Shimmering issue fixed for 7800GTX

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
Can someone please make my 6800GT shimmer?

Remember the guy who fixed the 7800 to fit (see the stupidest video thread), I can make your 6800GT shimmer... Now where did I leave that propane torch?

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: Matt2
Excuse me if I have misinterpreted your posts, but you seem to go out of your way to discount Rollo's claim that the shimmering issue is fixed.

I guess if it were me and I wanted the issue fixed, I would take Rollo's account as being true. Then if it turned out the shimmering issue is not fixed, then you can crap all over this thread.

It just seems to me that you're being very premature. Just wait and see if it actually fixes the problem instead of trying to prove that Rollo is lying without even using the drivers... that's all.

Rollo linked to videos here:

Originally posted by: Rollo
Shimmering fixed videos

ChrisRay over at nVNews has posted videos that illustrate this fix at work, as I've noted, I'm sure there will be more to come.

See the shimmer? You will see that even the guy who posted the videos sees the shimmer if you read in a few pages, So you want "take Rollo's account as being true" even though the evedince he linked to shows otherwise? I'm all for wishfull thinking but that is just absurd.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: M0RPH
I guess we should just all accept the fact that Nvidia has inferior 3D image quality to ATI. It looks like Nvidia thinks that you should accept some shimmering in their default "quality" mode. I just hope reviewers will point this out in the future and let everyone know that while Nvidia cards may be faster, they give you inferior image quality.

Right, because it's so "obvious" none of the reviewers even noticed it.

Should I go in to what we've gotten used to not having on ATI cards. LOL- got a few minutes?

1. No SM3
2. Therefore, no displacement mapping
3. Therefore, no current method geometry instancing
4. No Exr HDR
5. No soft stencil shadows
6. No multicard solution
7. No high end solution
8. No good linux drivers
9. No Transparency AA
10. No 16X AA

But hey, "No having to set the slider from quality to high quality to remove an effect many people can't see and many who can barely notice" is a fair trade for those ten points, right guys? :roll::wine:

That shimmering issue is a BIG deal because it's about the only thing you have to hang onto while ATI delays their next part over and over, tells stockholders it might not even be better, and hires lawyers to defend themselves against the six (and climbing) lawsuits for insider trading so the execs could cash out while the getting is good? (a couple months after paying $900,000 in fines for the same thing!)

Yep, ATI is just an honest, hardworking company who deserves your hard earned dollar.

Now remember buyers, it's a choice between:

nVidia- some faint shimmer at mipmap transitions that will be either greatly reduced or totally removed by upcoming drivers

OR

ATI:
1. No SM3
2. Therefore, no displacement mapping
3. Therefore, no current method geometry instancing
4. No Exr HDR
5. No soft stencil shadows
6. No multicard solution
7. No high end solution
8. No good linux drivers
9. No Transparency AA
10. No 16X AA

You can use your call to a friend if you need help with this tough choice!

LOL

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: TheSnowman

Originally posted by: Matt2
ChrisRay over at nVNews has posted videos that illustrate this fix at work, as I've noted, I'm sure there will be more to come.

See the shimmer? You will see that even the guy who posted the videos sees the shimmer if you read in a few pages, So you want "take Rollo's account as being true" even though the evedince he linked to shows otherwise? I'm all for wishfull thinking but that is just absurd.

Geforce 7800GTX High Quality Beta: When looking at the Geforce 7800GTX in High Quality mode. We can see that the quality is significantly increased. I have found the new 7800GTX HQ mode to be fairly comparable to the 6800GT High Quality mode with older drivers. Many games that experience shimmering have been fixed. It should be noted that it is unlikely that shimmering will ever disapear completely as there are multiple forms of aliasing across surfaces.

Yah, its the crime of the century Snowman. Either totally fixed or greatly reduced.

So in games where it's totally fixed, the 7800GT/GTX own all, period.

Where it's "greatly reduced" smart gamers might make the trade.

