Jagged Shadows,Pop in,Low LOD and jagged aa

[Asasinas]

Time for another yearly post. No any new info, so it's almost the same post as the last year, which will act as a reminder that the issue still exists.

 

So, when did these AA issues started?

Problems started once I installed RTX 2080 Ti to my main gaming rig four years ago, december 31, 2018. I noticed the first problems during the first week of january, 2019.

 

At that time (december 2018) I had this build:

i7-6700k

16GB RAM

GTX 1080 TI >>> upgrading to RTX 2080 Ti

2 SSD drives

 

What kind of issues we are talking about?

Completely broken anti-aliasing in 3D apps/games. There are various problems of massive shimmering, flickering and jaggies in ALL games. No exceptions. To keep it short: TAA produces weird flickering on various edges of objects even if the scene is static and camera isn't moving, but the jaggies in some games with TAA are kinda tolerable (video examples: Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, GreedFall, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, No Man's Sky, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 76). All other AA methods, such as FXAA, SMAA, MSAA etc. have massive jaggies and shimmering when moving, in some cases jaggies are visible on static scene too (video examples: Destiny 2, No Man's Sky, The Long Dark, Surviving Mars, Cloudpunk, Life is Strange).

 

I also noticed massively increased jagginess in all video content, doesn't matter if it's media player or web browser, all videos are affected. Here is a short video showcasing jaggies in a video on a streaming service.

 

To summarize, it feels that computers completely lost their ability to proper render and work with AA.

 

Wait, you say computers. Does this also happen on your other systems?

Yes. I tried several PCs, laptops and even some separate parts of hardware. My secondary PC (it has AMD FX8350 cpu and GTX 980 video card), was collecting dust since 2016 summer. I turned it on again in march 2019 to test jaggies problem and guess what, it had all the same issues as my main gaming PC! HOW? I don't know. Maybe my RTX 2080 Ti have some kind of bad aura or what?

 

I also checked the games on my laptop with intel cpu and 860m gpu and it had all the same AA issues. I use my laptop at work ~40km away from home in a different city. I don't use my laptop at home. So I have no idea how or why these AA issues appeared on my laptop too. No changes in hardware or software were made.

 

Back in the spring of 2019 I decided to remove RTX 2080 Ti from my main gaming PC and install back the GTX 1080 Ti. Sadly, all the AA problems were still there. I then decided to test some older video cards I had. Those video cards are GTX 1070, GTX 980, GTX 780 and GTX 760. All of them had all the same AA issues.

 

During the summer of 2019 I decided to completely replace all the parts (CPU, motherboard, RAM, SSD, PSU, case and even coolers) of my main gaming PC (excluding RTX 2080 Ti which I bought december 2018). There was no change, all the AA issues were still present. I also tested all the older video cards on a new motherboard again. Sadly, no change.

 

My current gaming PC is:

i9-9900k

16GB RAM

RTX 2080 Ti

2 SSD drives

 

In july 2021 I bought a new laptop MSI GP76 Leopard (i7 10870h, 16GB RAM, RTX 3070, 1TB SSD). I had a slight hope that there won't be any AA issues, but they were there since Day 1.

 

Are there any AA methods, which work 100% fine without any issues?

No. All of them, more or less, have various problems, be it jaggies, shimmering or flickering or all of them together. There are games, which look fine enough, but the problems are still there. I played Metro Exodus back in february 2019 and I didn't noticed ANY problems at all. But back then I wasn't aware that this issue is widespread and that it affects all of the games, so maybe I just didn't noticed any problems. Resident Evil 2 remake also looks kinda okayish. There are still flickering on static image (if set to TAA), or massive jaggies (if set to FXAA or SMAA), but TAA looks decent in this game. 90% of the environments are dark in this game and darkness masks these issues quite well. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is also decent. It has Filmic SMAA, which is much better than standard SMAA. There are still jaggies and flickering, but nothing too bad, game is quite playable.

