It adds pixelated snow to the image. I do love some film grain in movies but video games don’t really need it unless they are going for a film look.

Color banding is predictable. Grain is random noise.

Also, I grew up on 90s games. If there’s no banding, is it even real?

I agree. Film grain is great if your monitor doesn’t have 100% perfect color reproduction (and unless you have a high-end display, most will exhibit at least some form of color banding. see here for yourself)

It literally makes the scene grainy by adding random noise to it… 🤨

I haven’t even seen color banding in games since the days of DOS.

a lot of games use it more as a way to give it a vibe, or just have it poorly implemented and doesn’t scale correctly with your monitor resolution