Feel free to keep waiting for the 5800U.....oops, I mean R520!

 

[hans030390]

Originally posted by: M0RPH
I guess we should just all accept the fact that Nvidia has inferior 3D image quality to ATI. It looks like Nvidia thinks that you should accept some shimmering in their default "quality" mode. I just hope reviewers will point this out in the future and let everyone know that while Nvidia cards may be faster, they give you inferior image quality.

Last time i checked EVERY review on Nvidia cards have pretty much stated that Nvidia and ATI are about equal in IQ quality. Oh sorry! maybe the AA/AF doesnt look as super duper! maybe its just a tad bit worse. Sorry, not all the cards run the same way.

By the way, I want you to pull up a decent source that says "nvidia is faster, but the IQ sucks" or whatever you're claiming. Huh? yeah. Do that. I'll just put up a few more that disprove that.

Obviously the shimmering can be fixed by drivers. Obviously the framerate drops by a 1-2 fps...but isn't that worth making the nvidia cards closer to being more like ATI superior IQ?

last time i checked, my 6600gt gives as much IQ as any other card i've seen (not like, graphics settings, but shimmering for an example).

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch
theyll be released tomorrow anyways.

LOL- guess they weren't. Hopefully soon.

 

[fstime]

tl;dr

 

[kylebisme]

I'm not waiting for the r520 you fool, my 6800gt and x800xt-pe are treating me fine right now and I'll probably be good well though this new round just like my Geforce3 lasted me for ages back in the day. Actually, since nVidia desided to improve their support for tirple buffering I have all sorts of new love for my 6800gt, and if you could tell me that these new drivers will have a positive effect on the shimmering issue that would make things even better. So please stop pretending like we are having fanboy wars when the truth is I don't give a damn what company makes my hardware as long s it does what I'd like it to, and news of new drivers that might do something improve the anisotropy on my Geforce is something I'd like to hear more about.

 

[BFG10K]

I have been wanting the shimmering fixed since I got my Geforce

Use the high quality setting.

Its not fixed, until its not in High Quality, or Quality. Since they have chosen for now, to leave in Quality, its not fixed.

That's not going to happen because if high quality matched quality then one of them would be redundant and would never have been included.

There is NOTHING "Quality" about shimmering.

So if nVidia renamed the quality setting to "my fruity orange" would it be fixed then?

I don't understand, what is it you want?

Do you want quality and high quality to be exactly the same? In that case why even bother having two settings?

Or you expect quality performance at high quality IQ levels? If nVidia could do that don't you think they would've done it?

Quality is faster because it degrades IQ from high quality and since the bulk of the gain comes from trilinear optimizations (which causes the shimmer in quality) then that's the nature of the beast. If you don't like the shimmer then run high quality or turn off trilinear optimizations. I really don't see the problem here.

I think there's some confusion as to what's being actually discussed. In a nutshell this thread is about the 7800 shimmering at high quality levels when it shouldn't be. It has nothing at all to do with quality shimmering on any card since that's part-and-parcel of the setting, or more specifically, trilinear optimizations. That one comes down to opinion as to whether you want to use it or not.

 

[xtknight]

Hmm...I'm starting to see it now that I d/l'd FRAPS and watched those videos. I thought that was my LCD's blur. So this is exhibited in all games?

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

I have been wanting the shimmering fixed since I got my Geforce

Use the high quality setting.

High quality helps a lot, but there are still plenty of situations where shimmering is still an issue. The most notable spot I have seen is the grass in Halo like on Blood Gulch, though it does come up in plenty of other games to some degree or another.

 

[BFG10K]

Are you sure that shimmer isn't just plain old aliasing on alpha textures? I know you can't in Halo but have you tried something like 8xAA in the other games to see if it helps?

 

[kylebisme]

Nah, I'm talking about the solid grass texture that covers the ground of the gulch, not anything using an alpha channel. And yeah, supersampling always helps where you can use it, but the anisotropy issue is still there reguardless.