 

I guess it also depends on TAA implementation. Some games, like RDR2, has well implemented TAA and the issues are very well masked. Same goes to DLSS. Horizon: Zero Dawn implemented DLSS recently, and it completely fixed shimmering on all vegetation. There are still visible moire pattern, shimmering and flickering on some specific surfaces, but it made the game really playable for me. Sadly, but games without proper TAA and/or DLSS support are still doomed to have absolutely horrible AA. You can only lessen visibility of the issue by increasing render scale.

 

Did everything worked fine before december 31, 2018?

Yes. Games looked super gorgeous on all resolutions using any of the AA methods and any of the graphical settings. There was no flickering, shimmering or jaggies in games/apps. I didn't even knew that such horrible graphical distortions could happen. My previous computers, video cards and laptop had amazing graphics too up until I upgraded video card in my main gaming PC back in december 31, 2018. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But this is how it is.

 

Is there a way to counter this issue? How about Nvidia DSR?

In my case using Nvidia DSR or increasing render scale in-game settings (if it has one) only lessens the effects of nonexistent AA, but not to the point where game becomes playable. In other words, it's not worth to sacrifice performance just to have 1-2% improvement in AA quality. My Destiny 2 video (200% render scale equals 5K on 1440p monitor) is a good example of it.

 

Does DLSS fix this problem?

Depends on DLSS implementation. Some games are tolerable, some are not. Two examples of not so well implemented DLSS: Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077.

 

What does big companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, say about this problem?

As far as I remember someone from this thread contacted Nvidia support and they said that this is a "brain glitch". You get it? A brain glitch. In other words, we are all idiots and this issue is just in our head.

 

I also tried to contact support of various software companies and all of them said the same thing: go reinstall drivers, change some settings, do this, do that and and so on and so on. Same goes to the game companies I tried to consult. They just say to reinstall drivers, update redistributable packages, mess around with settings in-game etc. In short, contacting customer support is a waste of time. At the end, they just say that they will pass the info to the development team and after that you won't hear anything from them ever again.

 

What troubleshooting you have tried?

I don't know how many hours I spent trying various things and searching the internet for answers, but it's probably at least few hundred hours. I search internet almost every day, I follow this topic and Discord group, there are new reports every week of similar issues here and there, but nothing specific.

 

Below is a full list of what I tried:

 

- Different combos of graphical settings in each specific game

- Various settings in NVCP

- Reinstalling GPU drivers (using DDU), various versions of drivers, both old and new

- Reinstalling/updating redistributable packages, various other drivers (chipset, sound, sata etc.)

- Doing a clean reinstall of Windows OS (tried Windows 10 and Windows 7)

- Various settings in Windows, such as changing power settings, disabling game mode, enabling/disabling page file etc.

- Many different video cards (RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070, GTX 980, GTX 780, GTX 760)

- Completely changed every single part of my main gaming PC (new Motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, SSD, even got a new case and new coolers)

- Two laptops (with 860m and RTX 3070 gpus)

- Different monitors (1080p and 1440p) and TVs (1080p and 4K), also various settings on them

- Also tested the games on my secondary PC (with an old AMD CPU and GTX 980)

- High quality 8K certified DP cable, new and different HDMI cable

- High quality extension cord with a surge protection

- New modem and internet cable

- Different electrical outlets in different rooms

- Updating BIOS

- Changing various settings in BIOS such as disabling c-states etc.

- Disabling Steam, Origin and other app overlays (I heard it could cause similar issues)

- GPU overclocking and downclocking

- Disabling all the unnecessary processes and apps, such as antivirus, afterburner, bluetooth etc (I keep my main gaming PC clean, just Steam, few apps and games).

 

Do you plan to do more troubleshooting in the near future?

I'm planning to buy RTX 4080 or maybe even a whole new PC sometime in 2023, but the chances that it will fix or at least reduce the issue are very slim.

 

What do you do now? Do you still play games?

Yes, I still play games, but it's not that fun as it was before. When playing I just try to not concentrate on the AA issues. But, as someone once said, once you notice the issues, it's really, really hard not to see them.

