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Texture Flickering

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Joined
3 Nov 2009
Posts
247
Hi guys. I'm having what I see as a small problem in pretty much every game I'm playing at the moment. I have a 7970 with a mild overclock. I've tried running games with and without overclocking, numerous drivers and the problems always persists.

Without a video it's a little tough to explain but I will have a go. Basically when I look at far away textures they flicker/flash/shimmer. It's only ever happens when my character is moving.

Examples are -

SWTOR - The ingame AA seems to be the problem in this game. Trees, grates, fences and objects flicker like mad. The only way I've made this go away is forced 4x Super-sampling which isn't ideal with Biowares nightmare engine.

Farcry 3 - Looking through a sniper scope, far away textures flicker away. Looking at water whilst moving has the same annoying effect. It's not screen tare or artifacing, it's just the annoying flicker/shimmer effect again. Approaching the Medusa ship mission caused my eyes to bleed. The ship was just a mass of flickering edges rather than graphical glitches.

Dishonoured - Same sort of thing here. Again, using Super-sampling helps out with it.

Skyrim - Hair flickers and distant landscapes like mountains do it in some cases.

BF3 - It annoys me massively in this game. I can happily run everything in Ultra and the flickering from fences, some buildings and far away hills really bugs me. Again, looking through a scope I can see flashing buildings, fences and trees.

Heaven Benchmark - This might give you all the best idea of my problem. The way ropes, edges of the ship and other textures flicker, is what I'm seeing replicated in most games.

My question is, is this normal for each of these games? If it is how can I, if I can help alleviate it?

It's not game breaking as such and it's definitely not my graphics cards fault as I have had a few different 7970s. I've seen proper graphical glitches before as a result of overheating or bad drivers, so I know it's not that.

It's just a frustrating issue that is slightly ruining my enjoyment in these games at the moment. I game at 1200p and for most of the games I've tried numerous different settings to try and help, some have helps liked the super-sampling some haven't.

Any help or being able to put my mind at rest that this is pretty normal these days would be appreciated. It could simply be my OCD playing up and I'm sort of looking for these AA or texture anomalies.
 
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you're experiencing something called z-fighting, and it's normal (in the sense that i've also had a few different 7970s and 7950s and they've all displayed the same problems in two different systems). it also turns up in game review videos sometimes and i notice most people just tend to ignore it. i would hazard that it's a combination of sub-optimal drivers and sub-optimal game engines. i know for a fact that some of my games exhibited different amounts of z-fighting between driver revisions so the best thing to do is to uh... ignore the problem/hope for a fix. it's just one of the many little bugs you inevitably discover after building a system (i tend to be overly cautious like yourself), and it sometimes takes ages to find you're not the only one with a problem. just relax and enjoy the games for now.

edit: so i take it from your post in another forum that z-buffer fighting isn't your problem then? :p.

http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/160030

you sure? post back if those links don't look like what you're experiencing so then maybe someone else can help you.
 
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Sorry what post in another forum? Completely forgot I'd made another. That link isn't working on my iPhone. After your comment google led me to the link you just provided, will take a look at it when I get home. To be honest after reading your post and looking into Z-Fighting it seems to be the exact problem I'm describing. I get the mountain flickering in Skyrim and the Z-Fighting videos show the exact problem I get annoyed with in BF3.

Thanks for the help. Sadly it looks like one of those problems I will have to live with in most of the games I mentioned.

Edit - Links working now. Was in private browsing. I will have a read up now.
 
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Drangueos this problem occurs just as much in dx11 games as it does in dx9 games...

davey, i meant the one on overclock.net which i happen to have open at all times... for some reason :p. you may as well follow Offler's suggestions on that forum but personally i don't notice improvements in z-fighting in reaction to a more stable overclock or anything other than occasional driver or game updates. in the main though the games which suffer from z-fighting tend to stay the same. skyrim for example is still the same today as it ever was, according to most people. so yeah, i'm afraid we just have to ignore it. you can try modifying ini files but i don't personally.
 
Argh yeah. Copied and pasted it there to. He came to the same conclusion as you at least. I'm sure I've tried each game at stock and have had the issue with every set of drivers I have used. Never tried a full windows re-install but I'd doubt that would help much.
 
yeah. i mean if you think you're ocd then you don't know how much time i've spent trying to "fix" things that turned out to be inherent qualities or unfixable problems/driver or game engine deficiencies. if it helps, among the things i've tried to attempt to fix various driver problems is installing directx packs (including directx11 packs that come with games), reinstalling windows, trying windows 7 and 8, using the same hardware in different machines, underclocking, changing graphics options... and so on. z-buffering has never really been affected by anything i did, but i didn't really expect it to either.

there are some ini tweaks but the reason i don't use them is because they tend to sacrifice something else in order to fix the problem... so, i don't know. report back if you find anything though.
 
I can get some weird flickering when I up the SSAA on some games with my Nvidia Cards - I don't know if ATI Cards work the same way, but if you have some global setting on, this may be the cause.
 
I can get some weird flickering when I up the SSAA on some games with my Nvidia Cards - I don't know if ATI Cards work the same way, but if you have some global setting on, this may be the cause.

I don't use RadeonPro or Ati Tools. I rely on CCC for everything. In most games I just use ingame graphics settings. Like I've said the problem in say SWTOR is solved by using super-sampling but that does decrease performance quite a lot.

Does rivatuner have an option for z-buffering or something? Just something I've noticed when googling. Not looked into it properly yet.
 
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