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Shimmering?

Garric

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2005
Messages
197
What's up with all this shimmering business I'm hearing about? Just about to buy the 7800GTOC but someone is saying some BS.
 
Yeah, I want to get rid of the shimmering on my x800 XT PE in CS:S. Help!
 
In my opinion it's completely blown out of proportion. Get the 7800GT, be happy.
 
I dunno seems to me that if I was going to spend 400 dollars on a video card it better perform flawlessly.
 
shimmering can be distracting when you are trying to spot things or moving players in the distance
 
I only recently heard of this 'shimmering' as well.. not that it's a problem I have.. but what is it? Is there examples somewhere?
 
Is this something that can be fixed with drivers, or is it the card itself that causes this problem?
 
They probably could fix it with drivers, but I doubt they will. Hmm. That article is interesting, I always noticed a difference between the AF on my GF3 as opposed to this x800. The GF3 always looked noticebly more detailed at 8xAF. Hmm.. After I a while, I stopped caring though.
 
I have always heard this term, and never noticed anything betweeen all my ATi Cards, and NVidia Cards ever... so I dont have a clue.
 
As with the launch of every new product(6800 launch driver fiasco?) the drivers and hardware isn't as mature as the later production versions. Havent personally seen this simmering business on the 7800, but I would personally wait until most of everything is flawless with the 7800(6800GT's today? no more driver fiascos!).
 
If you don't know what it is then it's not a problem. Get whatever you want and be happy.
 
bildad said:
If you don't know what it is then it's not a problem. Get whatever you want and be happy.

Thats very bad advice. Just because they dont know what it is, doesnt mean they wont notice it when they get a new card.
 
The shimmering is a result of the AF optimizations nVidia uses for the 7800 cards. If you compare the quality against a 6800 or X800 card, it is clearly worse. Also if you try to disable optimizations using the high quality setting in the control panel, it doesn't work since shimmering still occurs. Supposedly nVidia is looking into a fix but who knows when that will happen.
 
Ouch that is completely unacceptable IQ.

Why arent the nvidia !!!!!!s pitching a bitch?

you dont spend 550 bucks to downgrade IQ,, I know I wouldnt....
 
The Nvidia !!!!!!s are pitching a fit... and Nvidia has already responded and claim a patch to fix it will be available soon. Until they either don't deliver a patch, or do deliver a patch that doesn't fix it... we can't bitch much more than we have.

It's not the end of the world, unless they can't fix it.
 
Advil said:
The Nvidia !!!!!!s are pitching a fit... and Nvidia has already responded and claim a patch to fix it will be available soon. Until they either don't deliver a patch, or do deliver a patch that doesn't fix it... we can't bitch much more than we have.

It's not the end of the world, unless they can't fix it.
Well fuck, if I knew that I wouldn't have bought that piece of shit..

I AM SO MAD.. this was my first top of the line PC to date, I spent over a year saving money to buy it, and now I learn about this bull shit!
 
ive looked at the joint ops movies side by side and i cant tell the difference

what am i suposta be looking at here??
 
Nidhogg said:
ive looked at the joint ops movies side by side and i cant tell the difference

what am i suposta be looking at here??
Look down the road.. there's like this mirage sort of thingie. Shimmering.
 
I thought the AF didn't look so good. It seems like both companies are always trying to find ways to cheat with performance.
 
Advil said:
Nvidia has already responded and claim a patch to fix it will be available soon.

The Joint Ops movies are not taken from a 7800, but from a 6800. Despite there was a shimmering fix for the 6800 series some time ago (use HQ/Lod clamp = big performance hit), you can clearly see the shimmering is still there. It's there for like 18 months and still is.
So maybe they'll come with a fix to bring the 7800 AF quality on par with the 6800, most likely the shadow shimmering as seen in Joint Ops will remain. :(
 
I recently noticed shimmering in Lego Star Wars. I was playing it w/ all my settings cranked, and I noticed a fluttery effect on the edges of the charecters. I thought it was heat wave effects in game, but now that I realize its shimmering, Ill have to look at other games. I have a GIgabyte 6600GT, BTW.
 
