MarkFMB

Don't worry, you'll get used to it after a good 5-6 months and at least start enjoying games again. There will be times when you get pissed at it again when you fire up a game where the problem is particularly marked... but you learn to mostly ignore it on most games with the right tweaks and settings. Look at the bright side... the day we finally get rid of it you'll be super happy again like a toddler on christmas morning. Even though, seeing where we stand right now, we probably won't resolve it as much as "surpass" it. What i mean is that i don't think it'll ever be resolved, but with new technologies it will prolly eventually become irrelevant and not feature at all... DX12 games already seem to be almost uneffected by this horrific issue. Prolly when whatever causes this stops featuring in or being used by new software we'll stop suffering as well. Before that happens... remember, 4k dsr and TXAA are your best pals. And if you ever need to move to a new hosue sell everything and buy everything from scratch, and i mean everything. TVs, pcs, consoles etc.etc. That might do the trick.

A comparison video to show just how bad this shit can be and how it can be made "tolerable" at least, watch at 1080p or it won't really show fully. So this is Dishonored 2 played with everything high/ultra, every effect, at 1080p resolution, with FXAA and without any third party / control panel postoprocessing and or editing. As you can see the shimmering and the now infamous "white jaggies" are everywhere and the game look like an awful mess. Here is the same take with 4k dsr, TXAA, SweeFX to add SMAA and Lumasharpen (cause TXAA+DSR make stuff blurry as f***), some nvidia inspector tweak to lod and anisotropic filter. As you can see the game looks ALMOST (90%) decent and normal, although some residual shimmering and weird geometric shadows on some areas are still there (other than the fact the FPS dropped drastically, but i have a 970 g1 gigabyte, so this amount of detail, dsr and postprocessing is obviously gonna kill my fps, but i prefer shitty fps than shitty looking game tbh...). I don't think i need to add here that the first video does not look normal. And that to get a decent looking image/game the amount of extra (and external) post-processing needed to try and correct this shit SHOULD not be needed in the slightest. Especially because we can't all afford 3k euros/dollars pc to get the hardwared needed to enforce all that shit while maintaining decent FPS. Also, the more we look at this in videos and screens, the more the problem seems to be the shadow mapping. This is defo shadow acne.

Has anyone moved house and tried not bringing anything from his old house? Like buying new pc and all its peripherals new, including screens, new tv, consoles, external hds etc.etc.? Cause that's what i'm planning on trying when i move out on my own. Selling pc, ps4, screens, peripherals etc.etc. and buy everything new. Wipe external hds and throw them in the junk. Buy new tv, new cables, new router with a new internet connection for the new house. New pendrives. Not accessing to any file that i might have stored online in cloud storages on my new devices. Everything. Might takes some time, 1 year or more to reach that point, but that's the plan. If that doesn't work i dunno what will. Meanwhile i've started enjoying games again on pc. DSR + tweaking of inis and Nvidia control panels + SweetFX makes most titles ALMOST normal. Some things like blocky shadows shaped like chainsaws crawling everywhere or fucking triangle shaped jaggy shadows on characters faces out of nowhere will never die i guess... and some staircase white jaggies still remain... but MOSTLY you can manage to make them look normal (even if you have to spend a good 2 hours tweaking a game before you can even play it). On my PS4 the matter is totally different. Can't do anything there, so i'm really cringing when playing it, like feeling like i want to poke my eyes out and throw the console out of the window... but i'm enduring painfully for the exclusives i want to play (hang in there FFXV, i'll finish you even if you look like a ps2 game someone shit on sometimes... i promise brah <3). To anyone saying "OMG YOU'RE ALL MAD, THIS IS TOTALLY NORMAL", i had like a 16-17 years old son of a friends' couple here tonight, and i hook him up on my ps4 cause he was getting bored. He tried some FFXV and after 10 minutes he comes to me and says "WOW Graphics are really awesome on this game... but what are those white flashing lines and shapes on grates, poles and straight stuff? And why shadows and foliage are flickering like that? That's not normal i think you have some issues with tv or ps or something". Took him 10 minutes to notice, didn't even tell him anything beforehand cause i was curious if he would notice or if it's normal as some unhelpful chaps around the internet claim. I was so happy i almost wanted to kiss him (ofc i didn't). This is honestly the weirdest and more mysterious issue i ever had with something technology-related. It's clear by now that the whole issue is shadow acne tbh. It's not aliasing or anything imho. It's something totally fucking up and messing with the shadow mapping. What and how is mysterious though, cause something like that should surely be SW related, but that wouldn't explain how and why it passes through hardware as it's apparent it does by now...

Just out of curiosity... have you tried bringing the ps4 and monitor back to your friend's house? If so it goes back to normal or does it still look ugly?

Seriously how can you say in all honesty the 2 videos daraga123 posted look normal? Check the witcher3 one at best quality fullscreen. Everything is shimmering! The lines on the windows, the doors, the objects, basin, candelabra. Nearly every straight texture is swimming like crazy. I have that too. That's NOT normal. I'm starting to notice i'm having this also on still pcitures. Like photos. Just only when i drag them. While i drag or move pics around the screen everything shimmers in it, when i drop it it goes normal and perfect. Same that happens with moving camera in games. This is so weird. What the heck is causing this really?

