Low image quality on newer GPUs

[Monarch]

3 hours ago, Demiqas said:

Ok, and what do you do when after optimizing the settings the game still looks like garbage as if your changes didn't have any effect at all? Or when you enable 8x SSAA and aliasing is still all over the place as if you didn't apply any AA at 1080p (ofcourse I am talking about games with proper AA support).

SSAA is the best AA solution IQ wise afaik and if it the image is still heavily aliased there's something wrong on your end, it has nothing to do with newer GPUs. In what games does SSAA not work properly? SSAA is extremely expensive, few games include it.

 

[MEC-777]

10 minutes ago, Monarch said:

SSAA is the best AA solution IQ wise afaik and if it the image is still heavily aliased there's something wrong on your end, it has nothing to do with newer GPUs. In what games does SSAA not work properly? SSAA is extremely expensive, few games include it.

 

Agree with you it's nothing to do with newer GPUs. The SSAA in ROTTR is broken/difunctional and I'm not the only one to notice. 

 

 

 

[Praesi]

1 hour ago, MEC-777 said:

Agree with you it's nothing to do with newer GPUs. The SSAA in ROTTR is broken/difunctional and I'm not the only one to notice. 

 

 

 

It costs a ridiculous amount of GPU Power. Thats why i switched to FXAA in TR.

[MEC-777]

4 minutes ago, Praesi said:

It costs a ridiculous amount of GPU Power. Thats why i switched to FXAA in TR.

Yeah, it hammers the GPU, but did you find SSAA actually looked better than FXAA? Because I found SSAA looked far worse on my system - as seen in that video I created. 

[Praesi]

1 minute ago, MEC-777 said:

Yeah, it hammers the GPU, but did you find SSAA actually looked better than FXAA? Because I found SSAA looked far worse on my system - as seen in that video I created. 

I didnt notice much of a difference. But SSAA cost around 30fps. Thats no Option. As long everything else is ultra, im fine with FXAA.

[silverhawk]

another example of the broken anti aliasing and shimmering, it's funny how the low settings looks better than the high settings.....

this is using default Nvidia Control Panels settings (No Nvidia Inspector settings changed too), please watch it on 1080p quality and fullscreen

 

 

[Monarch]

6 hours ago, Demiqas said:

Ok, and what do you do when after optimizing the settings the game still looks like garbage as if your changes didn't have any effect at all? Or when you enable 8x SSAA and aliasing is still all over the place as if you didn't apply any AA at 1080p (ofcourse I am talking about games with proper AA support).

The game has a bad AA solution probably because it's cheap performance wise. We don't even know what kind of AA it is, it just says AA.

 

2 hours ago, MEC-777 said:

Agree with you it's nothing to do with newer GPUs. The SSAA in ROTTR is broken/difunctional and I'm not the only one to notice. 

 

 

 

I've seen the screenshots in Nvidia's article where they tested all the graphics settings and it seems to be working for them. There's a huge difference in IQ with SSAA, but it's expensive as hell.

[Angalote]

I have spent the better part of my life in front of TV screens and PC monitors. I immediately notice when something is off. People who deny this issue have the good luck of not being affected or simply never experienced normal, crisp graphics ever and think that these issues are normal.

 

I don't think this is an anti-aliasing issue at all. It's something else I believe. Anti-aliasing effects being reduced is just due to the complete change in display image output. When this issue first happened in 2010 (after a GTA IV freeze), I immedeatly noticed something was wrong even while my pc was booting up. Namely, it was like colors were dulled and filled with tiny compression artifacts and everything was jagged, even the ASUS logo and Windows logo on boot-up. Same on my desktop, all icons are jaggy, pictures look bad, as if they were slightly compressed, every picture, icon and font, even videos, were jaggy with duller (fewer) colors. And yes, I remember watching 1080p videos windowed did not produce the superjagged shimmering image. Now HD videos look nothing HD anymore, and believe me, they used to.  The same thing is happening on my rig as we speak, and has been since 2014, after trying an ENB for Skyrim. Funny thing is, the same happened (only to Skyrim, though), with a CERTAIN update for Skyrim, but an uninstall of the game and new install coupled with a newer update fixed it again. Graphics were reallly realistic up to the point where this happened. Now it's not just that they are ''aliased'', but shadows are lower res, too, lighting is weird, kinda way to bright and as if shading did not quite work, there is not really any depth to the image. The jagginess and shimmering are a result of the picture being drawn out of raw pixels which look unprocessed. It looks like my games were rendered in Paint pixel by pixel. The games (and desktop graphics, heck even BIOS graphics) look nothing like they used to. Before, I used to wonder how the heck a pixel-based display produced such a crisp, beautifully realistic image. Now I wonder why the heck my display looks like I was using a cheap smartphone, whilst before this issue graphics looked like I was using a Samsung Galaxy s6.

