Swimming textures

[Hornit 3]

Hello all, I have an experiment for you. I have been messing with my Riva Tuner trying to do away with a bit of swimming or shimmering textures. I'm using the 41.09 detonators with Riva tuner tweaking. What I get is this...at about 2,000 or 1800 feet or so i start to see some swimming in the textures out at about 3 miles or so, doesn't go past about 4-5 miles either. It gets pretty bad down low and almost goes totally away at higher altitude (like above 5,000') As I go higher the band of swimming/shimmering seems to creep out like a ring, mind you its not very bad, but is this just the price to pay for a GF card? I am pining for my old V5 right about now. I'm just wondering if others see this also. I have the terrain textures and complexity up quite high as I like the look of it. Also run at 1024 and sometimes 1152 res. Nothing I do with Riva tuner seems to do away with it. I antialias at 4x usually or use quincunx. Also my building textures (updates by Gerrish) seem to flicker quite a lot and im wondering if there is any way to get rid of that or not.Thanks for any info!Hornit

[Hornit 3]

I forgot to mention it seems to be mostly the textures which make up the forested area, not the trees themselves but the forest texture under them. Also it seems worse if I climb or descend while viewing in spot view. If Im steady on altitude it is almost nonexistent. Could it be my drivers? Im thinking I might go back to the 30.82's at this point.Hornit

[Guest JonP01]

Hornit,I hope these answers will make you feel better (or not):1. Yes, I see the shimmering and swimming textures, exactly as you described and under the exact same circumstances. I always have ever since ditching my Voodoo.2. Yes, I miss my Voodoo 5500. otoh, it isn't anywhere near fast enough for today's games.3. Yes, I can't stand the shimmering and aliasing effects either and I've spent countless hours trying to reduce the effect.4. It's a Voodoo sort of thing. Unless people owned a Voodoo 5500, people are probably happy with the image quality of their Geforce 4 cards. A few things you can do to reduce the effect:Firstly, go easy on the negative LOD. People seem to love pushing high negative numbers with the LOD but is also one of the best (or worst depending you how you look at it) ways to increase texture aliasing. I only run as little as -0.1 LOD on 2x AA. Use the smallest amount possible to bring the texture crispness back to what it was when you had AA disabled. Any more than this and the symptoms get worse.Secondly, go easy on the AF as well. I only run 2 x AF, although 4x is OK as well.Thirdly, download aTuner and try using the 2x2 anti-aliasing mode. It is significantly better than the standard 2x AA and is not too far way from the original quality of the Voodoo 5500. The problem is that it a pretty big performance hit.

[Guest]

Guys...Thanks for your post. Sorry to interupt but I have ditched the Voodoo5500 card last week. Installed the G4Ti4200 and the whole world seems to sparkle (especially below 4000 feet). I really miss the 5500 for scenery quality and may reinstall it if this is not cureable!The new card also only allows me to fly for 30mins before locking up and restarting the computer.Bobfrom the Isle of Wight.Ps maybe we should start a 5500 fan club with newsletters, hats and annual Voodoo parties...

[Guest]

News updateI downloaded aTuner as you suggested and with the setting you have listed I have a quality view very like the Voodoo5500 used to give me!A big thanks for that.If you can now cure my lockup after 30mins problem with the G4Ti4200 Ishall be very pleased...Bobfrom the Isle of Wight (under snow again today)

[Guest JonP01]

Bob,Firstly I would just be double checking the video card itself to make sure the heatsink is properly seated on the GPU and that the fan is working correctly. In all likelihood this is not the problem, as the symptoms would appear sooner than 30 minutes. Also make everything in your PC is running at standard speed (no overclock) - that includes CPU, memory, GPU core and GPU memory. A few things from the top of my head that you can try (but one at a time, otherwise you won't know which one works, if infact one of them does work).1. Try turning off Transform and Lighting from within FS2002.2. Try disabling AGP fast writes in the BIOS.3. Check your power supply, both for sufficient wattage and watch for any voltage rail drops. Your motherboard most probably came with some software that lets you monitor the various voltage rails. The one you will be most interested in is the 1.5 volt rail for the AGP card. It shouldn't vary by more than 5% downwards from that 1.5 volt figure.I might humbly suggest you also go back to the 30.82 drivers, just for the time being, if the other suggestions don't bring any improvement. Then see if that helps a little with stability. I have a feeling that the latest 40 series drivers can sometimes do some odd things with texture management on some setups - something that I never found with the 30.82 drivers.

[Guest]

Great stuff, thanks.A long night ahead but this must be cureable!Bobfrom the Isle of Wight - stopped snowing now

[Hornit 3]

I have had some weird thing happen with the 41.09's recently. Its only happened three times in the past month or two. I will be happily flying along in spot view and if I slew or try using Lago's scenery editor I get the sim to hang, the screen goes almost all yellow with some blue and white pixels taking over the entire screen and a hard crash which needs a reboot. It never happened with the 30.82's or the 29.42's I may go back and try the 29.42 drivers as I recall I had better image and could use GTU instead of Rivatuner which seemed to yield better results, especially in the swimming texture are. By the way, If you can stand it, turn on mipmapping and my shimmering pretty much is gone. I don't like it though. Ahh for a Voodoo!Hornit

[Guest]

HornitYou beat me to it! I was just about to say that from my own trials, you seem to have a choice: Dont use mipmapping and you get clearer but shimmering textures.Use mipmapping and get more blurred textures (including the blurring affect when looking along the fuselage of aircraft).I dont know if I'm clutching at straws but I'm sure my blurred texture problem is worse since I installed DirectX 8.2, courtesy of CFS3.

[Guest JonP01]

I'm still a fan of the 30 series drivers. I have noticed odd things happening with 40.72 drivers. In Rally Trophy, the game can degenerate into progressively worsening slow motion slide show as time goes on, neccessitating a re-boot. I've seen this happen on 2 different system configurations, both using a Geforce 4. In FS2002, after a certain amount of time, the game can degenerate into a progressively worsening stutter fest. Neither of these problems occur with the 30 series or earlier drivers. I have felt at times the 30 series have better image quality but at the same time I could just be seeing things. I haven't tried the 42 series drivers yet but since I'm going perfectly well with the 30 series I'm not sure I will bother.

[Guest]

Guys..I have returned to the 30.00 drivers from the MSI website and the improvement is there to see, much clearer ground textures and with the aTuner settings from before its almost like the old Voodoo!Also train simulator is much improved with clear textures all round.Bobfrom the Isle of WightPs FS now locks up after 15mins so no cure there..onward and upward!

[Hornit 3]

I can confirm this. There was stil a tiny bit of some shimmer but it was definitely improved pretty dramatically using identical Rivatuner setings. I went from the 41.09's back to the 30.82's Last night I could not get CFS3 to work anymore now its fine with the 30.82 detonator set and flight sim looks great!Hornit

[Guest]

I have to ask, what is this Riva tuner your talking about? I didn't even know there was a way to get rid of the shimmering. I have a gforce 2 32 mg card, will this tuner get rid of shimmering for me? Btw, where would I go to get this Riva tuner?

[Hornit 3]

You will never get rid of it totally but you can make it almost go away. Go to www.guru3d.com and look for Riva Tuner. Then come bak here and do a search for riva tuner and read up on what folks have done to help this and some other things.Hornit

[Guest JonP01]

Bob,Are these lockups occuring only in FS2002? What happens, for example, if you leave your system running overnight with 3D Mark 2001 in an endless loop? Your system should be able to run this sort of benchmark pretty much indefinitely.