 

That's it. If I have any new important information I will update this post.

[nodropjagged]

welcome to 2023 gentlemen
This devil has been here since 2018 and it can affect our PCs and monitors and moreover, video media and pictures, I can confirm this 100%, after 7 years we still don't know what this problem is How it came about, but it's never in our minds,I WILL FIGHT TO THE END

[nodropjagged]

In the Chinese player community, a player mentioned that he knew a person who worked in a game rendering company and had this problem. He used a friend who worked in a state-owned enterprise to create a carbon material for welding On the north bridge of the MOBO, he fixed the problem, he charged about 30 USD (200CNY), after that when mailing the MOBO, he claimed that this special material is very expensive, but we don't think he is a liar, because he returned For this fee, I am here to share the experience of the Chinese community in order to find potential solutions

[Julia Wolfe]

Happy new year my brothers and sisters. Nothing new on my end but let's keep pushing until we defeat this disease.

[INFANTRY3219]

Hi everybody. This shit happened to me in the summer of 2021 and only one thing caused it: A format. I formatted my PC and all my games with super sharp and quality graphics became like Atari games. 

 

I suggest knowledgeable people looking for a solution to consider this format issue. There may be a clue.

[Yuan2739106990qq]

I want a lot of videos to study this problem, including mobile phones, televisions and computers.

If someone can send it to me, please send your contact information.

[Julia Wolfe]

On 1/15/2023 at 12:08 PM, Yuan2739106990qq said:

I want a lot of videos to study this problem, including mobile phones, televisions and computers.

If someone can send it to me, please send your contact information.

Just captured this while playing Deathloop.

 

 

This is mostly, if not the entirety of my issue. These real time shadows (cascaded I believe?) that will look like trash no matter the setting. Happens in every single game. I have seen reports that this is just what shadows look like, but I have compared what I see on my end to what I see in other people's videos in games like Control and Sea of Thieves, and it looks very different.

[Yuan2739106990qq]

在 2023/1/17 在 AM6 点 40 分，Julia Wolfe 说：

刚在玩Deathloop时捕捉到这个。

 

 

这是是是是我全部全部。阴影相信相信是是是是是级联级联级联是是是是是是无论无论无论无论设置如何如何如何如何如何如何它们它们看起来都像垃圾垃圾。。发生在一一一一阴影的样子，但我会自己看到的和其他人在《控制》和《盗贼之海》等游戏的视频中看到的进行了比较，结果看起来非常不一样。

你的手机会这样吗？

[Julia Wolfe]

46 minutes ago, Yuan2739106990qq said:

你的手机会这样吗？

I can't render the game on my phone but I watched that recorded video on my Samsung S20 phone and yes, it looks exactly the same as it does on my PC screen.

[riperviwe]

Can someone please write down something under this post? I can't because of the "national regulations"

https://www.zhihu.com/question/438513487

Maybe they know some stuff?

[riperviwe]

On 1/3/2023 at 9:47 AM, AudAmerica said:

In the Chinese player community, a player mentioned that he knew a person who worked in a game rendering company and had this problem. He used a friend who worked in a state-owned enterprise to create a carbon material for welding On the north bridge of the MOBO, he fixed the problem, he charged about 30 USD (200CNY), after that when mailing the MOBO, he claimed that this special material is very expensive, but we don't think he is a liar, because he returned For this fee, I am here to share the experience of the Chinese community in order to find potential solutions

Where? Link?

[nodropjagged]

20 hours ago, riperviwe said:

Where? Link?

It's not me, I'm sharing the opinion of a player in the Chinese community, and I'm thinking about whether there is a Northbridge in the current MOBO

[nodropjagged]

20 hours ago, riperviwe said:

Where? Link?