Wow... this is totally blown out of proportion.
I've had a 6600, a 6800 GT and have a 7800 GTX, and I have been able to get any minor shimmering to go away permanently using the same option on each card.

Go to advanced driver options, and set "Negative LOD bias" to "Clamp"

That's it. No more shimmering. Not that it was even very noticeable in the first place. Sorry to ruin the party for all the ATI !!!!!!s here

shimmer.gif
 
omg. No kidding this is blown outta proportion. I mean, look at Nidhogg's first impression. He didn't even notice it until someone described the damned thing. I noticed it my first look but hell, I didn't notice any shimmering when playing Doom III at my friend's on a 6800 NU. All I saw was a bunch of splattered bloody holes on an Imp, beautifully lit by the flashes of the shotgun while it was swiping at me.

The beauty came from the lighting effects, high resolution, and smooth framerate, not lookin a mile down the hall for some shimmering crap.
 
Garric said:
Well fuck, if I knew that I wouldn't have bought that piece of shit..

I AM SO MAD.. this was my first top of the line PC to date, I spent over a year saving money to buy it, and now I learn about this bull shit!

So after performing (Go to advanced driver options, and set "Negative LOD bias" to "Clamp") and realizing that the problem is resolved you realize that the bull shit you fell for was the ATI !!!!!!s dissing your nice card.

The only flak for nVIDIA that I have is why they default to not having Clamp on. Works for my 6600GT as well. Since I get great performance and game play happiness, I have no sympathy for your 7800 card as it's got to truely rock and I'm truely envious.

If you really are unhappy, PM me for my address to where you can send it. I'll gladly take it off your hands, for $120 (as that's all I've got for a video card at this time).
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
omg. No kidding this is blown outta proportion. I mean, look at Nidhogg's first impression. He didn't even notice it until someone described the damned thing. I noticed it my first look but hell, I didn't notice any shimmering when playing Doom III at my friend's on a 6800 NU. All I saw was a bunch of splattered bloody holes on an Imp, beautifully lit by the flashes of the shotgun while it was swiping at me.

The beauty came from the lighting effects, high resolution, and smooth framerate, not lookin a mile down the hall for some shimmering crap.
THATS NOT THE POINT! I JUST SPENT AN UNGODLY AMOUNT OF MONEY.. at least for me!!! I have a dumb job and I can't just throw shit around like you people do (7800GTX SLI.. wtf? that's just overkill on anything.). I wanted to get something flawless that can at least run a decent game without any crap or anything.. and now this.
 
HighTest said:
The only flak for nVIDIA that I have is why they default to not having Clamp on. Works for my 6600GT as well. Since I get great performance and game play happiness, I have no sympathy for your 7800 card as it's got to truely rock and I'm truely envious.

Well, they did kinda have it as default, in 67.03 they set it such that when the user enables anisotropic filtering through the control panel, the control is automatically set to “Clamp”.
 
im not sure why you people accept it. LOD to clamp does not solve the issue. And there are other more important ones at hand such as Nvidia seeming to accept image quality loss over time. Heres a funny fact for you, the best image quality core was done in the NV2A in the Xbox. And as the article and facts point out, from past cores, even though current ones offer up to 16AF, we are actually seeing IQ loss, not increase. Now you can say "if you dont notice it who cares" and thats all well and good, but its not the way i want the graphics card industry heading, or a method i think should be accepted.

The overal quality improvement of the NV40's and G70's so-called 16x AF is, in fact, much less compared to 8x AF on the GeForce3-FX series. ATI's AF also does not reach the traditional GeForce quality, but at least ATI improved the capabilities of their AF with each real new chip generation (R420 is a beefed-up R300 and no new generation), while Nvidia lowered the hardware capabilities for their AF implementation compared to their own previous generation. The Reviewer's Guide is silent about that fact, it only highlights the possibility of 16x since NV40, making the Reviewer think this must be better than 8x provided by older GeForce series.

