With the 8.12 drivers, and previous ones as well, im getting shimmy/sparkles on the grass/field texture, primarily in madden08. I didnt get this when i was using an nvidia card. Makes the texture look bad visually. Since its not just the 8.12 drivers, im assuming its either the ATI card itself, or a setting in the drivers itself making it do that. I normally run everything maxed out. If a setting is the problem ? Which is it and how can I get rid of this grass/field sparkle-shimmying effect ?? I'm at a loss!!!! TStetson
I get that (assuming it is similar) really bad in Battlefield 2 when I am running edge detect AA. I just go with the regular 16 AA Box & 16 AF @ 1600 x 1200 85Hz. Massive FPS until I get the ATIDKMDAG crash randomly. I use 8.11 Cats because 8.12 Cats make my computer act unresponsive.
I don't think it's driver related. It's just the way ATI's hardware does AF. Nvidia's Geforce 8 and later AF method produces less shimmering from what I've read and understand. I've noticed the transitions between mip levels in a lot of games, especially in Left 4 Dead and Prince of Persia and that's where I see the most sparkling.
..So would it be better to raise or lower AF if thats the case ??? It seems turning off AI Optimiztions helped in ridding some of the sparkles/shimmer effects...
Johnp is pretty much right in what he says. If you're describing what I think you're describing, then the problem can be also attributed to Negative LOD bias. Is bias clamp set to clamp or allow in the control panel? It should be Clamp..
The term is "strobing". It can be caused by a combination of Anisotropic Filtering, Mipmaps, LOD and even AA. Lowering the mipmaps at the driver can help stop this. Playing with the LOD can also stop it, or make it worse. Do a little research on the LOD so you know what it is doing, but generally don't touch the LOD setting.
Slightly ot, but I used to get shimmering really badly when I played BF2 Project Reality with my X1950 XTX but only when I moved my mouse. Used to drive me nuts. Lot better now with my 8800 but from what I've read it's also partly caused by the way the BF2 engine does AF with ATI cards.
yeah, i havent touched the LOD. so im assuming its at 0 then. so your saying if i RAISE it that should have some effect of helping. (positive LOD) ??? (yeah, the problem im getting is the grass on the field like SPARKLES or like it has glitter all in it, and doesnt look real. wasnt getting this problem with my previous nvidia card(s)).
Leave it at 0. Basically the only thing that setting will do is allow greater looking resolution textures, but that will just make the strobing worse. Setting it to positive will just cause you to lose ALL detail. You can try this for yourself, but I wouldn't. Tweaked around with it in BF2 and had to reinstall the drivers. But if you set Mipmaps to "Performance", this should clear up most of the strobing, while not noticeably losing any details. Turning on a little AA can smooth it out some more. Also, turn off the Anisotropic optimisations. Only use these if you are losing FPS because of a high AF setting.
No don't raise it, but if you have optimizations turned on then it's probably set to "allow" which means allow negative lod. It should be clamped at 0.
I know when I played BF2 with my 8800GTS there was an option in the nvidia driver to set the "Negative LOD Bias" from "Allow" to "Clamp" like this poster is saying. Not sure if ATI has a similar setting. That took care of some shimmering in BF2 for me. The shimmering always started about half way up the screen and into the distance. Probably has more to do with AF in this situation then AA. In my situation with my 4870X2 with Edge Detect AA on and set to 24X the edges of lines in BF2 would crawl when when you were moving and happened on the whole screen where there were any distinct edges. Drove me nuts so I just changed it to 16X AA Box and it looks very nice and gets some good FPS. All my other settings are at quality or high quality for the driver settings and I haven't seen any shimmer in BF2 with this card and those settings, just what I had mentioned with the edge detect AA which isn't shimmering.
If you are using ATT then: -Right click on the tray-icon -Goto 3D -Click on Settings -Click on the Additional tab -Set LOD from 0 to 1 (not -1) -click on the apply button See if that reduces/removes the shimmering effect you are seeing. But remember, this may not help in every case and in some cases may make images looks slightly blurred.