It's like pixel density got reduced and the ''blur'' which made everything look soft simply vanished.

As for the LOD issue, THAT I did NOT have UNTIL I installed the 350.xx drivers. I played GTA V with the 347.xx drivers and there was NO pop-in. After those drivers (and installing older does NOT revert it to normal), ALL draw distances in ALL games have been DRASTICALLY reduced. Skyrim suffers the worst, rendering things a few feet away from me. I noticed it in Far Cry 4 right away, too. That was NOT so before the 350.xx drivers came out.

 

My guess is something fried our PCs (something DirectX-ish) or altered our monitors' EDID in a very bad way. A fresh copy of any version of Windows does not help (how and why would it, anyway, it affects ALL image output, even my BIOS suffers jagginess, slight compression artifacts and duller colors). The only thing which fixed it for me was uninstalling Windows (format C:). going out and buying a new GPU, putting it in my PC, and installing Windows anew. I immedeatly noticed the issue was gone even in BIOS.

High expectations from newer hardware? Dude, my 2006 hardware had better picture quality. I've had this happen on two rigs now, and this IS an ISSUE.

 

My TV downstairs suffers the same fate. Never hooked that up to anything. In fact, it's like my PC monitor was outputting some crappy TV quality image instead of PC monitor image.

[MEC-777]

Illuminati... 

[Demiqas]

6 hours ago, Monarch said:

SSAA is the best AA solution IQ wise afaik and if it the image is still heavily aliased there's something wrong on your end, it has nothing to do with newer GPUs. In what games does SSAA not work properly? SSAA is extremely expensive, few games include it.

 

Oh right my bad we all forgot to set the aa settings properly, topic can be closed now that was the issue /sarcasm

 

I don't even play most modern games, I play mainly DX9 games that support nearly all types of anti aliasing. I tried every single possible combination in both the control panel and nvidia inspector. See this is the frustrating thing, one day everything's working fine and in a week everything goes to shit and doesn't go back to what it once was. This is what I tried to explain but must admit have no proof to, and will probably never get any because I'm long done with buying new parts. 

[Cloud7_3]

3 hours ago, Angalote said:

I have spent the better part of my life in front of TV screens and PC monitors. I immediately notice when something is off. People who deny this issue have the good luck of not being affected or simply never experienced normal, crisp graphics ever and think that these issues are normal.

 

I don't think this is an anti-aliasing issue at all. It's something else I believe. Anti-aliasing effects being reduced is just due to the complete change in display image output. When this issue first happened in 2010 (after a GTA IV freeze), I immedeatly noticed something was wrong even while my pc was booting up. Namely, it was like colors were dulled and filled with tiny compression artifacts and everything was jagged, even the ASUS logo and Windows logo on boot-up. Same on my desktop, all icons are jaggy, pictures look bad, as if they were slightly compressed, every picture, icon and font, even videos, were jaggy with duller (fewer) colors. And yes, I remember watching 1080p videos windowed did not produce the superjagged shimmering image. Now HD videos look nothing HD anymore, and believe me, they used to.  The same thing is happening on my rig as we speak, and has been since 2014, after trying an ENB for Skyrim. Funny thing is, the same happened (only to Skyrim, though), with a CERTAIN update for Skyrim, but an uninstall of the game and new install coupled with a newer update fixed it again. Graphics were reallly realistic up to the point where this happened. Now it's not just that they are ''aliased'', but shadows are lower res, too, lighting is weird, kinda way to bright and as if shading did not quite work, there is not really any depth to the image. The jagginess and shimmering are a result of the picture being drawn out of raw pixels which look unprocessed. It looks like my games were rendered in Paint pixel by pixel. The games (and desktop graphics, heck even BIOS graphics) look nothing like they used to. Before, I used to wonder how the heck a pixel-based display produced such a crisp, beautifully realistic image. Now I wonder why the heck my display looks like I was using a cheap smartphone, whilst before this issue graphics looked like I was using a Samsung Galaxy s6.