The quoted passages from Nvidia's Reviewer's Guide can be easily disproved. That means: All benchmarks using standard settings, no matter if GeForce 7800 or 6800, versus a Radeon, are wrong: Nvidia offers, at this time, the by far worse AF quality. Radeon standard settings are better (speaking in terms of image quality) than 6800 standard settings, whilst the 7800's standard settings are even worse. Thus, the so called "performance" should not be compared either. One should also not compare 7800 standard vs. 6800 standard or 7800 HQ vs 6800 HQ, since the 7800's texture quality is lower. Real "performance" includes on-screen image quality. (Otherwise, why bother to have and benchmark with AF at all? Should an AF implementation just have only minimal impact on the rendering speed or should it result in greatly improved textures?)

What advantage do you have of 16x AF if you get 2x AF at maximum at certain angles only, are exposed to texture shimmering while other cards provide flicker-free textures? All benchmarks using the standard setting for NV40 and G70 against the Radeon are invalid, because the Nvidia cards are using general undersampling which can (and does) result in texture shimmering. We know and love GeForce 7 for the Tranparency Antialiasing and the high-performance implementation of SM3 features, but the GeForce 7 series cannot be configured to deliver flicker-free AF textures while the GeForce 6 series and the Radeon series can (of course) render flicker-free AF quality.
 
The negative LOD clamp is a workaround not a fix. It does not fix the problem in all games. If you read the 3D Center article, you would have realized that the LOD of the textures was zero, so a clamp would not have helped. Besides that, if the negative LOD does not shimmer on ATi cards or 5900s, you can get a sharper image in certain situations, since they can handle the different LODs without shimmering. I was temporarily satisfied when they added the LOD clamp last year, but I always knew it was not a fix, and simply a workaround. I'm hoping the fix they are working on now is a real fix and fixes the root of the issue.
 
Garric said:
THATS NOT THE POINT! I JUST SPENT AN UNGODLY AMOUNT OF MONEY.. at least for me!!! I have a dumb job and I can't just throw shit around like you people do (7800GTX SLI.. wtf? that's just overkill on anything.). I wanted to get something flawless that can at least run a decent game without any crap or anything.. and now this.

Your $700 isn't just gone just because the card isn't absolutely perfect.
I mean, just like Nidhogg you didn't notice the first time around without looking closer. Would that even be a problem to you when playing a real game? Was that even a problem to you in a real game?

If you really want to, you could sell your 7800gtx (or whatever card you have) somewhere, and get an x850xt PE or something. But keep in mind that no matter how good the IQ is compared to the 7800, no driver updates will ever get you SM 3.0. So another choice is to sell it and wait some more months for an r520, or just sit tight and see if any future updates could patch it up. Also, you could try that clamping workaround and see if that does anything.
 
Bah, if I knew this I wouldn't even have bought ANYTHING, but would have waited for a fix! So the CLAMP doesn't even fix it at all hm!?!?!? NVIDIA I HATE YOU..
 
dude seriously you have a 7800GTX, you didnt even notice the problem until it was pointed out, wait for a fix, nvidia promised it, sit and wait..........I am still sitting on my hands for the R520xl and the grouper mobo, to see how they compare to nvidias solutions, from the mummblings I have heard grouper is amazing, and R520 is gonna be awesome, but no one knows for sure, if they dissappoint guess who is gonna get my cash..............you have an amazing card, use the temp workaround, sit and be paitent, patience is a virtue..............

on a side note, I havent owned an nvidia card since geforce 4 days, the people who use nvidia cards with the tv out tell me if they fixed the refresh rate, so you dont get refresh lines on your tv? I recall you could not drop the refresh rates below 60Hz
 
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