texture shimmering on 6800 GT even w/ optimizations disabled

Im trying to figure out if my texture aliasing and moire problem is common or rare.

See I have texture aliasing and moire problems in anything that moves. Like Ill watch a video and notice moire in it.

I also have horrible texture aliasing in Doom 3, it looks terrible

And the thing is, I never used to have this problem at all, Doom 3 looked beautiful. all my games and videos i watched were perfect till about September (except for BF42 which still had some crap here or there, very subtle). Seeing I have reformatted twice, and switched out my motherboard and video card, that solves those problems.

So I wonder if this is a common problem, or if I really do need a PSU, or some new ram, try a different card, or mabye a whole new computer.

 

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http://www.henno.dutchweb.nl/bf1942nv6800.avi
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http://www.henno.dutchweb.nl/bf1942atix800xt.avi
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whow thats crazy...what drivers are you using ???

Some D3D settings seem to be totally screwed up - does everyone get this with a 6800 or is he an exception ???

Do you use any tweakers ? I wish i could help, but i dont own a NV card, still deciding whether to get X800 or 6800....but *this* looks *BAD* for the 6800....

 

There's still shimmering in the X800 vid. The extremity of shimmering in the 6800 vid seems to indicate that either the game is rendering textures with mipmap a LOD is less than 0, trilinear filtering and/or aniso optimizations are set to on via driver control panel, or a conjunction of both of these issues.

 

As i stated it's not my 6800, but a vid shown at the forum of Hardocp. (i've mirrored it because Hardforum seemed to be down last evening). Don't know which drivers are used.

 

Okay could you guys be bothered to help a frustrated gamer here? I have this same horrible shimmering problem and also the roofs of buildings do nasty moire effect on my 6800.

I would like a step by step guide on how to remove this thing, how to set a proper LOD generally across all games so that there is no more shimmering.

I'm completely and utterly lost in the Rivatuner power user tab and nothing seems to affect anything and I have no idea what to do with it.

 

What games and what drivers? I'll be happy to try and figure it out, this looks like a cool way to kill an afternoon.

 

well... the one that matters the most would be Battlefield 1942.

Whatever driver that you find working best will do, I will then move to that driver. edit: try 66.51 for instance since its the newest with no cs:s graphics glitch

settings for battlefield. Use 8x AA and 16x AF. I have found it to be very playable framerate.

edit: Oh and if you could be bothered to download this http://www.xpandrally.com/en/show.php?006 and investigate a bit... I seem to be getting very bilinearish mipmap lines no matter what...

 

The problem with LOD biases is that these are not the same for all titles. What is needed is for these biases to be programmed into the driver as an application preference along the lines of AF and AA.

I see many claiming that 8x AA is helping a lot and I want to make it clear that by applying 8sx AA you are simply fighting the problem using the strongest measures possible. The error is still very much there. 8x AA is a combination of super and multi-sampling (2x SS & 4x MS, I believe) and it is only the super-sampling that is helping against shimmering as the MSAA algorithm only touches the geometry. Super-sampling also helps with alpha textures so this is a great mode to use as long as performance doesn't tank (had to go for that pun).

Ok, so super-sampling helps clean up the textures a bit, but you are still fighting a losing battle because the LOD being used is too high. To get rid of the problem, for now, you must counter the LOD bias from the game itself. It wants -1.5 and your Geforce 6800/ForceWares want a neutral LOD bias of 0. If you can't find a config/preferences/ini file for the game in question you can always override using Rivatuner. This is simple to do and may be the best option as future ForceWare drivers are likely to compensate for the game LODs so you don't want to alter those and change them all back once the drivers are compensating. The catch is that Rivatuner adds or subtracts from the LOD level across all applications and byb the same amount; what you set the LOD bias to in Rivatuner.

For example, Battlefield 1942 demos seem to call for LOD -1.5 and Geforce 6800 wants 0 (zero) to be happy. So, in Rivatuner you simply set the LOD bias to +1.5. This is the same as not using Rivatuner and setting the config for Battlefield to use LOD bias 0 in the config, if you can find and edit that. 1.5-1.5=0. Now, the problem is that some other game you have is working correctly and not shimmering, but it will still receive the +1.5 override call as applied in Rivatuner and you will now end up having something unnecessarily softened. You can use AF to sharpen it up, but because the LOD is too low your AF algorithm is working with very little and you are sharpening something that isn't there.

So, for Battlefield 1942, assuming you have done no previous hackery to it and assuming that the full game and subsequent patches you may be using have the same settings as the single player demo, this is what must be done using Rivatuner:

Open Rivatuner and on the main page click the "Customize Settings" under "Driver Settings" (that's the bottom one of the two) where it reads "Forceware detected". In the pop-up menu select the Direct3D tab by clicking the DirectX icon. The main page that opens should be the one to control the LOD. Set the slider to +1.5 to lower the LOD and to compensate for the -1.5 (extremely high) LOD that Battlefield 1942 asks for. Click OK.

Now you will definitely want some AF applied to sharpen it up. I would select AF x4 or x8 with x8 probably being closer to optimal. You may also apply AA as normal and using the 8xS mode should look even better, but this mode is very intensive and may lower your frame rate too much. Try and see.

Summary:

LOD bias + = less detail
LOD bias - = more detail

Some games exhibit too much detail on 6800 and this causes shimmering.

Compensate for it using Rivatuner. Unfortunately this slider must be used on a per-title basis as it is additive with the bias called from the application and you can never "set it so that the sum is zero." This is because the LOD bias is the reference point to which mips are mapped. You are, in essence, changing the zero by forcing a bias other than zero-zero. It is beyond me why zero is not used as the default in these applications.