Here I share what I heard. He works in a game rendering company. According to him, all of the company’s more than a dozen computers have this problem. The company purchased a special carbon material from a company and welded it on the MOBO Finally, the problem disappeared, it seems to be shielding some kind of EMF interference, he thought he solved the problem, so he started to share his paid solution, but in the end he said the price of this material was beyond his reach, so he returned it money and deleted the discussion

[nodropjagged]

21 hours ago, riperviwe said:

Can someone please write down something under this post? I can't because of the "national regulations"

https://www.zhihu.com/question/438513487

Maybe they know some stuff?

The discussion here is all meaningless explanations, and the long answer is to explain the principle of anti-aliasing, but his conclusion is-------This is a kind of our psychological problem, yes, PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM hahaha WTF

[riperviwe]

On 1/26/2023 at 9:00 PM, AudAmerica said:

The discussion here is all meaningless explanations, and the long answer is to explain the principle of anti-aliasing, but his conclusion is-------This is a kind of our psychological problem, yes, PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM hahaha WTF

https://www.zhihu.com/people/mo-kong-mo-ya

no but this guy kinda seems to know some stuff

On 1/26/2023 at 8:52 PM, AudAmerica said:

Here I share what I heard. He works in a game rendering company. According to him, all of the company’s more than a dozen computers have this problem. The company purchased a special carbon material from a company and welded it on the MOBO Finally, the problem disappeared, it seems to be shielding some kind of EMF interference, he thought he solved the problem, so he started to share his paid solution, but in the end he said the price of this material was beyond his reach, so he returned it money and deleted the discussion

And do you know what that special carbon material is? Very sketchy explanation fr

[riperviwe]

Which company is it?

[riperviwe]

Hey, @AudAmerica maybe you can join our discord server related to the issue

https://discord.gg/wuVwa75aqK

[DBFTW]

To me it's becoming rather convincing that electromagnetic interference is at play. Last year, after having had experienced this issue for 6 years, I had half an hour of jaggy- and shimmer-free gameplay one day. There was a power outage prior to it and I assume that some neighbors' appliance had restarted in factory settings mode or something along this line. Maybe a cellphone tower? Or, more controversially, maybe the street block's transformer was working properly for once before going weird again. Or maybe something in my local installation.

 

The site mentioned above said that if it's working, then the electricity is fine. Thing is, a computer may work as expected in almost all ways, but may misbehave (but still 'work') if one characteristic of the power delivery is being wonky. I wish I had deep knowledge in that field, all I can say is that electricity is much more "analog" than we may think. The power grid allows for significant deviations from the simplistic 50/60Hz, 110/220V terminology we think in. 200 or 180 volts may be no issue to handle for a stove, a fridge or even a computer's components, but whatever part of video cards controls MIP maps, anisotropy, pixel/fragment sampling or view frustum may somehow get affected by that, or by interference.

 

Some of you complain of your TVs and even phones suffering from that. And some have issues with 2D rendering, so it can't be drivers alone. I've read a lot-ish about antialiasing, for most of us none of the options work even if the driver interface or external tools say they do. So it appears that the problem is closer to the hardware level than to the software level. They are intrinsically linked and if the issues don't appear at a friend's house without changing any settings meanwhile, something must be preventing the GPU from taking the number of samples that we want. Is it taking 4/8/... identical samples? There is randomization involved in some antialiasing techniques, but IIRC it's not the one used most of the time, if it was we could guess that the card's random number generator is at fault. Wouldn't that be a serious enough fault that would cause the drivers to not allow the card to run at all? On the other hand I guess that's not that major of an issue. I'm not even sure how RNG in video cards works. And I guess I'll read about random subpixel sampling again...

 

This brings me back to the thought that mipmaps just don't work. When you're looking at a texture from far away, you're supposed to pick from a low-resolution version of the texture, otherwise any camera movement will result in pixel's abruptly changing their values, multiply that 60 or more frames a second or more and you get shimmering. It's most obvious in high-contrast textures and especially at pixels that are on the edge of polygon. High anisotropy makes surfaces at a more oblique angle become more clear. Good up close, but results in jitter away from the immediate vicinity. LOD settings affect the radiuses from the camera where model complexity and mipmap levels change. I read years ago that the Nvidia drivers began disabling the clamping of negative LOD, that is to say setting this option to Clamp doesn't really prevent getting the ugly overly sharp pixels if the game engine asks for such type of filtering (a trick that was once used a lot to make things look poppier).

