What is this visual bug? Is it Moire patterning?

[fastfishy2]

I've seen similar visual effects described as 'Moire patterns' in other games. It happens in a lot of my games but to greatly varying degrees, in some games it basically doesn't happen at all, other games it's occasional or only in certain circumstances, and others (like no man's sky) it's more apparent but again it's only on some textures in some circumstances.j

 

I guess I'm worried it could be my GPU but that doesn't make sense - it would be doing it on all or most textures, right?

 

Photo attached from Prey (2017) as an example, although I've had it happen in RDR2 and No Man's Sky, to name a few. It's usually not a bother but I've been noticing it since I've started paying attention to it.

Effect in question is prominent on the button pad in the center of the image

[Kilrah]

Something looking like that as an effect on an image would rather be called banding, but in this case I would think it's simply the intended look/devs took a shortcut doing it quick and dirty and using a repeat of a band to avoid having to make a custom texture for that thing.

[fastfishy2]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Something looking like that as an effect on an image would rather be called banding, but in this case I would think it's simply the intended look/devs took a shortcut doing it quick and dirty and using a repeat of a band to avoid having to make a custom texture for that thing.

so, it's more likely a software / game design issue rather than a hardware problem? Is there any way to fix this by mucking around with settings or is there really not much I can do about it?

[Kilrah]

Yes I would think it's simply how the game is, nothing you could do. There isn't really anything that would cause something like that to happen on a single thing. Maybe if you increase some graphics details in the game it would switch to a different texture if the choice of a simple one repeated was done for performance reasons, but probably not.

[fastfishy2]

3 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Yes I would think it's simply how the game is, nothing you could do. There isn't really anything that would cause something like that to happen on a single thing. Maybe if you increase some graphics details in the game it would switch to a different texture if the choice of a simple one repeated was done for performance reasons, but probably not.

yeah, I'm not sure I can do that, because I already have it as far as I can possibly push it in terms of graphics, there's no higher setting. Oh well, at least I don't need to go shopping for a new GPU! Thanks for the help!