Strange Lines on Textures? - eVga 6800

[MarkFahey]

Hi People,

I just installed a brand new eVga 6800 AGP into my rig. ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, P4 2.4b, 2 x 512M Corsair PC3500, Creative Audigy 2. I did a fresh install of Windows XP Slipstreamed SP2 and have installed a few games. The issue I am havng is that I am seeing faint lines on my ground textures in Americas Army and BF2 that go from one end to the other of my full view. The stay horizontal to my view and are spaced about an inch apart vertically. The move with me as I am turning and always stay at the horizontal postion directly in front of my view. The further I look straight down the more pronounced they become. They are only visable on the ground textures. They almost look like a reflection of the sky in water if the sky had lines in it.

The best way to describe this problem is like a "Banding Effect", where all the faint horizontal lines on the ground are banded together and moving at the same time and distance apart from each other while moving with me.

I am currently running the latest Forceware 81.95. I have tried a few older versions or Forceware to see if it was driver related and the problem was the same with the older drivers. I have tried adjusting the settings, like using triple buffering, 2XAA/AF, 4XAA/AF, as well all the settings in the nVidia control panel.

Before upgrading to this eVga 6800AGP I was running this rig with an ATI 9700 Pro and never had this issue.


Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated!


Thanks

Mark
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[DonNagual]

Just to start with the basics to make sure you have already done the following:

1. Do you have the 4pin molex power connector attached to the card?
2. Have you updated your motherboard's AGP drivers?
3. How old is your current bios? It may be worth a shot to update it, but do this as a last resort.

Also, can you give us some info on your power supply. Maker name and how many watts it is rated at?

 

[MarkFahey]

Hi Don,

The answer is Yes to 1, 2 and 3. My PSU is an Antec TruPower 550.

On another note: I used to know a guy from Jersey City named Don Nagual, he was a karate instructor. I thought it was kinda strange when I saw your name and your avatar with a karate kick.

 

[Sharkfood]

This doesn't sound like any particular technical problem, but an inherent quality of the 6800/6600 series.. and the main reason why I chucked my XFX 6800 for an X800 series.

The drivers have a number of "texture optimizations" that are meant to yield better benchmarks, but look absolutely horrible on higher end monitors (high end CRT's and a few 600:1 or higher contrast LCD's). It's texture aliasing and mipmap boundaries that alias like crazy!

You can try different drivers, plus you need to set the drivers to "High Quality" mode in order to reduce this. Also, I'd recommend RivaTuner and crank the LOD Bias adjustment to try and remedy.

ATI does this too, but has a nice Catalyst AI feature which you can disable to remove all "optimizations".. of course, benchmarks go down but the image quality is returned. No more banding, texture aliasing or mipmap boundaries.

 

[MarkFahey]

Shark, I tried the settings you suggested but I am still getting them in Americas Army. Strange thing is I am not getting the banding in Call of Duty 2...

Has anyone else seen this issue? Any other suggestions?

 

[Sharkfood]

Make sure you have Trilinear checked in the America's Army in-game graphics options. I'd also say forcing a small amount of anisotropic filtering will help too (like 4x to 8x).

That banding/line is a mipmap boundary. On newer NVidia cards & drivers, it's incredibly hard to get rid of them since there are too many websites doing benchmarks right now. When the reviews against ATI cards are finally over, you'll see texture filtering/mipmapping back to being acceptable.. but for now, the 8x.xx series are pretty dirty.

I'd say try 8x AF, ensure Trilinear is checked in the game, and use RivaTuner to adjust LOD Bias (adjusting LOD Bias UP little notches can clean some of this up). Also, older drivers may be helpful as well. Googles on "shimmer + nvidia drivers" might yield some hits on recent review sites complaining of image quality issues in the various 7x.xx and 8x.xx drivers. I just got tired of it myself and got an X800.