What Does Bloom Mean In Gaming? (Answered!)

Bloom refers to a specific kind of graphical effect in gaming. It is a technique used to reproduce the imaging artefacts of real-world cameras, particularly around light sources in games. It’s about the level of reflection of a surface when a light source touches the entity. It can have a couple of other meanings, too.

Many of the graphical options on modern games can be a bit difficult to understand if you aren’t savvy with these things.

Bloom is one of the relatively more simple to understand, and yet it is still quite opaque for many of us.

Let’s find out more.

In This Article

What does bloom stand for in gaming?

Bloom can stand for a couple of different things in gaming, but it most often is a graphical matter.

Bloom is a particular kind of graphical effect that is designed to replicate the way that light reflects off and interacts with surfaces.

Its basic aim is to reproduce the kind of effects you get from real-world cameras, in the way that light seems to grow and reflect more because it is reflecting off the lens.

Bloom is usually a graphical option that you can turn on and off in video games, and this is the easiest way to see for yourself what the difference is.

Look at a source of light in the game, whether that’s the sun or just a light in the ceiling.

With bloom turned on, you’ll see greater reflections, and the light source itself will seem to dissipate further.

With bloom turned off, lighting will be flatter, and surfaces not be as highly reflective.

You also will not get that sense that you’re looking through an actual camera lens.

While these things are by no means required to produce a good-looking game, they are to a degree the standard now at least in the AAA industry.

Bloom can have a completely different sense related to the firing of weapons, particularly guns, in video games.

I’ll get into that later, but for now just rest assured that usually when people are talking about bloom in a general sense, they are referring to the graphical feature and not the other meaning.

But where does this term come from?

Where does bloom come from?

Bloom is a term that has been in use in photography and videography for a long time.

It refers to the act of coating a lens in a special surface layer so that reflections from its surface are actually reduced.

Bloom is certainly a term that came out of the gaming industry itself, as opposed to being coined and popularized by gamers themselves.

Developers use this term to describe the graphical effect they are trying to achieve, and it has now become the industry standard.

This has been in use in gaming for decades, with the earliest games to use the effect including Riven from way back in 1997, Outcast from 1999, and other games of that era.

Since then, bloom has been an industry standard term for how graphical lighting works in your game.

The other sense of the term comes from the idea of a blooming flower—since it describes the recoil area of effect of a gun, it blooms outwards like a flower.

How does graphical bloom work, exactly?

How does bloom work?

This is naturally a highly technical question to answer, but let’s look at the broad brush strokes of it. It boils down to just adding a glowing effect that radiates light sources in the game.

Games now have pre-built systems which can simulate the finest minutiae of the way light behaves in a real environment.

Developers mostly just employ these techniques to create the effect.

As I said, there’s no necessity to have a bloom effect in your game to have good visuals, but it can certainly spice things up.

What is bloom in FPS games?

So, what is this other sense of the term bloom?

Well, as I touched on, it’s to do with the spray and recoil of a gun in a shooter game, whether an FPS or a third-person shooter.

It refers specifically to the area that your bullets hit as the gun recoils and sprays bullets around.

This is often utilized as a technique to try and hit more people, using a larger or more powerful gun to simply haphazardly spray into a wide area—like, as I said, the blooming of a flower.

So how is this different from recoil?

Is bloom just recoil?

No, it isn’t.

Recoil is simply the term that describes how the gun pulls back as it is being fired.

That’s just the way it moves in your hand from the force of the firing.

It does not relate to the way that the bullets are spread out from the recoil as that happens.

Blooming is just about the area over which shots are fired while the gun is recoiling.

Recoiling is a separate thing that causes this to happen.

There are a couple of things that this word can mean, then, but it should be quite clear from context.

It’s either a very specific graphical term referring to how light interacts with objects and surfaces, or it’s about the radius of bullets from a gun in a shooter game.

You will most often hear about “bloom” effects in the graphical sense since virtually all games make use of bloom effects to some degree.

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Founder - @PollyWebster

Polly Webster is the founder of Foreign Lingo and a seasoned traveler with a decade of exploration under her belt.

Over the past 10 years, she has journeyed to numerous countries around the globe, immersing herself in diverse cultures, traditions, and languages.

Drawing from her rich experiences, Polly now writes insightful articles about travel, languages, traditions, and cultures, sharing her unique perspectives and invaluable tips with her readers.

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