texture shimmering on 6800 GT even w/ optimizations disabled

Ah who the hell needs a $300 video card anyway? Id rather encouter graphics problems on my 9800 pro I bought a year ago then shelling out cash for the same problems.

 

You've got a point.

I replaced my 9800 NP with the 6800 GT. The 6800GT is quite nice, but I do have to state one thing very clearly: I'm NOT impressed with the state of Nvidia drivers.

I'm experiencing far more issues with the GT then I ever had with the 9800. Pretty sad. It's not bad enough I regret the purchase, but I can see it turning out to be over time.

 

Ok, I about had it with the shimmering and the very obvious moire patterns appearing all over the place. Not only does Call of Duty: United Offensive sometimes (which is odd) exhibit lines around alpha textures, which is very apparent on trees as you see the boxes with a faint and aliased dark line, but it has the moire problem as well. The moire pattern, as shown here on the vertically lined wallpaper, is stronger when textures are set to "extra". Setting this to "high" clears it up for the most part, but there is still some pixel crawling that is apparent when viewing the same wallpaper from an angle. I hope the moire pattern can be discerned. The lines at the boundaries of alpha-textures seems to only happen when anti-aliasing (4x MSAA) is applied. However, it seems this problem comes and goes from map to map. I have not dug in deep trying to figure out exactly how to trigger it.

Lines showing up on the boundary of alpha-textures when using anti-aliasing:


Major moire showing on walls ('extra' textures + 4xAA, 4xAF):


Using 'high' textures with the same (4xAA, 4xAF) settings for everything else clears it up. This mode still shows crawling when the wall is viewed at an angle:


I am getting more and more upset by these filtering errors. As I am about to upgrade my main workstation I am wondering whether to hang on to the 6800 Ultra and buy an AGP mainboard as I had planned or throw this thing to the dogs and go PCI-e.

EDIT:

A movie would show the moire shimmering much better, but I have no place to host videos.

What is the best way to get some sort of official response on this matter? How can we best find out what is going on and what is being done about it? I want to return the 6800 and get something else if there is no clear indication that this is a problem and will be rectified in a timely manner.

PS. In what forum do we best start a thread where users of various video cards can post screen shots from games for comparison?

 

Wireframe,
Do you know anyone with an X800 so you can test it for these same IQ problems? I'd hate to see you spend more cash if it doesn't solve your issues. If you were from Northern California I'd gladly loan you my X800 for some testing. Hope you get it sorted out.

 

I recently installed Serious Sam (the First Encounter) and played about with it on my 6800. It turns out this title is excellent for discovering shimmering. 'Unfortunately' the game has lots of tweakable graphics options so it is difficult to be sure what exact settings you are using or how those may impact IQ. However, this game is great for analysis because it has very large areas with very plain 'chess board' texturing for floors. This makes picking out noise a simple task.

While playing Serious Sam I saw directly how setting "High Quality" in the ForceWare panel was necessary to get 'perfect' texturing of floors. Using "quality" and disabling optimizations did not help. In fact, the optimizations don't seem to have any major effect. It was only on "high quality" that I could have a perfect shimmer-free floor and by this I do mean perfect.

Serious Sam uses a type of grain in textures that makes them look quite sharp. This grain seems to be distance controlled, only becoming grainy when up close to avoid the soupy looking textures we see when we put our nose to the wall in games like Quake 2. It seems all these factors can be controlled so it is not easy to say if setting it at certain levels will solve the problem or bring it out in certain hardware/drivers. Of course the 6800 Ultra can easily handle all the settings maxed with full AA, AF, and "High Quality" (with no optimizations) but this is not the point. This, to me, seems like an excellent tool set for testing and analyzing the shimmering problem.

I'm hoping many of you have this title and it would be very interesting what the results are using various hardware and setting combinations. If only a few have the game and the will to test I would gladly spend some time in trying different combinations. We could work out some division of labor or at least some standard method of comparing results.

Go on, try it out. The worst that could happen is that a swarm of monsters attack you and you end up shooting back like a mad man.

 

This is an issue of the game not using centroid sampling/not using clamp to edge on those textures.
The same lines appear on my R9800 with MSAA enabled.

 

Wireframe,

read this thread

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=40829

shimmering issue well and truly examined, chewed over and explained as much as possible in there.

 

That makes sense, but it is strange that this is not consistent. Unless I am going completely insane, I could have sworn that reloading the map makes it come and go.

 

Thanks for the tip. That is a thread I have been following. as well as numerous others across the Web. Unfortunately, all discussion on this problem seem to lead nowhere, with some people claiming they don't even have the problem. I suppose this thread (and perhaps even the issu) is now too old to be of real interest.

These are the main points of inquiry that interest me:

1) Do all people with 6800 have this issue or is it only certain configurations?

2) Are these shimmering issues seen on other hardware?

3) Is the horrible moire I am seeing in Painkiller, Half-Life 2, and Call of Duty: United Offensive connected to this problem?

4) Will it be solved? (or are people just accepting this trashy quality?)

 

Answers...from me, anyway....

1) could be
2) I have none of these issues on my X800, but have these issues on both my 6800nu and my 6800GT
3) Probably yes....
4) Now...that's a good question. But so far, nVidia doesn't even admit there's a problem........

