Unsolvable Z-fighting, LOD problems, AA issues and a lot more (RX580)...

Hi guys

This is the problem:



Notice the patterns on the buildings. This is present in every game, on any settings. On top of that, there are LOD issues with objects and textures popping in. It appeared suddenly, without changing anything (hardware, drivers, win updates etc.) Basically, my brand new system was running perfectly for two weeks, and then turned into this overnight.

Driver reinstalls, redist reinstalls, game reinstalls, system restore, CMOS reset, BIOS flash, and eventually full reformat and Windows reinstall did nothing. I tried connecting to my TV, issue was still present. AMD support is at a loss.

Zipped uncompressed videos, showing the full horror of this issue:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bRQBSxvB403sV90YKnKsT6KsVNhsYDuY?usp=sharing

Does anyone know what might cause this or where I should look?

Please help, it is driving me mad.

 

You're running some sort of a scuffed resolution

 

thats not z fighting or lod problems, its surfaces that can't be antialiased without a post process or temporal filter.

 

That was my first thought as well, but I'm running native resolution. No scaling is enabled anywhere. Unless there is a hidden setting somewhere deep that somehow got flipped.

Why were they antialiased properly one day and improperly the next day, and how do I revert it?

 

Looks like normal aliasing to me. Seems to me you are just realizing the reality of how things really look for the first time.
The only thing possible you were doing different before was if you were running at a higher than native resolution before without realizing it. For 1280x1024 this looks normal. AMD GPUs have no other way of forcing AA AFIK. (In the case of TW2 you may have had ubersambling on before).

The GTA footage looks like it might be a texture lod bug maybe.(Lod bias set to high) I also don't see any Z-fighting, Z fighting would be the faces of two surfaces in the distance fighting for which is the correct pixel to be displayed.

GTA has MSAA support, as does AC3 (If the original version) if you think you do have those enabled (Keep your expectations realistic. It can't do anything for specular and texture aliasing), delete your config files and let the game regenerate new ones and reset your settings.
You can also try DDU and do a clean install of drivers if those changed recently.

 

GTA5's super sampling can help with that aliasing

 

What driver?

Probably a game problem, and not a GPU problem.

 

I know how things look like because they looked great before. And there is footage on Youtube without any of those issues.
Also, 1280x1024 is almost the same horizontal resolution as 1080p, it's just not widescreen.
Uninstalling, reinstalling, deleting settings, none of that helped. In this last month I tried everything.

There is only MSAA and FXAA in settings.

Problem is in all games, with any driver version.

 

That option doesnt help much either. Even if it did, I shouldn't be forced to use a "fix" that halves my framerate. The game looked great without it. Now it doesn't.

 

the game never looked any better than what you see now.

 

I'm sorry, but that is just not true. If you watch this footage, you won't see anything even similar to what i've got. There are no shimmering shadows, no jagged geometry, and all the road markings are rendered properly. This is what my game looked untill the problem appeared overnight.

 

That's it....

 

What's your screen resolution again?

 

1280x1024. Its an old screen. I was planning on buying a new one soon, but what's the point if my games are like this?
I also tried my TV at 1366x760.
There are people who have the issue at 1080p and even 4k.

 

You mean other than improved refresh rate options, less ghosting, better color gamut, tighter pixel density,....

 

For email and facebook, this old screen is good enough.

 

maybe try not showing a video that has high distance detail settings disabled.

 

At such a low resolution, you're going to get aliasing and with regards to AA not working, the problem is, most games today use deferred rendering which means traditional AA doesn't work (MSAA) unless the game engine supports it leaving only post-processing options (FXAA/SMAA/MLAA). Even at 1080p, aliasing is fairly common, much higher resolutions, aliasing is less perceptible unless you specifically look for it.

You can try to use methods such as super sampling or VSR to mitigate and smooth the lines but the fact is, you're not going to remove it entirely.

As for texture pop-in this can also be related to the media you have games installed on such as a slow or fragmented hard drive in which the game and graphics card is waiting for the texture to be loaded due to such a bottleneck.

 

I am aware of the imperfections of 3D graphics. I've been gaming even before 3D acceleration became a thing. But this issue is beyond what is typical and acceptable. If I hadn't seen it work properly for the first few weeks of having this brand new system, I might have even convinced myself that this is simply how things are.
Please take a look at the uncompressed videos, Youtube smoothes out a lot.