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Artifact problem in Doom 3

U

undertow

n00b
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
Messages
2
I've got a 9800SE unlocked to a 9800Pro and have never had a problem with artifacts until I ran Doom 3. I only have artifacts when "High Quality Special Effects" is turned on though and it only happens around areas where special effects are applied (such as flames). I doubt there's anything I can do to fix it but I was wondering what area of the card is being tapped when HQ Special Effects are turned on.
 
the heat effect around the flames/hot objects are done with fragment shaders. I don't know what other OpenGL programs you can run to see the same thing fail.
 
Aside from the gameplay that is the topic of great debate, Doom 3 has an absolutely amazing engine that really excels in a few areas. Lighting and special effects are two of those areas. The Doom 3 engine pushes video cards in those areas in ways that HL-2 and Far Cry don't. OpenGL games based on older engines like Call of Duty don't even approach the intentsity of the Doom 3 engine. I doubt you'll see a game that pushes hardware in the same way until the Unreal 3 engine is done. However, that's all conjecture on my part. Bottom line is that Jon Carmack stated quite clearly that the Doom 3 engine would push hardware in unique ways, and by using certain features the engine would not behave well on overclocked cards. Since your unlocked SE is in effect also an overclocked SE then I suspect the engine is exposing imperfections that were the reason why your GPU chip was designated as an SE in the first place.

I'd turn down the settings a bit, or maybe underclock a touch to see if things improve.
 
I agree that the special effects in Doom 3 are amazing. The distorted visual effects around heated areas add a lot to the realism.

Fragment shaders eh? I tried pushing the card with ATI Tool, 3DMark05, and Aquamark and never saw any issues. I guess those programs don't test the fragment shaders.

I'll mess around with settings in ATI Tool and will report back if I find any improvement. Otherwise, the game plays fine with the HQSE turned off. Thanks for your suggestions and insight.
 
Like the poster above, and John Carmack himself said Doom3 will push cards in different ways and may render an overclock unstable where it was stable with every other game.

JC has always had a way of maximizing efficiency of videocards, CPUs, & memory. Thats why Quake3 was such a great benchmark for so long. There was no single bottleneck and it scaled well with every upgraded component of a system. It showed every single tweak (CPU, GPU or MEM OC/tweaks).

And Doom3 is similar though currently a little GPU bottlenecked, but when Quake3 first came out it too was a little GPU bottlenecked.
 
I think you should first clean up the registry and hard drive of possibly corrupt setting or conflicting versions first (driver cleaner) and reinstall an official driver. If you still have a problem with OpenGL fragment shaders after that, but not with PS2.0, I have a pretty crazy theory for poor ATI OpenGL fragment shader performance. :D
 
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