9800 GX2 shows blocky edge lines in games (screenshot)

A

alex2112

n00b
Joined
Feb 2, 2005
Messages
30
Hey all, ever since I got my EVGA 9800 GX2 I have noticed that it displays these weird blocky horizontal lines on the edges of some 3d objects in games. The lines appear to stay stationary as the 3d objects move, almost like an overlay. I have been searching google and forums for a while on this and I can't seem to find anything similar or what may be causing this. This happens in multiple games, Assassin's Creed and The Witcher to name a couple. I actually just recently received a replacement 9800 GX2 from EVGA as my first one died on me and this replacement is doing the same thing. I have tried different drivers and I am currently using beta drivers but the issue still persists. I have a screenshot of the problem in Assassin's Creed below. Any ideas?

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a352/huskyunit/forums/graphicalglitches.jpg
 
The blocky edges are "aliasing". This issue has been around for a long time. When objects are made in a game, figures are drawn line by line and stacked together much like a set of horizonal venetian blinds. To get rid of them, one can increase the resolution (to cover up the edges) or increase the "anti-aliasing" setting in the game's video menu.

Here is an article on the matter from wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing
 
lol :eek: By the way, I'm very proud of the [H].. the first comment wasn't a smart assed remark ;)
 
[H] is a place for helping & conversing... not trolling & flaming. :p At least, I would hope so...

anime4u seems to believe this at least :) Bravo to him.

alex2112, turn on anti-aliasing (aka AA) and try to find the best balance with performance & elimination of jagged edges through different levels of AA.
 
Thanks for the replies guys, but I am not sure this is a matter of enabling anti-aliasing. In that screenshot I had 4x anti-aliasing enabled. I also game at 1680x1050 so the blocky edges shouldn't be that big as in the screenshot. You can see the stairs in the distance that are circled in blue, those are correctly anti-aliased, as well as the guy sitting on the bench, and the bench itself on the left side of the screen. There are no jagged/block edges on those 3d models, but on the right side of the screen, there are numerous edges that are excessively blocky, and if you look closely, some of the shadow edges are also very pixelated and blocky.
 
I have not had the chance to try out AC on the PC yet so I don't know if those visual artifacts are typical, but I'll try and put my .02 in. Shadow edges in games are very often less ridged than edges of actual objects being displayed, they will appear to be very aliased and generally of lower quality. Some games use "soft shadows" and such to try and combat this, but I have seen it in quite a few titles out there. Similar to the way reflections in games often look lower quality than if you were to look at the object being reflected directly (especially car reflections in racing games).

As for the rest of the scene, it looks like there is more at work than meets the eye. Those steps up to the pool look to have pieces missing as if the artist wanted to convey that the steps were worn down and had some chunks missing. If they did this via bump and normal maps than those effects are not affected by anti-aliasing methods the same way that polygon edges are, because it is not actually a polygon edge you are seeing. You may try enabling transparency AA in the NVidia control panel to see if that helps at all.
 
I agree, transparency & gamma AA could smooth certain edges out (hopefully)...

Edit: My bad on almost repeating anime4u... credit goes to him for providing all of the info in the first place...
 
alex2112 said:
Thanks for the replies guys, but I am not sure this is a matter of enabling anti-aliasing. In that screenshot I had 4x anti-aliasing enabled. I also game at 1680x1050 so the blocky edges shouldn't be that big as in the screenshot. You can see the stairs in the distance that are circled in blue, those are correctly anti-aliased, as well as the guy sitting on the bench, and the bench itself on the left side of the screen. There are no jagged/block edges on those 3d models, but on the right side of the screen, there are numerous edges that are excessively blocky, and if you look closely, some of the shadow edges are also very pixelated and blocky.
Click to expand...

check nvidia control panel, if it overrides the prog to set AA to off then that might explain the problem
 
Ok I tried enabling transparancy AA in the Nvidia Control Panel but it didn't help at all. I have made an observation though, it seems like only edges on the right side of the screen are affected. Could this be an sli issue? I took another screenshot below that shows the problem much more clearly, its of the same game, looking at stairs that are supposed to be perfectly straight, the right side of the screen has bad edges, the left side is ok. This screenshot was taken with transparancy AA enabled in the control panel.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a352/huskyunit/forums/edges.jpg
 
alex2112 said:
Ok I tried enabling transparancy AA in the Nvidia Control Panel but it didn't help at all. I have made an observation though, it seems like only edges on the right side of the screen are affected. Could this be an sli issue? I took another screenshot below that shows the problem much more clearly, its of the same game, looking at stairs that are supposed to be perfectly straight, the right side of the screen has bad edges, the left side is ok. This screenshot was taken with transparancy AA enabled in the control panel.

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a352/huskyunit/forums/edges.jpg
Click to expand...