[wearealldoomed]

I just want to say i have the problem from fairly recently and i just saw another commenter say it is formatting the pc that may cause it and atleast for me personally all the issues stated started after i did exactly that and reformatted my pc.

I have asked multiple "experts" close to me for help and all have so far given me no solutions but i did find a person who can get me lots of different parts i can change and test with (PSU,CPU,GPU,etc.) and i will post the results after i change each part and see if anything changes for the better even if from what i see it is highly unlikely.

I just recently even found out other people have this problem and there is such a huge and old thread hopefully someone can take a look if formatting or something related to it causes it.

Also i saw another thread where most people with the problem were in one way or another connected with HDMI at one point or had a second monitor or a TV as a second monitor (maybe im completely wrong on this but im new to this sorry id love if someone corrects me as i want to understand things better but i for one am usually using HDMI with TV).

And another case where i've seen people encounter the same problem is when their PC entered some sort of Safe Mode and all the textures became blocky after that and the same problem we all describe occured. Maybe our computers ar all in some sort of Safe Mode even if it says they aren't?

[nodropjagged]

On 1/29/2023 at 3:33 AM, riperviwe said:

https://www.zhihu.com/people/mo-kong-mo-ya

no but this guy kinda seems to know some stuff

And do you know what that special carbon material is? Very sketchy explanation fr

no...i don't know more

[Fendrick]

On 12/31/2022 at 11:49 AM, Asasinas said:

Time for another yearly post. No any new info, so it's almost the same post as the last year, which will act as a reminder that the issue still exists.

 

So, when did these AA issues started?

Problems started once I installed RTX 2080 Ti to my main gaming rig four years ago, december 31, 2018. I noticed the first problems during the first week of january, 2019.

 

At that time (december 2018) I had this build:

i7-6700k

16GB RAM

GTX 1080 TI >>> upgrading to RTX 2080 Ti

2 SSD drives

 

What kind of issues we are talking about?

Completely broken anti-aliasing in 3D apps/games. There are various problems of massive shimmering, flickering and jaggies in ALL games. No exceptions. To keep it short: TAA produces weird flickering on various edges of objects even if the scene is static and camera isn't moving, but the jaggies in some games with TAA are kinda tolerable (video examples: Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, GreedFall, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, No Man's Sky, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 76). All other AA methods, such as FXAA, SMAA, MSAA etc. have massive jaggies and shimmering when moving, in some cases jaggies are visible on static scene too (video examples: Destiny 2, No Man's Sky, The Long Dark, Surviving Mars, Cloudpunk, Life is Strange).

 

I also noticed massively increased jagginess in all video content, doesn't matter if it's media player or web browser, all videos are affected. Here is a short video showcasing jaggies in a video on a streaming service.

 

To summarize, it feels that computers completely lost their ability to proper render and work with AA.

 

Wait, you say computers. Does this also happen on your other systems?

Yes. I tried several PCs, laptops and even some separate parts of hardware. My secondary PC (it has AMD FX8350 cpu and GTX 980 video card), was collecting dust since 2016 summer. I turned it on again in march 2019 to test jaggies problem and guess what, it had all the same issues as my main gaming PC! HOW? I don't know. Maybe my RTX 2080 Ti have some kind of bad aura or what?

 

I also checked the games on my laptop with intel cpu and 860m gpu and it had all the same AA issues. I use my laptop at work ~40km away from home in a different city. I don't use my laptop at home. So I have no idea how or why these AA issues appeared on my laptop too. No changes in hardware or software were made.

 

Back in the spring of 2019 I decided to remove RTX 2080 Ti from my main gaming PC and install back the GTX 1080 Ti. Sadly, all the AA problems were still there. I then decided to test some older video cards I had. Those video cards are GTX 1070, GTX 980, GTX 780 and GTX 760. All of them had all the same AA issues.

