The First Descendant – How To Reduce or Remove Motion Blur

This is an updated post from the beta of The First Descendant. After the full release of the game, this fix still works for players having motion blur issues.

The main issue or concern for us is the existing motion blur and the overall blurry graphics and look to The First Descendant.

There is a simple way to go about this problem that I will discuss with you so that you can maybe at least run the game before quitting the desktop at the earliest. This is an updated guide since NEXON has an option now to toggle Motion Blur in the game.

How To Reduce or Remove Motion Blur

I tried a number of different settings to find certain fixes to my problems. Let me list them down below so that you also have a checklist of the things you can or would have done to fix this. Take note that these options DID NOT WORK for me:

  • Changing Resolution To lower scale – Looks very bad and did not work well at all. Definitely not recommended.
  • Using upscaling option – Setting the DLSS to Performance with Very Low or Low Settings gave me a good FPS boost without Blur. Make sure to set it to High Quality if you want to use it. FSR an XeSS were okay and did not help me much here.
  • Changing FOV This did not fix my issue and made the FPS even lower by rendering more from the background environment. Definitely not recommended. I keep this to 90 or 95.
  • Changing Display Mode – I am currently using a 2K monitor so I am taking more FPS hits than a normal 1080p user. Hence I am using Borderless Window mode to lower the CPU load while I ALT Tab. This did not help me but it aided me in reducing the system load.

Working Method To Remove Blur

First of all go to: C: > Users > Your Username > Appdata > Local > M1 > Saved > Config > Windows

Now Head over to the Engine.ini file and open it. Now Copy and Paste the following code in order to turn off motion blur:

[SystemSettings] 
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0 
r.MotionBlurQuality=0 
r.FastBlurThreshold=0 
r.BlurGBuffer=0 
r.SceneColorFringe.Max=0 
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0 
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0 
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0

Now, just save the file and start the game. Hopefully, the always-on-Motion Blur will be gone by now. The above method is a foolproof way to remove Motion Blur in the game. I will also show other methods to reduce the blur effect if you do not want to do the settings file changes.

ALSO READ:  High On Life: How To Fix Audio And Sound Problems

The only option that significantly reduced the Motion Blur or Blurry Graphics is the Graphics Option. Simply Lowering the settings from Auto to “Very Low” did the trick for me! You can also use Medium or Low Graphics Options and Put the upscaling to DLSS High Quality to get decent FPS.

I have no idea why it is like this, but no other option seems to work for me. One explanation is that there must be a preset with each option that keeps the Motion Blur ON. Since there is no way to turn that OFF in the current state of the game, you cannot use them to reduce blurriness in-game.

Hence, the only thing that worked for me to remove or reduce Blur significantly and increase the FPS to about 90-95 is dialing down the Graphics Option to Very Low or Low. Here are two comparison images that show how it made the changes:

The First Descendant Graphics Adjustment 1

This image was taken before changing the Graphics Option.

The First Descendant Graphics Adjustment

This was taken after the adjustment was made. As you can see, most of the visual noise is gone which was present before. Even though the game may not look that great, it is playable to some extent in its current state. Before this change was made, I was having a tough time even making it through one cutscene or phase.

Pro Tip: You can also increase sharpness to 3-4 values to make the game look sharper and cleaner. This tweak worked for a lot of players, so give that a go as well.

I am using an RTX 3060Ti and a Ryzen 5 5600x with 32 Gigs of RAM. I am quite sure that the issue is not from my end but from the developer’s end. This is a medium-level rig in the current time that can run modern games at medium to high settings


NEXON has an integrated Motion Blur toggle option for the full version of The First Descendant. Turn that off if you want and do the other mentioned changes as well to see the difference!


Thanks for dropping by!


Last Updated on July 5, 2024

2 thoughts on “The First Descendant – How To Reduce or Remove Motion Blur”

  1. same issue, game is super blurry, only fix was to enable nvidia dlss and use dlaa, any other option like quality or even dlss off results the entire game looks blurry, regardless what quality you use low or ultra.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top