 

Interesting. This is actually the first time I read this observation, someone owning more than one unit and seeing the same problem on both. I strongly suspect everyone has this problem, but is either not noticing, not 'picky' enough to care, or unwilling to report it as a problem.

This one I have some doubts about. My first hunch was that they are definitely connected, but now I am not so sure. My reasons for this is that moire is not evident in all titles. Neither does it go away when "High Quality" is set.

However, it could very well be related and we are seeing two distinct issues: 1) Shimmering when optimizations are engaged and 2) shimmering caused by other factors.

My reasoning for this is that some titles show shimmering regardless of the "High Quality" setting; they seem to be immune to this 'cure'. Half-Life 2 and Counterstrike: Source are examples of this. There is no way to remove the shimmering in these titles (although I have not tested with Rivatuner LOD bias on these titles as 67.02 is reported as being incompatible and I didn't want to cause more trouble). Other titles can show no shimmering even using "quality," but usually you can bring out some bands of pixel crawling by engaging all optimizations and I think this is to be expected (I am surprised you are saying X800 does not have any as I understand these boards always use certain optimizations that cannot be disengaged through the driver control panle).

Well, to be honest I have never really read a bug confirmation report from Nvidia (or other company) of such a bug. The release notes seem to focus on very specific problems with specific titles. This problem seems more general and my tinfoil hat tells me that they do not wish to discuss such general issues to prevent them haunting them later. Let's imagine we know that this shimmering/moire is caused by a 'hidden' optimization in the driver. If Nvidia were to make a user controlled toggle or remove it they may cause problems for themselves, especially in the ever-important benchmarking department. That is not to say the problem cannot be cured without a significant performance hit, but in doing so they may opening a can of worms elsewhere and they probably would not want to jeopardize performance/compatibility while benchmarking season is still open. But that is just what the voices that made it through my tinfoil hat are saying...

 

Unless you're one of the few people with both ATI and Nvidia hardware side by side, you're probably going to think whatever you're seeing is the way it's supposed to be rendered.

 

yes, I had that.

Yes, the moire and the shimmering seem to be very much connected indeed.

Have you tried downloading the latest beta forcewares from nzone and setting negative lod bias to clamp? (show advanced settings in performance & quality settings)

It seemed to get rid of my shimmering/moire issues in the games that I play that had it. (battlefield1942 is a biggie)

 

since they introduced AI you can disable every optimization

 

Ok, as in past tense... are you sure it's all fixed?

Using 67.02 right now. Have been playing with the LOD clamp and it seems to help with some titles. I did get spooked once because I thought it had cured UT2003/2004, but then, at a later time the shimmering was back. Maybe it was never really gone and I was just looking harder or maybe my fiddling with the configuration file had me confused as to the settings I was using. At any rate, I think it might be worth while for me to use Driver Cleaner and start over with 67.02/67.03. I'll try that now.

 

My 6800GT exhibits the shimmering in many of the games I've played (mainly noticible in Doom3 and HalfLife 2 (both on the floor). It seems AA and 8xAF simply don't help.

Now, I do not notice this on my PC with a 9800 NP. Nor do I notice it on my P4 2GHz box with a TI4400.

In fact, I would say that ATI is superior in both FSAA and in this shimering aspect. Both are noticably superior on the ATI.

I like my 6800GT though--and prefer it over the ATI X800 Pro.

What I find kind of irritating is that with all of this power I'm forced to have rendering defects for the benefit of speed. Ugh. With all of this power I would prefer to have the option of best visuals and live with performance that is still superior to the best of rest.

 

My 6800GT exhibits the shimmering in many of the games I've played (mainly noticible in Doom3 and HalfLife 2 (both on the floor). It seems AA and 8xAF simply don't help.

Now, I do not notice this on my PC with a 9800 NP. Nor do I notice it on my P4 2GHz box with a TI4400.

In fact, I would say that ATI is superior in both FSAA and in this shimering aspect. Both are noticably superior on the ATI.

I like my 6800GT though--and prefer it over the ATI X800 Pro.

What I find kind of irritating is that with all of this power I'm forced to have rendering defects for the benefit of speed. Ugh. With all of this power I would prefer to have the option of best visuals and live with performance that is still superior to the best of rest.

 

double post.

 

Ok, I have dabbled with the control panel some more in conjunction with UT 2004 (the Asbestos map is a good one for testing). I made some observations that may be well documented, but I leave my comments here at least as a reminder to myself (I think this explains why my clamp function seemed to "stop working").

It turns out that the only way for me to get rid of the shimmering, without modifying the configuration file to another LOD bias or using Rivatuner to force another LOD bias, is to set the control panel to "High Quality". What is interesting is that setting "quality" with all optimizations off does not help and does not appear different from "quality" with all optimizations on. "High Quality," however, which locks the use of filtering optimizations, works like a charm, but would seem to be benefitting from something that cannot be controlled from the panel. It would be interesting to discover exactly what that is.

I have not gone through all my trouble titles to study the effect, but from just playing the game I can tell that this setting seems to have no impact on Counterstrike: Source. This title shimmers no matter what setting I use.

 

I would assume that the CP quality settings are for generic filtering optimizations and in some games might be overwritten by app. specific filtering optimizations.