texture shimmering on 6800 GT even w/ optimizations disabled

This is just when you wish B3D had an active OpenGL guy/sireric on the Nvidia side of things. Dang it, Nvidia, speak up!

 

BIIIIIG hugs to OpenGL Guy/SirEric/CATALSYTmaker for spending so much time on the boards and sharing info and such! Me loves ATi!

(Sorry, someone had to say it. )

 

I just want to post a theory. I don't have a 6800 so I can't test this, but looking at pix from around the web I was wondering if the shimmering is caused by "non-standard" aspect ratios.

My hypothesis is that normal CRT aspect ratios such as 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200 don't suffer from shimmering, but other ratios such as 1280x1024, 1920x1200 cause the shimmering.

Jawed

 

Not the case here. Using a standard CRT monitor and standard resolutions.

Not a bad theory though and it really brings out the point that we need those who do not experience shimmering to speak up because we need to know what we, as a group experiencing the shimmering, are doing different.

Shimmer-free 6800 users, we need you!

 

Hey can you shimmering 6800s clairify 2 things for me.

1. What is the wattage of your power supply units?

2. Do you get texture aliasing and crap moving all over the walls in every game you play?



I am a guy who has suffered this crap for quite some time now on my ATI Radeon 9800 pro. I get aliasing crap and crap all over the walls in every game I have, opengl or d3d it does not discriminate. I even get aliasing crap in video files. I never used to have this problem, for a year everything worked great. I have been so many different drivers, reformatted twice, had the card and motherboard both replaced. The only hardware I haven't changed is the power supply or the Ram, or the harddrive, which has been reformatted, twice.

So you mentioned CSS, check out Robars photos, this is with 4x anti aliasing and the like:

http://www.nofurries.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=263

I asked him what watts his PSU was, he said 350. My PSU is 345 watts and I am going to get a new one soon. Another person I talked to said he had artifacting, put in a new PSU, and his problem was solved.

So if you guys have low power supply units, below 400 watts, this could be the problem. With these cards you really need a good 400 watt or higher PSU. I know ATI says you have to have at least a 300 watt psu, but they really reccomend 400. I can only imagine how power hungry a 6800 would be.

Another reccomendation I have is to try this: http://www.driverheaven.net/cleaner/

Driver Cleaner will eradicate your driver files, there are files you dont even see, that DC gets rid of. If you had ATI in the past run this to remove ATI files as well.

But your best bet to ensure that your problem is NOT driver or software related, is to reformat, which is NOT FUN AT ALL! REFORMATTING SUCKS!

What I really want to know is if you get texture aliasing, and other graphical glitches in every game?

 

Swordfish,

First, let's get these out of the way:

1. 520 Watts, but more importantly, 28A 12volt rail and complete voltage stability on all rails.

2. No.

Prior to the 6800 Ultra I was using a GF 4 4600ti with the system. I used Driver Cleaner 3 to clean up even though I should not have needed to. The 6800 shipped with 60.85 ForceWares so those went in and Direct X 9.0c followed, I assume this was reinstalled when I later applied SP2 for Windows XP.

I find your PSU connection interesting because just the other day I read on Hardforum that someone claimed to solved their shimmering issues by increasing their GPU core voltage. This, to me, doen't sound right, but if it really happened that way I guess it's possible. I'd prefer to think that this person flashed a VGA BIOS with higher core voltages and other changes came along with that and that those were responsible.

However, even this does not sit right with me because I want to think this is a simple driver texture mapping error. There is only one fly in this soup and that is the claim that some do not experience the moire/shimmering at all. I would be much happier if everyone had it and simply wasn't noticing it.

In that shimmering thread on Hardforum (cannot grab the link and post it right now because Hardforum seems to be temporarily down) there are some good screen shots of moire in Painkiller and other titles. There is also the theory that Omegadriver 61.77 would fix it, but that is shot down later in the thread with a very good example of moire on a staircase in Painkiller.

I link to this illustration of the moire effect in action for those not familiar. It is a mathematical function and not random. This suggests that it is not a simple error, but a systematic error in how pixels are being manipulated. Have a look here to see the moire effect in action on your monitor using your web browser.

 

While I sometimes had/have texture problems with my DX9 ATI cards, it wasn't that often and were pretty much game specific. BF1942 is very bad ON ALL CARDS.

What we are talking about here is 6800 specific.

BTW, I learned a long time ago not to use cheap power supplies. And you don't have to spend a great deal for a decent one.

 

but on my 9700Pro Quality AF with forced trilinear cleaned it up nicely, even performance AF wasn't terrible on the R300.

All AF on my 6800 even with opts off makes it worse!!

 

Guess I overstated my point, which is that if you want to find a title that has the greatest possibility of texture ailising.....BF is it.....

