From what I've read online, the PS3 uses a post-process filter that applies over the entire screen, "FXAA", to get rid of Aliasing and pixelated edging.

I'm sure Bethesda usually never adds additional "options" in their patches, but this is something that really really really really really REALLY needs to be added in as an eventual option (to disable if we so please).
The game's framerates suffers as it is, right out of the box, and it never maintains it's 30 FPS that it strives for, (that it maintains on the xbox 360)

I know this is a long shot, but if someone at Bethesda has the power, please add in the option into the games display settings to disable "blur", or "FXAA"

If it helps with the framerate in even the slightest, I'd kill for the option. If other people find aliasing and pixelated edging to be so abhorent, then keep the option on and play the game as is. But seeing the screen comparisons, it's obvious the aggressive manner in which the FXAA works on the PS3 ends up blurring the overall image, sacrificing contrast and detail in textures. FO: New Vegas, as aliased as it is, has a much crisper deeper look to it.

yeah, so.. that's it: give us the option to disable the PS3's FXAA.
Here's an article that helps explain some of it, and even has a side by side FPS comparison: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-off-skyrim

I second this. I think those primative days where console gamers can't adjust a visual setting or two should be behind us already.

Even on the PS2, if anyone remembers the GTA3 games, before San Andreas, in GTA 3 and GTA 3: Vice city, you had the option to disable the games "blur" effect, which was used to give the game some sort of cinematic motion-blur effect, but also did so at the detriment of the games framerate.
After i found the option to disable it in the Display settings, It felt like my beer goggles were lifted, and I always played with it OFF in Both GTA 3 and Vice city. It gave the game a cleaner look, and let you play at a much steadier framerate (especially in Vice City)

But then in San Andreas, Rockstar added in a REALLY heavy blur affect, that changed depending on weather and time of day, making the game incredibly choppy and sometimes laughably blurry and blinding with sunrise / sunset. And NO option to disable the blur. This left San Adnreas STUCK in its sub-par framerate. The lack of an option to Disable the blur in San Andreas, when previous games had it, annoyed me to no end.

FXAA uses very little in the way of resources, which is why it's so popular with the developers who don't want to expend time and effort finding extra memory budget on the PS3 to implement a proper AA solution, or get into the detail of utilising the SPUs as most Sony first party developers do. While removing the filter will undoubtedly give us parity to the 360 in terms of fidelity as Pete Hines promised the costs aren't high enough to boost our frame rate, for that we'd need to do something else like add an option to disable V-Sync, which is actively reducing our frame rate by not showing the frames that get torn, considering that some tests have placed the tear rate on 360 as high as 15-20% during large battles such as the civil war it would make a huge difference to our frame rate if these were displayed for us.

This is assuming you're talking about base frame rate, if you're talking about the slideshow that the game turns into due to poor memory allocation, then the only way to fix that is to optimise the engine to work properly on our hardware, something which cannot be done easily in a patch but we have to wait and see just what Bethesda has done with 1.4

I agree with the above.

FXAA is pretty mild on the system. It's the V-Sync that causes most of the issues.
We shouldn't have to be dealing with V-Sync On/Off when playing games, but unfortunately some developers are so lazy that they should at least give us the option to do so.
If some people want -5 on their framerate with V-Sync turned on I can understand that, because it can get annoying when watching the scenery. But I much rather have a +5 increase when the game is already struggling to run.

But let us be real here. We shouldn't even have to be talking about this if 'some' developers put some effort into the testing of their own games.
Because that is where Bethesda failed. They did 'not (let me repeat that again) 'NOT' tested Skyrim towards a proper extent or else the game wouldn't have even got released.

I also believe Sony failed as well because to my understanding they have testers for games released on their platform.

You shouldn't. Sony Quality Assurance ONLY checks game releases to ensure that nothing within the code damages or reacts, in an adverse way, to the console in general and it's operating system. They do not test/check the quality of the game, that is left to the developer/publishing studios.

In response to the OP, I can live with the FXAA effect. Skyrim deserves not to be a blocky mess like the Fallout games. As for V-Sync, sure give players an option (even though it's not possible with PS3 architecture) but watch how many people pop up complaining of incessant screen tearing. V_Sync is enabled for a reason. Both of these coding devices is a case of "Damned if you do, damned if you don't".

That's great for you, but my point is to have an OPTION. The FXAA blurs out details, especially at distances with rooftopts, characters faces etc.
My point isn't about differences of opinion in what people think looks better, its about having an OPTION.

Nobody would complain about Screen tearing because V-sync would be on by default. If you want a higher framerate at the cost of screen tearing, having the option to turn it off would help. This isn't "damned if you do or damned if you don't", It actually solves that problem by giving the player control over improving the gameplay, be it by sacrificing v-sync or AA.

If anyone still thinks the PS3 isn't a computer and shouldn't require the user to tinker with things... (as Sony would claim in why they don't like those options in console games) Well... I'd point out the great hypocrisy of disabling the console command and other options on the PS3, while the game still suffers horrible FPS drops and game crashes like we're playing on a PC, and NOT a console. These options they force on us are at the cost of the gameplay. The "streamlined console experience" was lost once the game starts degrading, crashing, and running into multiple bugs like a Beta PC game release.
If they want a simplified streamlined console experience, they should at least make sure the game still RUNS well with said options forced upon the user.
To the other people talking about the FXAA not being too taxing on the system, my point was that the FXAA is implemented in a way that it completely washes out colours textures and contrast, blurs the overall image, and it STILL hits the performance. How much it does, only the guys at Bethesda who can flick it on or off know, but its still at a cost to performance and framerate. My post has nothing to do with the PS3's lag issue.