 

During the summer of 2019 I decided to completely replace all the parts (CPU, motherboard, RAM, SSD, PSU, case and even coolers) of my main gaming PC (excluding RTX 2080 Ti which I bought december 2018). There was no change, all the AA issues were still present. I also tested all the older video cards on a new motherboard again. Sadly, no change.

 

My current gaming PC is:

i9-9900k

16GB RAM

RTX 2080 Ti

2 SSD drives

 

In july 2021 I bought a new laptop MSI GP76 Leopard (i7 10870h, 16GB RAM, RTX 3070, 1TB SSD). I had a slight hope that there won't be any AA issues, but they were there since Day 1.

 

Are there any AA methods, which work 100% fine without any issues?

No. All of them, more or less, have various problems, be it jaggies, shimmering or flickering or all of them together. There are games, which look fine enough, but the problems are still there. I played Metro Exodus back in february 2019 and I didn't noticed ANY problems at all. But back then I wasn't aware that this issue is widespread and that it affects all of the games, so maybe I just didn't noticed any problems. Resident Evil 2 remake also looks kinda okayish. There are still flickering on static image (if set to TAA), or massive jaggies (if set to FXAA or SMAA), but TAA looks decent in this game. 90% of the environments are dark in this game and darkness masks these issues quite well. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is also decent. It has Filmic SMAA, which is much better than standard SMAA. There are still jaggies and flickering, but nothing too bad, game is quite playable.

 

I guess it also depends on TAA implementation. Some games, like RDR2, has well implemented TAA and the issues are very well masked. Same goes to DLSS. Horizon: Zero Dawn implemented DLSS recently, and it completely fixed shimmering on all vegetation. There are still visible moire pattern, shimmering and flickering on some specific surfaces, but it made the game really playable for me. Sadly, but games without proper TAA and/or DLSS support are still doomed to have absolutely horrible AA. You can only lessen visibility of the issue by increasing render scale.

 

Did everything worked fine before december 31, 2018?

Yes. Games looked super gorgeous on all resolutions using any of the AA methods and any of the graphical settings. There was no flickering, shimmering or jaggies in games/apps. I didn't even knew that such horrible graphical distortions could happen. My previous computers, video cards and laptop had amazing graphics too up until I upgraded video card in my main gaming PC back in december 31, 2018. Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But this is how it is.

 

Is there a way to counter this issue? How about Nvidia DSR?

In my case using Nvidia DSR or increasing render scale in-game settings (if it has one) only lessens the effects of nonexistent AA, but not to the point where game becomes playable. In other words, it's not worth to sacrifice performance just to have 1-2% improvement in AA quality. My Destiny 2 video (200% render scale equals 5K on 1440p monitor) is a good example of it.

 

Does DLSS fix this problem?

Depends on DLSS implementation. Some games are tolerable, some are not. Two examples of not so well implemented DLSS: Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077.

 

What does big companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, say about this problem?

As far as I remember someone from this thread contacted Nvidia support and they said that this is a "brain glitch". You get it? A brain glitch. In other words, we are all idiots and this issue is just in our head.

 

I also tried to contact support of various software companies and all of them said the same thing: go reinstall drivers, change some settings, do this, do that and and so on and so on. Same goes to the game companies I tried to consult. They just say to reinstall drivers, update redistributable packages, mess around with settings in-game etc. In short, contacting customer support is a waste of time. At the end, they just say that they will pass the info to the development team and after that you won't hear anything from them ever again.

 

What troubleshooting you have tried?

I don't know how many hours I spent trying various things and searching the internet for answers, but it's probably at least few hundred hours. I search internet almost every day, I follow this topic and Discord group, there are new reports every week of similar issues here and there, but nothing specific.

 

Below is a full list of what I tried:

 

- Different combos of graphical settings in each specific game

- Various settings in NVCP

- Reinstalling GPU drivers (using DDU), various versions of drivers, both old and new

- Reinstalling/updating redistributable packages, various other drivers (chipset, sound, sata etc.)