 

well... I was able to re set the mipmap lod in battlefield videodefault.con

putting there this line:
renderer.mipmapbias 0.5

seems to do the trick I wanted. No more moire on the roofs, no shimmering.

 

Did setting renderer.mipmapbias to 0 not clear up all the problems? When using the demo I got good results using 0. You want this number as low as possible without getting shimmering or moire. (with the negative game default obviously being too low)

 

Interestingly enough, When they patched the game last week, And my 6800nU was being replaced, They fixed the shimmering in World of Warcraft on the 6800 series,

It seems mipmap bias werent properly being set in game. Now all you really gotta do is disable texture stage optimisations and for the most part it goes away in that game.

 

with 0 I still had some moire on rooftops of buildings in "wake island" map when looked at from certain angles/distances. It was noticeably better than the default setting though. 0.5 completely removed the moire.

After having this fixed I am seeing this problem elsewhere too now that I know how to look it... and I automatically subconsciously do and can't help it. Just tried the new Painkiller demo and some problems there too... So there is not any way to force absolute value for this globally? This sucks...

 

Most of these games are probably using negative LOD and the reason could be because they're "optimized" for a bilinear setting (and the ground is typically too blurry in a normal bilinear setting).
But it is wrong, when aniso is applied at the same time.
If it's control panel aniso, then nothing the app can do about it.
If it's app enabled aniso, then they should disable any negative LOD when using aniso at the same time (or slightly positive if the texture shows very high frequency components).

 

In BF42 are any of you getting a thing where if you walk backwards while looking at some rocks, and then forwards half the rocks disappear?

(copy and paste into browser)

http://www.nofurries.net/imghost/bf1942 2004-10-24 12-36-07-73.zip

 

Having tested BF 1942 Secret Weapons demo on a GF 4600ti, I can safely say that it looks and plays exactly the same. That is with 'ancient' ForceWare driver 56.72. The LOD bias is simply too high and setting the texture quality slider to maximum, as one would expect to use with a 6800/GT/Ultra, these lines of pixel crawling can be expected. There really is no special case here.

 

Hi. I just recieved my XFX 6800 GT today. Installation was perfect and I'm up and running.

I think I've run into the shimmering issue. I have a screen shot from Doom 3 showing a dancing effect with the grated floor. (How do I include the image here?)

I am using the following autoexec.cfg values:

seta image_usePrecompressedTextures "0"
seta image_useCompression "1"
seta image_downSizeLimit "1024"
seta image_ignoreHighQuality "0"
seta image_downSizeBumpLimit "1024"
seta image_downSizeSpecularLimit "512"
seta image_downSizeBump "1"
seta image_downSizeSpecular "1"
seta image_downSize "1"
seta image_forceDownSize "1"
seta image_roundDown "0"
seta image_lodbias "0"
seta image_preload "1"
seta r_useCachedDynamicModels "1"
seta r_skipBump "0"
seta r_skipPostProcess "0"
seta r_skipParticles "0"
seta r_skipSpecular "0"
seta r_skipNewAmbient "0"
seta r_multiSamples "2"
seta r_shadows "1"
seta r_useOptimizedShadows "0"
seta r_useTurboShadow "0"
seta g_projectilelights "1"
seta g_skipParticles "0"
seta g_bloodEffects "1"
seta g_decals "1"
seta g_showBrass "1"
seta g_muzzleFlash "1"
seta g_doublevision "0"
seta g_showPlayerShadow "1"
seta image_anisotropy "8"
seta image_filter "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
seta image_useCache "1"
seta image_cacheMegs "256"
seta image_cacheMinK "2048"
seta r_lightScale 4

Note the LOD is set to 0. I have AF at 8x and FSAA at 2x.




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Does it help if you switch between 8xAF by Nv control panel or Application controlled AF? (high q. in D3 = 8xAF)

 

The new Nvidia drivers are confusing to me. I see that there are application profiles. A couple questions to you before I can answer your question:

1 - Is the "Acitve profile" the only profile that is in effect?

2 - If I have the Active profile on "Global Driver Settings" and run Doom 3 does it use these or the Doom 3 profile?

3 - In the Doom 3 profile I am unable to un-check "Application Controlled" --it's greyed out.

Let me know the ansewers to these.. I'll do some experiments in the mean time.

Steve

 

The effect is lessoned when using the NV control panel 8x compared to using the App controled 8x.

Why would that be? It is still there, but lessoned.

Also, it is worse when I use a LOD of -1. However, all of the "best image" tweak guides say to use -1. Why if it causes this problem on the 6800 GT?

 

Nvidia working on revisions?

It could be a coincidence or an excuse, but it seems that the supply of 6800 cards has dried up a little, I was after getting one but they seem to be pretty much sold out. This is apaprently because of difficultys obtaining the substrates they use in production, but is convienien since it would give them some time to revise the design if a bug was present.

Also its quite possible to lend some credance to the PSU being the cause, the 6800's with extra molex connectors are supposed to be on indipendent rails and not shared with any other peripherals, this says to me that they require both alot of power and that they are (overly?) reliant on having a clean power supply.

Just as a test try unpluging some cddrives/hard drives/fans etc and giving the card dedicated power as well as reducing the overall load on the psu, if this gives an improvement then that would confirm that although Nvidia has quoted minimum requirements, these might not be sufficient for optimal operation.

i'm going to wait till after Xmas for upgrade now... short on cash... and lacking faith!!!

Just my 2 cents...

Al