I think you're on to something there. My 360 version does have quite a bit of tearing and I've found that it happens most in the areas that my PS3 version drops frames I.E forest around Riften/swamp near Solitude. Although there is a lot of screen tearing it is by far better than fps drops.

However I do agree with John about adding the option to turn off the FXAA to help with the blur effect.

I do not have a clue how all of this alliasing stuff works, but I don't understand why I do have jagged edges all over my game of Skyrim. I don't know about you guys, but I have the blurring that you see in comparison videos AND jagged edges. I see them flickering back and forward all the time. What gives? I have tried it on several displays, and multiple settings, it is the game itself making these problems. Anything with small details or small movements (like a strand of hair, a banner in dragonsreach, or the top of the vine fence thing in the cloud district of whiterun) just jump all around when it comes to the display. They make the game hideous, and now I am being informed that I am having my graphical quality in my game being reduced to fix a problem, when it doesn't fix the problem? Too me it seems like I'm getting screwed. Yes, I experience these jagged edges on other games, but it is exceptable, such as the edge of a light or corner that is way out in the distance in a cutscene or a very thin antenna. But when I am right next to a banner or shadow in Skyrim, and it takes up the whole screen, that should not be a problem, but it is.

(I may make this a seperate thread for attention to my issue)

As noted above, FXAA is really mild in its demands. It doesn't take up much bandwidth or performance and as such, disabling it purely for framerate benefits wouldn't do much, if anything at all. FXAA also isn't inherently so blurry... Bethesda just kind of screwed up and implemented it to be too aggressive. FXAA is a nice alternative to contemporary AA methods, assuming it's implemented properly, and doesn't cost much hence why it's so popular. In Bethesda's case, they set it so strong that it just overly blurs everything, which is a shame and begs the question "why bother reducing aliasing at the cost of so much texture detail".

Anyway, a toggle for FXAA is not going to do anything, really, to assist the framerate. V-sync (which can be toggled on and off on a PS3 game... don't know why some people think otherwise - it's been done, see BioShock) is factually detracting from the fps a bit, but not quite too much. Still, an option to toggle that on or off would help, although as you may or may not know, we'll never reach parity with the 360 version. The framerate issues on the PS3 (inherent issues separate from the memory problem) are a result of Bethesda's generally poor porting job and though I agree I would rather decrease certain graphical settings to maintain a more stable framerate... we're still stuck with crap either way, unfortunately, but yeah a v-sync toggle isn't asking for too much, though we'll never get it.

The way its implemented on PC and the way its implemented in Skyrim is not identical. Without being able to toggle it on & off ourselves, we can't actually be sure how much of a difference, if any, it makes to the FPS. But if FXAA is adjustable, just as regular AA can go from mild 2x AA to more intensive 16x AA, it very well be enabled in such a taxing way on the PS3, which explains why it blurs the game so much more than it does on PC.
Certain detailed textures at a distance get so blurred, that it almost ends up looking like water colors, and overall everything looks so washed out.
Anyways, my main post focused on how much more bland the game ends up looking, and not really about the performance hit. But considering they left v-sync enabled, at the cost of FPS, I wouldn't be surprised if FXAA was taking a bite out of FPS as well, but left just so the overall image would look less "jaggy"

I know asking for options like V-sync and FXXA toggles is a long shot, but unless people at least attempt to make suggestions for change, there will never be any.

FXAA is just really mild in its demands as an AA method. Platform has nothing to do with it, it's very memory-minimalistic and easy on processing capabilities, hence it's become a popular alternative in games regardless of platform. It doesn't scale like sampling-based AA methods and more aggression doesn't really cost much more bandwidth or memory. The cost is texture fidelity.

The PS3 is a 6 year old computer. FXAA may be a less taxing alternative, but it may affect the older PS3 hardware slightly differently. Back in the day, my video card could flip to max 16X anistropic filtering with a zero drop in framerate, (older games, older hardware, but I'd run tests and see ZERO difference) nowadays people can see significant FPS drops by using it., even from 8x to 16x, especially for hardware intensive games like Crysis

Skyrim on PS3 seems to average low 20 FPs right now. Dropping into the teens regularly as well in some fog/water/lighting heavy areas. (again I'm not talking about the game lag / stuttering) There are only so many FPS between 0 and 30. Any hit to performance, no matter how insignificant, is still a hit to performance, and that much more noticeable when your game is choppy to begin with.

regardless, even if it doesn't affect the FPS in any significant way, I'd like an option to disable it purely for the blur reasons.

We should have the option to disable it but I don't expect that option to ever be given to us. Not now. The game is done and aside from bug fixing and hopefully new content bethesda is ready to leave skyrim behind. They can't work on it forever.

Bethesdas' mentality as I see it is this: Its done, its good enough (not great, not as good as it should be), lets move on.

So we'll be stuck with blurry textures, a lower frame rate and an overall inferior product compared to the 360.

More graphical options are always welcome by me. Lately they are fewer and fewer in console games.

FOV settings
FSAA on/off
Vsync on/off
Lighting settings
shadow settings
Draw distance etc...