- Doing a clean reinstall of Windows OS (tried Windows 10 and Windows 7)

- Various settings in Windows, such as changing power settings, disabling game mode, enabling/disabling page file etc.

- Many different video cards (RTX 2080 Ti, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070, GTX 980, GTX 780, GTX 760)

- Completely changed every single part of my main gaming PC (new Motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, SSD, even got a new case and new coolers)

- Two laptops (with 860m and RTX 3070 gpus)

- Different monitors (1080p and 1440p) and TVs (1080p and 4K), also various settings on them

- Also tested the games on my secondary PC (with an old AMD CPU and GTX 980)

- High quality 8K certified DP cable, new and different HDMI cable

- High quality extension cord with a surge protection

- New modem and internet cable

- Different electrical outlets in different rooms

- Updating BIOS

- Changing various settings in BIOS such as disabling c-states etc.

- Disabling Steam, Origin and other app overlays (I heard it could cause similar issues)

- GPU overclocking and downclocking

- Disabling all the unnecessary processes and apps, such as antivirus, afterburner, bluetooth etc (I keep my main gaming PC clean, just Steam, few apps and games).

 

Do you plan to do more troubleshooting in the near future?

I'm planning to buy RTX 4080 or maybe even a whole new PC sometime in 2023, but the chances that it will fix or at least reduce the issue are very slim.

 

What do you do now? Do you still play games?

Yes, I still play games, but it's not that fun as it was before. When playing I just try to not concentrate on the AA issues. But, as someone once said, once you notice the issues, it's really, really hard not to see them.

 

That's it. If I have any new important information I will update this post.

Quoting this very big post.

 

I want to come across as non offensive but may well fail at doing so.

I first of all think people are suffering from a lack of knowledge on how visuals work and the drawbacks of modern rendering topped off with expectations of perfection and then an obsessive need to see it everywhere and write it off as "An issue".

 

You are not wrong, yes it is an issue, all rendering techniques are inherently flawed in one way or another or we would have visuals that are not different to real life.

Non shader based AA methods are too expensive so 99% of modern games don't include it. Also game engines also render differently making MSAA ineffective too.

 

All games are using shader-based AA and that alone, no MSAA on top, no downsampling and no other tricks is flawed. Downsampling also without MSAA will still show the problems explained below because there is no direct geometry aided AA like MSAA in use.

 

Edges of geometry have always been flickery or somewhat off without the use of proper MSAA, since we moved away from using MSAA the stair stepping problem of stair edges has been annoying but it don't cause myself personally to get obsessed with it.

 

In the videos in the quoted post you see high contrasting light interacting with edges of steps, this is because the technique in the game with a day and night cycle the light is always moving as it interacts with an aliased edge, the stairs are the most extreme example of square geomatry so it exacerbates the issue even more.

Strong contrasting physical based lighting interacting with aliased squared off geometry. Of course it will flicker and look a bit odd, shader based AA is not applied to actual geometry like MSAA is, it's an approximation and is not good enough to stop that problem alone.

 

You also need to factor the point that games using shader based AA methods are aiming for visual clarity too so effectively sharpening applied to it will again make this way worse.

 

Here is a video of Hogwarts Legacy and can you see how soft the image is? It's VERY soft even at native with TAA, there is also a lack of highly contrasting lighting, the image is very subtle which the visuals remain more solid looking.

 

Take note of the shadow flicker in this video and it is due to the physical based real time day night cycle.

Notice on the run through Hogwarts the wooden bridge shows the stair problem subtley, the stairs inside the building show it a bit too but there is no high contrast light to make it extremely obvious, the bottom of doors flicker too but again it is subtle.

 

 

[Fendrick]

Youtube comment.

