(In my opinion, no game ever needs motion blur, but that's a whole other article.) I will say, at the very least, turn it off before laying down your first road. I don't honestly know why a city building simulation has a motion blur setting.
You do lose some detail (like trees) when zooming way out, but up close the game still looks nice. I hate having to lower detail in a game where examining all the details is the best part! I will admit, though, changing this setting does improve game performance quite a bit, and it doesn't make as much difference visually as I expected. This was a recommendation from Colossal Order for the review build, and the setting I was least happy about having to tweak. It does appear to make a small difference in fps, however, so I'd advise disabling it. I've clicked this on and off a bunch of times while playing and visually I can't really detect much, if any, difference at all. But if you want to improve performance, try disabling this setting completely (and don't even think about setting it to Tilt-Shift mode, it seriously slows my game down). This is kind of a bummer considering a tasteful amount of DOF can go a long way to giving games a bit more visual flair.