Wow that is a much more disturbing shot. It looks as if some parts of the scene are rendered at a lower precision than others. This reminds me very much of an old ATi 9700 demo that used a model of a Ferrari F50 to demonstrate the difference between low and high quality normal maps. Found a screenshot here.

Can anyone else with a 9800 (NVidia not ATi :p) and AC try this out and see if they notice these types of artifacts? I hope this isn't another case of the drivers trying to get more fps at the sake of better image quality...
 
I suggest changing the image quality settings to High Quality & turning all optimizations to off.
 
Silent.Sin said:
Wow that is a much more disturbing shot. It looks as if some parts of the scene are rendered at a lower precision than others. This reminds me very much of an old ATi 9700 demo that used a model of a Ferrari F50 to demonstrate the difference between low and high quality normal maps. Found a screenshot here.

Can anyone else with a 9800 (NVidia not ATi :p) and AC try this out and see if they notice these types of artifacts? I hope this isn't another case of the drivers trying to get more fps at the sake of better image quality...
Click to expand...
Hopefully someone with a 9800 and AC can chime in. Like I said, I have tried the latest official drivers from Nvidia, and a couple beta releases with the same result. I have not changed any of the default settings in the Nvidia control panel except for the Transparent AA which was suggested in this thread. This is my second 9800GX2 to do this (my first one was RMA'd for something completely unrelated).

Also, I am not sure if it is an SLI issue or not as this has also occured in the Witcher, in which I had to disable multi-GPU rendering because that game has an SLI bug where all light sources in game can be seen through walls and such. Disabling SLI resolved the lighting problem in the Witcher but the blocky, pixelated edges still persisted.

I will try some of the other suggestions in this thread such as turning off anisotropic filtering and all optimizations to off later on tonight as I am not near my PC at the moment.
 
inotocracy said:
lol :eek: By the way, I'm very proud of the [H].. the first comment wasn't a smart assed remark ;)
Click to expand...

owl_orly.png


Sorry, I couldn't resist... Nothing personal to the op. Glad you found your problem.
 
Something is wrong. The game's not supposed to look like that.

Here is a shot, all settings maxed, 1360x768 w/ 8800 GTS 512MB:

AssassinsCreed_01.jpg
 
This issue is a problem SPECIFICIALLY WITH ASSASIN'S CREED. Don't worry about it. It's from the console to PC conversion. It's because the graphics are not actually being delivered at the resolution you ask, it actually is compressing and scaling the image to a forced 16:9 TV resolution.

It's not anti-aliasing. I documented this months ago.

wierdpl6.jpg

1680x1050

I really hate how the engine does this, but it's a consolified PC port. Even if you ask for a 16:10 resolution, it's actually delivering 16:9 but scaling it with low precision.

Look at the monitor bezel at the bottom of the screen and the stapler edge. That's not aliasing. That's just random low precision edge production from screen scaling the way the edges are randomly bumpy and not geometrically aliased. It almost looks like the scaling removes few lines of resolution and then blurs the interlaced image together. Looks like it's distorting or getting smudged.
 
Spare-Flair said:
This issue is a problem SPECIFICIALLY WITH ASSASIN'S CREED. Don't worry about it. It's from the console to PC conversion. It's because the graphics are not actually being delivered at the resolution you ask, it actually is compressing and scaling the image to a forced 16:9 TV resolution.
Click to expand...
Ok, that explains why I didn't see it. I was running native on a 720P set which is probably how the game was designed.

In that case the best thing to do is set the monitor to 1:1 pixel matching and get the closest 16:9 res that will fit.
 
Spare-Flair said:
This issue is a problem SPECIFICIALLY WITH ASSASIN'S CREED. Don't worry about it. It's from the console to PC conversion. It's because the graphics are not actually being delivered at the resolution you ask, it actually is compressing and scaling the image to a forced 16:9 TV resolution.

It's not anti-aliasing. I documented this months ago.

wierdpl6.jpg

1680x1050

I really hate how the engine does this, but it's a consolified PC port. Even if you ask for a 16:10 resolution, it's actually delivering 16:9 but scaling it with low precision.

Look at the monitor bezel at the bottom of the screen and the stapler edge. That's not aliasing. That's just random low precision edge production from screen scaling the way the edges are randomly bumpy and not geometrically aliased. It almost looks like the scaling removes few lines of resolution and then blurs the interlaced image together. Looks like it's distorting or getting smudged.
Click to expand...
So what you're saying is, this is an issue because I am running at 1680x1050?

My roommate played through AC with his 8800GT at 1440x900 (16:10) and he saw no issues.

Also, why does only half the screen appear to have the issue in my screens?
 
alex2112 said:
So what you're saying is, this is an issue because I am running at 1680x1050?

My roommate played through AC with his 8800GT at 1440x900 (16:10) and he saw no issues.

Also, why does only half the screen appear to have the issue in my screens?
Click to expand...

Just a guess out of the blue, but is your Rendering Split screen? or AFR
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top