 

I finally got around to trying the Battlefield 1942 and Secret Weapons demos and they definitely suffer from the problem in the worst imaginable way. Using Rivatuner to set LOD bias +1.0 helps settle the near ground but there are still evident bands of pixel sparkling in the distance or on sharp verticals.

I think the key here is that AF on 6800 seems to make it worse in all cases. Instead of smoothing it all out, then sharpening through AF, the sharpening is too strong at boundary regions and it just looks horrible in some cases.

In case some of you don't know, UT 2003 and 2004 have anisotropic filtering specified in the config/ini file. You will notice that the shimmering will decrease if you set this to 0 or 1. Some may have missed this, thinking setting "application controlled" for AF in the control panel meant setting it to zero. This means that, setting this AF control to zero, you get very little shimmering in UT 2003/2004 even with TexMipBias set at -0.5, but it is still present. Of course it becomes blurrier, but that is not an error, that is how it looks. It is the default setting of AF in the config/ini (LevelOfAnisotropy) of 8 that is causing the shimmering, just like setting such values in the control panel will bring it out in other games.

 

heh yes indeed which is why its my main test app for filtering, plus I play a bit of Desert Combat of course.

 

yeah i definetly get moire in my games

Well Ill be damned, If I bought a $300 next gen card Id expect my graphics to be flawless or Id be pissed!

 

Ha ha. Try that at $600. <I'm cracking up here. what was I thinking?>

 

With a attitude like that the only thing you can expect is disappointment.....

 

How does this have anything to do with my attitude? If I were to shell out that kind of money, I would expect that level of quality. I mean I wouldn't go out of my way to point out graphical glitches, but Id expect my games to run pretty damn near perfect. Would you have bought the card if it said "Causes graphicle glitches on alot of systems" on the box?

 

Don't want to go philosophical on you but......the whole idea of "perfection" in video is absurd...... as you can see by every thread in this forum. Nothing in this world is perfect...... The whole point of sites like this are to get the best you can....not perfection.

 

Well, asking for this shimmering to go away is not really about perfection as much as it is about getting what is considered standard. I can appreciate both your positions, but it really has nothing to do with the problem. I think I wrote this earlier in the thread, but if ATI was to vanish off the face of the planet it does not clear up the issues we are having on the 6800 and discussing in this thread.

In other news, I poked around a bit in the Battlefield 1942 demo and found a variable to control. The variable "renderer.mipMapBias" can be found in ..\Battlefield 1942 Singleplayer Demo\Settings\ and the default was -1.5. Setting this to 0 (zero) clears up the shimmering, but of course the game now looks less sharp, as do the menus.

The menu quality change is something I have noticed in UT 2004 as well. In fact you can use it to calibrate the bias. At some mip level the menus will become significantly aliased and torn looking. Improperly shaped characters etc reveal that something is wrong. Setting the mip lod bias to a level where these characters just become properly shaped is where you get your best bias without major shimmering.

As a personal note, even though the game (demo in this case) looks much more blurred with a mipMapBias of 0, I think it looks good even without AF to clear it up a bit.

Perhaps someone could enlighten us why these defaults we are finding are not zero? Maybe I am missing the obvious and these values are decreased (for 'increased quality') when we set "texture quality" in the games and these values are, in fact, at zero as default in both UT2003/2004 and BF1942.

UPDATE:

It turns out that setting the mipMapBias to 0 and using AF x8 from the control panel makes the game look rather good. I am not sure how it is 'supposed' to look, but it seems fine using these settings.

 

thanks for finding out about Bf:1942, I'll try those settings later.

 

You have a point in noting that setting things via control panel force rather than application preference forces thing into their proper place. I can't believe I didn't think of the fact that setting filtering to application preference via drivers allowed the application to override/discard the driver's bias settings.

Would forcing bias (if one wanted to keep a global setting) require using an app like rivatuner to set it within the drivers in addition to selecting aniso level manually (not via application preference)? What if you want to set filtering via the application, which generally produces better performance, but want all your games to use a mip bias of 0?

Beyond3D had the following to say about MipMap Bias (here):

 

Besides the shimmering i noticed something funny in rendering difference between Ati and Nv in BF1942.

At Hardforum a BF1942 vid is shown rendered by a 6800GT, with horrible shimmering. ( i've mirrored it here: http://www.henno.dutchweb.nl/bf1942nv6800.avi )

I've made the same vid but now with my x800xt, you'll find it here: http://www.henno.dutchweb.nl/bf1942atix800xt.avi

Watch also at the way you are walking. In the Nv vid you're "skating/gliding", in the Ati vid your head/view actually goes up/down while walking.
However, don't know if this is caused by difference BF1942 versions or mods, i use the original plain 1.0.