It's like pixel density got reduced and the ''blur'' which made everything look soft simply vanished.

As for the LOD issue, THAT I did NOT have UNTIL I installed the 350.xx drivers. I played GTA V with the 347.xx drivers and there was NO pop-in. After those drivers (and installing older does NOT revert it to normal), ALL draw distances in ALL games have been DRASTICALLY reduced. Skyrim suffers the worst, rendering things a few feet away from me. I noticed it in Far Cry 4 right away, too. That was NOT so before the 350.xx drivers came out.

 

My guess is something fried our PCs (something DirectX-ish) or altered our monitors' EDID in a very bad way. A fresh copy of any version of Windows does not help (how and why would it, anyway, it affects ALL image output, even my BIOS suffers jagginess, slight compression artifacts and duller colors). The only thing which fixed it for me was uninstalling Windows (format C:). going out and buying a new GPU, putting it in my PC, and installing Windows anew. I immedeatly noticed the issue was gone even in BIOS.

High expectations from newer hardware? Dude, my 2006 hardware had better picture quality. I've had this happen on two rigs now, and this IS an ISSUE.

 

My TV downstairs suffers the same fate. Never hooked that up to anything. In fact, it's like my PC monitor was outputting some crappy TV quality image instead of PC monitor image.

 

in this video (from a famous youtube channel that always use the same video for each comparisons, so it's an early (day one patch) record, (and if this is against the forum rule delete it , i'm just linking to prove that the 'issue' some user report as 'new issue' with GTA V is there since the begins) ) you will clearly see all the 'issue' starting from the jaggines on the bridge (stated that only TemporalAntiAliasing could do some work with these kind of traslucent object/texture and BTW example like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux are the proof) , at 0.48 - 0.49 you can clearly see a mega shadow pop out (LOL) , and then when the war aircraft part start you can clearly see that GTA V have suffered from Shadow Filtering and poor Draw Distance since the beginning lol , so i don't think it's dependant by the update of the driver or something else , it's just how GTA V render the image , the only thing that isn't very normal, is that someone have that shadow filtering box at just one or two feet from them , but i think it's somekind of an error on rendering that some clean install would repair .

And i see that these graphical issue happens in many games , that 'eventually' are all open world games , (Skyrim , Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes (very Noticeable) and Phantom Pain , Shadow of Mordor (barely noticeable) etc.) so i really think these are normal rendering problem with whatever engine you use. 

 

As for the color dullness remember that if you use an HDMI cable to hook your PC MONITOR to your RIG , you have to set the Output dynamic range to Full instead of Limited from the NVCP and Catalyst Control Panel. https://pcmonitors.info/articles/correcting-hdmi-colour-on-nvidia-and-amd-gpus/

 

The rest of the fact you are saying, well, i think we need to call Mulder and Scully , they recently re-opened the X-Files lol.

[LokiFire]

LOL i get pop in in GTA V on my GTX 580 but i barely notice it as i'm enjoying the damn game.

 

It's nothing new, just seems like new people to gaming complaining, they like to quote themselves as being this oh so mighty old school gamer but fail to see that it is placebo, the issue has always existed.

 

If we had infinite view distances without LOD changes most of us would never get a stable 30FPS let alone 60+.

[LokiFire]

Here is my GTA V.

 

 

 

[Angalote]

So you people are basically calling me a liar or ''conspiracy crook'' who does not know the difference between pacebo and fact. The fact is that the rendering distances got drastically reduced in all games since the 350.xx drivers. Or something else may be the culprit, but the fact of reduced rendering distances still holds true. In Skyrim I used to be able to look very far ahead. Now it does not load the high res textures until I'm much, MUCH closer to them than before. Even when I'm close there is a second ''bubble'' around my character outside of which finer detail is not being renedered at all. Also pop-in in games was minimal, and now it's all over the place. So many people complain about this, but hey, they must have crippled eyes or suddenly they started noticing it. It's not engine specific, all my games suffer from this issue now where before they have NOT. Believe me, since I've been having graphics issues for five years now, I tend to notice the slightest change. And this is not even slight.

