Tilt-shift minecraft shader (video)
youtu.be
youtu.be
The nicer parts of shading are from the mods that he is using (in modified form), http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/120261-125-glsl-shaders-... and http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/940974-125sonic-ethers-u...
Although nobody wants to watch a video like that either.
The blurry areas could be rendered at lower resolution then blurred to the final screen. I read an article where a 2D side scroller used this technique to good effect on its frame rates.
3D would require a serious mathematician to make the various edges match well enough to not be offensive.
EOM
[1] A Macbook Air that happily runs 6 hours on battery will run about 90 minutes playing minecraft.
That side scroller benefited because it could just draw the background/foreground sprites at a lower resolution before blurring. You wouldn't be able to get that luxury easily with a 3D game.
If I can render objects in the distance at 1/3 the spatial resolution, that is 1/9th the fragment shading, times a much reduced texture bandwidth since I'll be using a lower resolution mipmap.
I'll still have to composite it back in to the full resolution frame, but if that operation is faster than my fragment computations it would win.
This one does the same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQbUyO9goxM&feature=relmf...