 

[imported_g33k]

Originally posted by: jrphoenix
I don't play with my drivers too much and before my 6800 Ultra I had an ATI card. Does choosing "quality" instead of "high quality" just turn on optimizations? Do frame rates jump up? What about compared to performance / high performance?

I have always used high quality and wonder if I should change to boost frame rates???? Will my image quality go way down?

In my experience, you will get ~20% better framerates if you play on quality instead of high quality. You will notice virtually no image quality degradation. At least I cannot tell one setting from the other. I always play on quality for the increased performance. These shimmering problems is the first I've seen or heard about. Most of these games that are being talked about I don't play on a regular basis though.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: g33k
In my experience, you will get ~20% better framerates if you play on quality instead of high quality.

As you can see, that was my experience on only 1/3 HL2 levels?

 

[nitromullet]

These drivers are available now directly from NV

<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/">ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/</a></a>

from the release notes:

Issues Resolved in Version 78.03
This following are changes made and issues resolved since driver version 78.01:
? NVIDIA Control Panel: Some application profile settings do not
override the global settings.
? GeForce 7 Series: Shimmering artifacts appear when using High
Quality performance setting.

 

[xtknight]

:thumbsup:

 

[imported_g33k]

Originally posted by: Rollo

Originally posted by: g33k
In my experience, you will get ~20% better framerates if you play on quality instead of high quality.

As you can see, that was my experience on only 1/3 HL2 levels?

Maybe it depends on the game. Going from quality to high quality, I got my 20% figure using Painkiller's built in benchmark C5L2.

 

[nRollo]

Oh noes!

ATI fansite points out shimmer on X800 cards as well!

What do you think Ackmed? Should ATI re-name their "Quality" setting?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Rollo
Oh noes!

ATI fansite points out shimmer on X800 cards as well!

What do you think Ackmed? Should ATI re-name their "Quality" setting?

I don't think either is intentional optimization. Maybe it's just hard to get the equations perfect. I'm pretty damn sure I've seen that since my Radeon VE, and now on my Radeon 9500 PRO and GeForce 6800.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

they cant even link to a working video. try again, rollo

 

[compgeek89]

I dont have time to read through this whole thread but these things are available right now at Guru3d.com

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: xtknight

Originally posted by: Rollo
Oh noes!

ATI fansite points out shimmer on X800 cards as well!

What do you think Ackmed? Should ATI re-name their "Quality" setting?

I don't think either is intentional optimization. Maybe it's just hard to get the equations perfect. I'm pretty damn sure I've seen that since my Radeon VE, and now on my Radeon 9500 PRO and GeForce 6800.

It is the side effect of an intentional optimization in the the hardware that started with the 9600s last generation and is in all their new GPUs as well. I have been complaining about it since I got my x800xt-pe and I even linked an article explaining the issue from the site Rollo was trying to pass off as anti-nVidia fanboys when he linked to their article on Geforce filtering:

Originally posted by: TheSnowman
ROFL how people try to pass the article of as an anti-nvidia thing, yet same site called ATI out when they droped their filtering quality as well.
link.

Anyway, I'm using these new drivers right now and they don't do anything to help the shimmering on my 6800gt but they seem like nice solid drivers and it is good to see they help with the extra problems with the 7800 cards. I'm convinced that at least some of the problem is in the hardware just like it is with ATI chips, so I'm not really expecting to see a real fix but all the same I think it is important for everyone to be aware of the issue so GPU makers don't keep sacrificing image quality just to get some extra FPS on benchmarks.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
These drivers are available now directly from NV

<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/">ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/78.03/</a></a></a>

from the release notes:

Issues Resolved in Version 78.03
This following are changes made and issues resolved since driver version 78.01:
? NVIDIA Control Panel: Some application profile settings do not
override the global settings.
? GeForce 7 Series: Shimmering artifacts appear when using High
Quality performance setting.

they dont mention that it will fix the shimmering for the 6800 models too :/