That's the LOD issue, and I did not get that until May last year. The issue which bothers me most, and is very real, is the sudden loss of picture quality which affects all things including BIOS. Since I tried so many things on my old rig to get rid of that, believe me I immediatly noticed, it was gone after buying a new GPU. And not just noticed, I did thorough visual checks. You all think I did not think I am crazy and it might all be placebo? Of course I did. But it really did get fixed with a new GPU. Windows desktop and in-game graphics looked gorgeous. There wasn't even any Z-fighting, the shadows were smooth, no flickering, 4x msaa was more than enough to make jaggies disappear completely, and there was no texture shimmering. The image was very crisp, fine detail was rendered perfectly, lighting was super-realistic. As for the desktop, icons were smooth and very realistic looking, same goes for fonts and pictures, compression artifacts were gone and HD pictures and videos were gorgeous to behold. Color depth was great. Everything looked so much nicer and realistic.

 

You think FXAA does for me what it does for you in Tomb Raider?  I wish. But I don't blame nVidia, I blame the corruption. I think the anti-aliasing IS being applied, but the image output is completely different since the corruption and it can't look not jaggy. Before this, all my games looked ten times better even with AA set to OFF.
 

Do you guys really think so many people would report the very same things due to a placebo? Back in 2010 this was a rare issue, now it's all over the internet.

[Angalote]

I am aware of the HDMI dynamic range problem, came across it while googling for fixes to my problem. Never used HDMI in my life. I'm on DVI-D -- DVI-D. DVI-I -- VGA gives the same image. Three different monitors, the same.

[Cloud7_3]

2 hours ago, Angalote said:

So you people are basically calling me a liar or ''conspiracy crook'' who does not know the difference between pacebo and fact.

Nope nothing like that, but if 90% of persons who uses a PC tell that these 'shitty image quality issue' are always there with some proof, since long long long time ago , and if you do some research you will see we all have these 'problems' in games, just do some research on youtube to the game of interest and bam you can retrieve tons of ppl having the exactly same issue from years to years.

 

so if there's an effective issue the things are two.

 

1) we are all infected  and if it's true, so, what you want/hope to do? if there was some downgrade time by time on the various engine to make them working at a stable framerate what we have to do? Inject some Penthotal Sodium to some programmer and asking them if this is normal or not?

 

2) well it's all normal , and some people is going to see only now these issue , because of high expectation , monitor change , resolution change , rig change , architecture change (changing from AMD to NVIDIA or viceversa) etc..

 

(Don't know about the desktop problem, maybe you have some problem with that (make sure if you have some option on the monitor like 'Sharpness' to set that to 0 or a low value, i had some pixelated dashboard on my PS4 , not even a pc, turning off the sharpness from the tv control panel and solved the problem) but btw i've never seen in my life a perfect smooth Bios , not even the new uefi style it's always somekind of pixelated , not too much but a little for sure.)

 

As i said the only strange thing is that sometimes some user (it happened to me on MGS V Ground Zeroes , i have to reinstall to see if the issue persist) have that 'Shadow Box' very close and very noticeable, but i really think it's some bug with the game itself.

[Angalote]

It's really difficult to explain, but I bet if you sat down and took a look at my graphics you would notice it within seconds. Yes, BIOS is low-res in and by itself, but even the low res graphics just looked smudgy before with minimal jagginess, not jagged like they are now. As for desktop and games, t's like every pixel got it's own thing going, they are not blended together. I had this fixed with a new GPU and really enjoyed the graphics until I tried an ENB for Skyrim (it didn't even take, all it did was crank up the brightness way too high), after which the graphic immediately switched to crap quality.

