Will nvidia EVER fix the shimmering problem?

Apple740 said:
In your X700XT review you've stated that this shimmering was due to Ati's A.I., turning off AI removed it. Maybe we can simply state that Nv uses to much "hidden optimizations" in their drivers, which you can't turn off, which causes the shimmering.
Click to expand...

The Flight Sim problem was solved by turning AI off, the other dot shimmer problem wasn't. 'Least that's what I gather unless Brent contradicted himself. From the review:

"We are concerned about the colored dots or dashes we are seeing crop up in games on the X700XT. Here today we noticed it in DOOM 3, FarCry, and City of Heroes, all of which are popular current games. This does not seem to have anything to do with CATALYST A.I. since when we disabled it they were still present. If it is a game bug or a driver bug perhaps this is something that would benefit from being fixed through application detection."
 
The Flight Sim problem was solved by turning AI off, the other dot shimmer problem wasn't
Click to expand...

About the dots, this has nothing to do with "shimmer". I have never noticed it on my X800, must be a X700 specific problem or driver bug.

To be clear what "shimmer" is in theory, take a good look at the pic beneath. Moving your head while looking makes the shimmer worse.

shimmer2.gif


http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/shimmer/shimmer.html
 
Apple740 said:
About the dots, this has nothing to do with "shimmer". I have never noticed it on my X800, must be a X700 specific problem or driver bug.

To be clear what "shimmer" is in theory, take a good look at the pic beneath. Moving your head while looking makes the shimmer worse.

shimmer2.gif


http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/shimmer/shimmer.html
Click to expand...

I'm blind as a bat then. I don't notice anything moving in that pic.
 
The Batman said:
I'm blind as a bat then. I don't notice anything moving in that pic.
Click to expand...

Try scrolling the image up and down instead of or while moving your head as you look at it... You'll see an effect similar to what people have been complaining about in this thread. I still don't know why they call it shimmer, maybe I've just always related shimmer to the wrong idea... Shimmer always used to invoke in my mind blinking stuff such as appearing/disappearing textures and dot/seams. Whatever tho... :p

Heh, the dictionary definition is pretty all-encompassing:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=shimmer
 
That image just shows an illusion of shimmering. If that image were computer generated, you would see an exaggerated affect developed through the video card due to hidden optimizations. If these optimizations didn't happen in the processing, then the computer image would be exactly like the image above me in this thread.

Shimmering exists, theres no use in arguing that it doesn't. WTF, you got tons of people submitting feedback and evidence and EVEN AN EDITOR saying he sees it. Stop denying it.

Just because you don't get it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, open your mind and stop being ignorant to the problem. When I say you I'm obviously referring to anyone who keeps deny the existence of this effect.
 
Whatever word you want to use to describe it, I do see it in those videos.

So far I see this as 3 seperate issues:


1.) Sparlkling Texture Aliasing (that looks similar to having the LOD set to sharp)

2.) Moiré patterns that are appearing on textures (may or may not be related to Sparlkling Texture Aliasing)

2.) Dots/Lines that are appearing on textures or texture seams.


1 and 2 may or may not be related to each other, but 3 is definitely a seperate problem.
 
I've got shimmering with a 6800, AMD2500+M OC'ed to 3200+, nForce2 chipset.

Has anyone who has it tried to pull the vid card and put it in a different rig? It might help to narrow down the cause of the problem.
 
provoko said:
That image just shows an illusion of shimmering. If that image were computer generated, you would see an exaggerated affect developed through the video card due to hidden optimizations. If these optimizations didn't happen in the processing, then the computer image would be exactly like the image above me in this thread.

Shimmering exists, theres no use in arguing that it doesn't. WTF, you got tons of people submitting feedback and evidence and EVEN AN EDITOR saying he sees it. Stop denying it.

Just because you don't get it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, open your mind and stop being ignorant to the problem. When I say you I'm obviously referring to anyone who keeps deny the existence of this effect.
Click to expand...


Thats what im talking about . Very good point. Just last night i took out the 6800 gt and put back my 9800pro and BF1942 looks so much smoother to the eye and there is 0% of shimmering on ground textures and objects. But in BF Vietnam i see no shimmering with eather cards so im starting to believe that 6800gt has problems with dirextX 7 games. My personal opinion.
 
about directx7,. i have dx9.0c and a 6800GT, and i can't run 3dmark01, i can run 03(12,3xx) and 05(5,235) but when i run 3dmark01 it freezes with glitchy all over screen or dumps me to desktop, makes no sense. its the oldest dx app i have, every other game i have are all dx8 or higher. wish i had a old dx7 game like half life to test this dx7 problem theory
 
Hmm, I've still got the original discs for Half Life around here (was just replaying it the other day), that and a Radeon 9600... Might run an IQ comparison to my GT once it comes in.
 
I just installed the new 67.02 betas, and having LOD clamp set to "clamp" cured my shimmering problem.
 
Any IQ issues with the new drivers? Heard someone had texture corruption in NFSU2 and some banding on water in HL2. 'Least the issue is being addressed with new beta driver features.
 
nVNews posted a temporary fix to the flickering problem.

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


Yes, I own a Radeon 9800 Pro and 6800 GT OC on two rigs. I play World of Warcraft and do notice 6800 GT flickering like heck, while the Radeon yields no flicker. As soon as I get home today, I will try what nVNews suggests to fix the problem.
 
After following all the links I've seen a few different artifacts (and each piece of hardware is quite different in this department), but I've seen several different things all lumped together as 'shimmering'. In the end its all the same thing: Something is aliasing.

1) The City of Heroes shot of the parking lot stripes: Polygon edge aliasing. They draw their parking stripes and road stripes as decals on top of the road so you get edge aliasing on them. The pattern you see when the stripes are like 88 degrees from being horizontal are from the anti-aliasing filter.

2) The white pixel edges on the farcry/doom shots: Shader aliasing. Until recently everyone has seen a relatively similar diffuse surface texturemapped with various filters (linear, bilinear etc). Now that we have per-pixel effects, the lighting of a pixel can vary from black to white just by moving the camera a fraction of an inch. The shader can easily alias lighting levels, especially if the underlying normals maps are not mipmaped (which they arent typically since they take up so much space).

3) Doom 3 grated floors showing off ansisotropic filtering. This is a bit of a grey area: There is no 'one true way' to do Anisotropic Filtering. Its up to the hardware guys. Basically its a multisampled mipmap filter, with the configurable setting being how many samples to take. Originally NVIDIA ran this for all geometry all the time and it was very consistent visually. ATI did it based on the angle of the polygon compared to the view. Newer NVIDIA (FX series and newer) started doing it similar to ATI. The original NVIDIA design was for visual fidelity but the current designs are geared to the new speed race (at some point it will have to shift back to image quality).

4) BF1942 noise : This one is the trickiest for me to nail down, but I would have to guess that the BF1942 code is setting the mipmap lod bias through code in the game to make the game look sharper. By default graphics hardware and their drivers are tuned so that all mipmap filtering comes out as detailed as possible with no visual aliasing. Adjusting the mipmap lod bias at all to be 'sharper' will cause texture sampling aliasing all over the place. Various drivers have settings to this effect, some force the Anisotropic filter to be higher, some play with the mipmap lod bias, while others do both.


Peronsally I wouldn't care that much about it, if you've seen SiS Xabre, Trident BladeXP, Intel Grantsdale, S3 DeltaChome, Matrox Parhelia (or any of their ancestors) you would know how much better off you are with the big two.

I have just about all the cards (even the crappy off-brands listed below) and I have NVIDIA in both my home and work machines and its definitely more a function of the software (of the drivers) than the hardware.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top