I have that too daraga123... not it's not normal, cause it makes the game look like a pile of fuming shit. And that game isn'ìt normally a pile of fuming shit like that. Friends of mine don't have it... people at pc conventions i was don't have it. That's not the normal graphics for the game. I just recently finished Life is Strange... and ooooh boy the shadows and the shimmering there sometimes. Shadows like on floors and people faces looked like piles of triangles swimming like a chainsaw. *sigh* What the hell is this is still beyond me... i've nearly given up on gaming after 20 years...

Just had a casual search on google cause you never know when someone might have a breakthrough somewhere else. Found nothing new alas, but the posts, also on other forums, of people complaining of this issue are start to pile up by the dozens on the net. Just Tomshardware forums have tens and tens identical posts of people complaining of this issue. Just randomly google "shimmering in all games" "bad draw distance in all games" etc.etc. I reallly really think this has something to go with either: 1 a small incompatiblity between some hardware and/or softwares installed on a pc. This could explain why some pcs get it, most don't OR 2 a broken driver/directx issue on some rigs. Just hoping from the jump in visibility this issue is having, with all the new daily cases and people asking for help (not that i'm a fan of other people having issues, mind it), someone finds out something and or really big tech savvies start investigating it seriously. I really wonder if linus ever stumbled in here yet...

Not to be THAT GUY, but this topic is already filled with speculations, doubts and unsolved misteries, so it would be better to keep it clean from issues that don't concern the matter at hand duzy-wonsz. Just open another topic to ask for help with graphical issues for specific games or general blue screens / driver failures and i'm sure there'll be plenty of people willing to help. Here the topic is not about any graphic error your card or drivers might have, it's about people with seemingly broken AA on their systems experiencing very specific shimmering, staircase effects and white jaggies, all complemented by some low res shadow glithces and for some texture pop-ins in ANY softawre or video being played/run.

Holy mother of god when you switch into that "special vision" mode those stair look as ugly as can be, real playstation 1 quality there . Rest of the game/normal vision looks pretty cool though. It's nice to see that newer games with newer engines suffer a lot less from our problem... even as they still have those surfaces or those moments (like this special vision here) where it's still coming out and punching you in the face to do a reality check. Have you tried with DSR (i see your're not using it in the vid)? That might make it better but i guess DSR on that game will be a lot "expensive" fps-wise to run unless you have a sli. Anyway, clearly changing your AA ingame does nothing to modify or lessen the issue. Tried with NCP? Or Nvidia Inspector? If that doesn't work either i guess we can confirm AA is really broken on some surfaces for our pcs... which keeps sounding more and more like drivers are to blame here. Why are we not being able to get rid of this by formatting though? I'm losing my sleep over this...

Video is not loading for me. Says it's not available. Anyway i never had any BSODs on this pc. I did have in the first pair of weeks of usage various times when display drivers stopped working for a second or two and got black screens. That stopped happening after a pair of week, but i can't be sure if that was an actual problem or not, since i updated drivers different times wiping them after before every update since. Could have been something wrong specific to that version.

As much as this sounds interesting, i have my doubts that's the case for us. I actually have a sony tv. I could give it a go by trying to plug my pc in it and check if this does anything. But for example my monitor never got driver updates (BenQ GL2460HM), so i doubt that's actually our case as much as i'd like for it to be such an easy solution. Also i tried (and many other did as well) with different monitors and unless we're uber unlucky and every one of them needed updating or was malfunctioning, you see how this case is really improbable. Also 2 of the monitors i treid worked flawlessly on older card. So... yeah.

The more we dig into this and the more it starts to seem like software-related is the only answer... why does formatting not solve this than? If this is a corrupted driver why wiping and reinstalling and/or formatting doesn't seem to change anything? Could it be the conflict is with some windows basic software, at least in some of its versions or some of its updates (which would explain why not everyone is having this)? Afaik i didn't hear anyone with linux or ios lament this thing... has anyone tried formatting and installing linux instead of windows?

That's probably because Far Cry 4 has TXAA. Games using TXAA as their temporal antialiasing seem to be ALMOST immune to this problem. I noticed this in both Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 which look almost as good and normal as they should, and was very glad of that. I say almost cause it's still visible on very sharp edges like railings or fences and it still causes weird shadows and flickering on some far away surfaces, but other then that, it's almost eye candy. Now, if what Demiqas says is true, that he reverted to older card and drivers on the same pc AND the issue went away, then this issue sounds more and more driver related. Can some newer cards sometimes be plagued by flawed drivers on some systems which will plague your machine til you downgrade to a card using another generation of drivers altogether? This is weird though... cause formatting didn't solve the problem and changing brands didn't either for most. If it was driver related that should have done the trick. Can these flawed drivers affect the firmware if not even the hardware? Or maybe are just the newer cards incapable of implementing certain types of AA and, as we know, LOD clamping and totally depend for those on in-game engine, which would explain why we see newer games almost perfect and older ones that we used to see perfect on older cards as messed up clusterfucks? This could also be... but wouldn't explain why people with this issue have it also on videos, movies, etc.etc., which, being those prerendered, would make sense only if this was some sort of electrical disturbance (which if what Demiqas says is true, can't be). I'm at a loss. But i would direct more scrutiny to drivers here.

Follow up on yesterday's video. More issues popped up today. Weirdly enough yesterday i didn't have this and i didn't touch any setting. I'm perplexed.

Someone should try to build a new one from scrap with nothing in common and plug in a random 5 dollar keyboard and mouse and possibly another cheap monitor. Than see if it works properly. And start switching in components til it gets bugged. That would give a definite answer... but who has the money to throw right? Wish i had...