Screen Flickering is dangerous for your eyes.

[GothicSaint]

So yeah, just thought I'd point this out, if you do experience the black screen flickering, be careful about how long you play for. Headaches and Migraines have actually been reported a lot, now its eye damage, so better safe than sorry.

 

This is kind of alarming.

 

I don't know about migraines or headaches but I am a little concerned that I sat down one day to play this game, saw this flickering you talked about and couldn't remember anything for the next 8 hours.

 

I was level 14 and my clock said 2pm when I started to play, then ..BAM.. I was level 23 and it was then 10 pm at night.

 

I went to my doctor and he told me it was one of two very serious problems.

 

1. Epilepsy

 

2. Boredom

Edited January 23, 2012 by GothicSaint

[GothicSaint]

Good News !!!

 

My doctor ruled out Epilepsy

[Zorvan]

I never understood how somebody could get motion sickness when they aren't actually in motion.

 

Go into any modern game.

 

Climb to the top of a really high building/mountain where you can free fall all the way to ground.

 

Aim your camera at the ground in front of your character so you can watch the ground coming up ( in first person view is even better for this ).

 

Jump off.

 

Chances are, as you fall toward the ground, you will get that little lurch in your stomach, like you get in a rollercoaster when you drop from the top curve. Some people are more sensitive to it then others, thus they get sick where others aren't bothered by it or might not even feel it at all.

 

And it's all because your eyes and brain are telling each other that you are falling, and thus sending out those "warning signals" to your body.

Edited January 23, 2012 by Zorvan

[formulaic]

Noticed nobody brought this up, so here goes:

 

We're playing a modern game using modern hardware. I think a lot of us back in the WoW, UO or whatever days were rolling with CRT monitors that were set to an 85hz refresh rate or so.

 

The influx of cheap LCD monitors and laptop gaming now has tons of people using 60hz refresh rates, which is in fact terrible for your eyesight. Seriously, try looking at a 60hz refresh rate and then bump it up to 100hz. It's like night and day.

 

They are different technologies, and refresh doesn't mean the same thing.

 

With an LCD display your screen is a massive grid of dots. A dot effectively 'glows' a colour and will remain glowing that colour until you tell it to change to a different colour. You can point a video camera at an LCD display without much trouble.

 

With a CRT display your screen is the result of a beam drawing on it. Every 1/60 second the beam redraws the entire screen line by line... the image fades towards a black screen until 1/60 second later it is redrawn (ideally by that stage the pixel is black). If you point a video camera at a CRT display then you'll see blackness creeping up/down the screen.

 

Hence a CRT constantly fades to black, whereas an LCD shows the picture 'the whole time'. For that reason a CRT refresh rate is very important as you may be able to see the black bits from time to time. For an LCD it doesn't matter much.

 

Anyway, the end result is that an LCD at 60hz is an ~100% stable image, only let down by the response time of the LCD ('ghosting').

 

Perhaps this is why we're seeing more and more of these cases today. I still have an old 120hz CRT monitor that I'm playing TOR on and my eyes rarely get fatigued while staring at the screen.

 

120hz CRT monitors are very impressive pieces of kit - and I know other people that swear by them.

 

Personally, I find the key to avoiding eye strain is 'vsync'. Turn that off and I'll get eye strain - 'fake 3d audio' also gives me headaches .