 

Best way to describe it is the difference between expensive smartphone graphics (Galaxy s5/s6 range) and cheap smartphone graphics (cheap Lumia model, 535 for example). It's like pixel density went down and the blur filter is gone. Color gradients are terrible, everything looks really raw. Compression artifacts are clearly visible in all pics, on HDD or web browser. Shimmering in videos the same as in games. Weird brightness and contrasts (not fixable through monitor or nv panel settings). It's really a strange downgrade and no one would be happier just to know the cause of it, if not fix it. Screenshots don't really do much justice in showing this problem. It might be somehow electricity related, I really don't know.

 

Thanks for the tip, but adjusting sharpness on my monitor does nothing to help the issue... Nothing but a brand new GPU coupled with a fresh install of Windows did it for me. I'll try and save up for a new graphics card and see if it helps. On my old rig though, a new GPU didn't solve the issue. I put together a new rig but used the same graphics card as in the old rig, and still it looked the same. Then I went out and bought a new card, put that in and BAM gorgeous, crisp graphics everywhere, ALL issues gone. God how beautiful and realistic the games looked... But I had to be greedy and try that ENB 

[Demiqas]

It has nothing to do with an ENB, after a certain amount of time it's like the gpu becomes hyper sensitive and "breaks" really easily. Purely for testing purposes I had bought the gtx 750 ti, the graphics looked beautiful just like you said, I deliberately avoided any directx applications and enbs, yet it ended up breaking on its own after a couple of completely random bsods

 

for me its not even a question of whether it's real or not anymore, I've seen plenty of evidence with my own eyes, it's just that the nature of this issue makes it immensely difficult to capture and show it to anyone over the internet. 

[MEC-777]

I've said this several times before; if there really is something going on of this nature/description, it has to be software-related, not hardware. The reason I say this is because it [supposedly] effects such specific aspects of the rendering process and image quality (LOD distance, etc.). If it were hardware/power-related, it would garble the whole image in a non-specific manner and or would simply shut off/give a black screen.

 

Really don't know what else to say/suggest.  

[vanished]

34 minutes ago, MEC-777 said:

I've said this several times before; if there really is something going on of this nature/description, it has to be software-related, not hardware. The reason I say this is because it [supposedly] effects such specific aspects of the rendering process and image quality (LOD distance, etc.). If it were hardware/power-related, it would garble the whole image in a non-specific manner and or would simply shut off/give a black screen.

 

Really don't know what else to say/suggest.  

To add on to this, that doesn't mean everyone claiming to have problems is making it up or that this doesn't exist.  We're simply considering ways in which it could or could not happen, regardless of if it is or not.

 

To everyone still having issues, especially those who say they can recall a specific moment when it all started or that it happened on a console or that these issues popup and get worse over time, it would be extremely useful and interesting to see footage of this "before and after".  I think we all understand that this is no small request - why would someone start recording all their gameplay until after they have a problem, right?  But that doesn't change the fact it would be very useful, both because it would indisputably confirm that it is happening, and could shed some light on what exactly the issue looks like and even how to fix it.

[jinx33]

Yes, or two people record the same game at a same location, one not experiencing the problem and one having it.

 

 

[silverhawk]

or people who luckily dont have the problem list what game they are playing, and if we, who have the problem, by chance have the same game record it to show some comparison

[MEC-777]

48 minutes ago, silverhawk said:

or people who luckily dont have the problem list what game they are playing, and if we, who have the problem, by chance have the same game record it to show some comparison

This has been done. 99% of the examples posted of people complaining was actually just normal alaising/LOD distance graphical anomalies (for those games with those particular graphics settings). 

[Bouzoo]

So... was anything confirmed in the end? By @MageTank or anyone else? 

[jinx33]

5 hours ago, silverhawk said:

or people who luckily dont have the problem list what game they are playing, and if we, who have the problem, by chance have the same game record it to show some comparison

 

4 hours ago, MEC-777 said:

This has been done. 99% of the examples posted of people complaining was actually just normal alaising/LOD distance graphical anomalies (for those games with those particular graphics settings). 

 

Mostly the same games, particularly GTA V and The Witcher 3. Just pick different ones, older ones. And 99% of people uploaded screenshots of the problem, tell me how you can see the LOD distance anomaly in there. If some are skeptical about a real problem here, I wonder why they keep posting in this topic, even if I acknowledge some do really try to help.