the color scheme they chose mixed with low light values. Your eyes are struggling to differentiate the brown from the other brown or the other other brown. Then during combat they have bright flashes and high contrasting color schemes on spells. Your eyes are constantly going from trying to read on the moon to read on the sun. As some have mentioned, reducing the blue light helps but improving the overall brightness of the low light levels helps balance the strain it is causing.

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Arunderan#4678 wrote:

It's partially the graphics. While they look much crisper and more detailed compared to POE1, they are also much more stressful to the eyes. Especially in movememt.

I would nevertheless also check your settings. VSync off?

>Definitely not the high intensity blue light, flashes, or bright glowing on rare mobs, it's because it looks so good. Yea, that's right.