x800 texture shimmering: FarCry video

bether have videos that are NOT scaled at all. every scaling means filtering, the 9700 one has two filterings applied, one a non-power-of-two. that leads to more blurriness (not really visible), and thus reduction of flimmering.

then, get the same fps, as the higher rate flimmering on the x800 is simply due to the higher rate fps.

bether just cut out the wall part, than reduce the whole image size.

never seen any such flimmering. not on the 9700, too.

 

i just say the videos have a lot of differences that can mess up the expirience you had. get the videos equal so we see what you saw.

all i say is, due to those differences to the original data, the quality difference can look different than it was in your eyes.

never stated you are a liar.

 

déjà vu

 

Im sure hes not calling you a liar.

However, the evidence you are using to backup the claim is quite poor. The videos are of different sizes, different frame rates and the direction of movement is also different. You have offered to upload uncompressed videos which will remove some of the problems such as compression artifacts, but they wont remove the differing directions of movement or that they are shot at such a low res. Even if i set my old gf4 to 400x300 in Q3A i get texture swimming effects at the first mip boundry (using trilinear). It really would not be so difficult to load up a save game and point at a small object that you could easily point at again to move in the same direction.

 

Is it possible to record and playback demos in farcry? if so, record a demo at the area in question and make it available for download.

Then capture the motion with fraps at a resolution like 640x480 (so you don't have to resize the output) and encode with HuffYUV.

If the effect is noticable 10 to 20 frames will be sufficient to show it and you only need to encode that part with HuffYUV, the entire capture can be encoded with something like XVID so people can see the movie captured really is the demo.

 

If you turn off the X800 optimizations in the ATi Control Panel, these shimmerings are gone? And the FPS goes down how much withowd them?

 

the two vidoes i downloaded arent the same size.
One is 400x300, the other is 512x384.
edit: i see this has already been addressed, sorry.

 

Create a shortcut of the initializing exe and add to the command line:

-devmode

It should unlock all levels

 

Texture aliasing/shimmering is a problem on the R300 too. It seems it is even more aggressive on the R420 now.

Taking less samples than you would have to for a certain LOD / aniso-degree is very hard to detect with theoretical tools or screenshots, but should give a similar speed benefit to brilinear-like optimizations, may be even more.
Up to now, almost all aniso. test tools / interpretations assumed that LoD changes that are farer away prove that a higher level anisotropic filter is being applied. But this is just the necessary condition, not the commensurate condition. In order to "prove" what kind of anisotropic filter is really being applied, I guess you would have to use a tool that is able to calculate the number of different texels read. I don't know if this is possible for an OGL/D3D application at all.

 

Offhand, I'm just not sure FarCry is the best application to test this on. I've seen similar effect from my friend's 5700U as well (before he switched to an X800), though of course not slowed down and examined diligently to examine what magnitude. (One can see it on the 9700 Pro as well, just not as pronounced.)

I'd first check games that are much more common, have been worked on longer by the developer to get out the kinks, and have the most mature IHV drivers as well. UT2003 would be a good bet (and would be interesting to see if differences can be spotted between it and UT2004 on the same scenes), and from there I would spiral outwards--both to very old games, and to very new.

 

Well, there's clearly quite a difference between the 9700 and X800. As for the 5700, isn't brilinear the cause? As for X800?

 

Another Mirror - Hope You Dont Mind

Video FarCry X800Pro: FarCryx800ProHiRes_Divx.avi
Video FarCry 9700Pro: FarCry9700ProHiRes_Divx.avi

Just in case they are needed, when my bandwidth runs out I will have to take them down. Hope you dont mind the mirrors Grestorn.

I saw a pretty big difference in the videos and as someone that has Radeon X800 XT Platinum pre ordered I am somewhat concerned. Assuming this is indeed the result of these optimizations I would want a way to turn them off. This way I could enjoy the extra speed in games where it doesnt show and choose slower but higher quality option in games where it does show.

 

The 5700U also has a forced brilinear filter like the x800. I'm not surprised you saw a similar effect.

 

Re: Another Mirror - Hope You Dont Mind

Mirrored here as well btw:

X800
http://www.reflectonreality.com/images/r420/FarCryx800ProHiRes_Divx.avi

9700PRO
http://www.reflectonreality.com/images/r420/FarCry9700ProHiRes_Divx.avi

 

Can someone with an RV3x0-based card try and reproduce this?

 

I think Marko did it in the 50+ long thread (p.58 AFAIR)