Shalop

2 years ago

Ok I should probably actually make a comment here at this point. I'm a graphics developer. All non-pathtraced games have aliasing. Cyberpunk, as you have pointed out, is no exception. TAA, MSAA, all these algorithms mitigate the problem, but they do not solve it. The level of anti-aliasing you see here is not abnormal. The most likely reason that you think it started in december 2018 is because that is when you started to notice aliasing. It is one of those things you don't notice until suddenly you do and you can't stop seeing it. The only way that your aliasing could be unusually bad is a problem with your graphics card or its driver. It seems extremely unlikely that either of those could only effect anti-aliasing. (Maybe the driver could some how break MSAA... but TAA would still work in that case). Update your driver to the latest version because that's always a good thing to do, but realize that AA is just a problem you have to live with. Graphics developers have put millions of hours into solving this problem and this is the best that can be done with the hardware available to most consumers.

[Fendrick]

On 8/14/2016 at 5:02 AM, FPS-Russia said:

It is 2016? why you game on 480P and low setting?

This post by FPS_Russia has a post that was removed but highlighted the obsessive nature of some people in here.

MW2 has always had ugly shadows even on highest of settings.

 

Now it seems this image looks better? Think again the game is rendered in 1080p not 720p like the person FPS-Russia quoted was playing it in and also the OP purposely got as close as they could to the shadow making it appear worse than it really is.

Here is the video this is from, in motion it is not at all good looking, yes it always looked like that.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljydjZ3j9wI

 

 

 

 

 

[riperviwe]

On 2/16/2023 at 5:34 PM, Fendrick said:

This post by FPS_Russia has a post that was removed but highlighted the obsessive nature of some people in here.

MW2 has always had ugly shadows even on highest of settings.

 

Now it seems this image looks better? Think again the game is rendered in 1080p not 720p like the person FPS-Russia quoted was playing it in and also the OP purposely got as close as they could to the shadow making it appear worse than it really is.

Here is the video this is from, in motion it is not at all good looking, yes it always looked like that.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljydjZ3j9wI

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for the explanation. This might've affected me because I'm a bit of a videophilic and I switched from a very small 720p laptop monitor to a 24 inch 1080p monitor.

But there's also a weird thing. I started having more aliasing on my phone too, which i barely had. I installed Subway Surfers on it, and it looked like crap. The phone is 1080p as well but has a much smaller screen -obviously-. Now I don't know what this is tbh.

[Fendrick]

4 hours ago, riperviwe said:

Thank you for the explanation. This might've affected me because I'm a bit of a videophilic and I switched from a very small 720p laptop monitor to a 24 inch 1080p monitor.

But there's also a weird thing. I started having more aliasing on my phone too, which i barely had. I installed Subway Surfers on it, and it looked like crap. The phone is 1080p as well but has a much smaller screen -obviously-. Now I don't know what this is tbh.

When you render a crispy image onto a smaller screen it can look way more aliased than it would if it was blown up on a larger screen, this happens on my phone but also on my desktop too.

Say I hit 8K in Youtube render settings and leave my screen non full screen, it will look jaggied to crap on 1440P, I can demonstrate this. Why is this? due to it not being a real-time render (Video is a fixed encode unlike video games where jaggies come from geometry issues in real-time rendering), the pixels rendered in the video do not match the pixels of the device, lower resolution will look softer causing less flickering artifacts but on the downside of also more macroblocking if your encode has not enough bit-rate to fill the video resolution, we can call the resolution a container, that container requires a minimum X amount of Bit-rate in accordance to the encode method used (AVC / HEVC / AVI etc) to fullfill a desired picture quality output.

 

 

 

The video I demonstrated though is a very very good encode so this minimizes the impact of the actual encode and just shows you how a higher res video can look so jaggied on a lower res screen.

 

Original.

 

 

 

How I see it.

 

 

Now, there was a post comparing a dedicated Nvidia GPU where the video in question looked worse than the intel integrated display adapter, well sure, did this person ensure video quality settings were apples to apples?

 

There was mention of CSGO menus having jaggies, but CSGO get's updated all the time, how do we know it was not just a game update?