Flickering shadows / textures with GTX 260, DX10, Vista x64

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DanMan101

n00b
Joined
Aug 11, 2004
Messages
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Hi Everyone-

I am seeing flickering shadows and textures when running Crysis and Gears of War in DX10 mode. The flickering is more apparent in GoW and it does not matter when the resolution and all video options are set to low. I am seeing the following: http://www.dsst.net/share/GearsOfWar_Flickering.wmv

I want to know if anybody has seen anything like this or can confirm if the cause is either the game or the hardware. Again, I only see this if I run in DirectX 10 mode at any resolution.

My specs are as follows:
Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1
Asus P5Q SE/R
E8400 at stock speeds
EVGA GTX 260 at stock speeds running 178.13 driver
2x2GB Corsair XMS DDR2-800

Thanks For The Help,
DanMan101
 
So you forced the DX9 path and the flickering did not appear there, correct?

Have you tried other drivers?

What are your GPU temps under load? (Use Rivatuner to figure this out)
 
Yes, I do not see the flickering when running in DirectX 9 mode. I recall that the GPU temperature never went over 75C under load. I also saw the problem using the older driver that was provided on the EVGA disk, but I am not sure what version it was. Do you know where I can download older drivers?

Thanks.
 
GURU3D.com, downloads section, has a bunch of Nvidia betas.

But this one stumps me. Maybe the DX10 stresses some component that DX9 doesn't, revealing some problem with your video card hardware? Seems like a remote possibility, really.
 
maybe grab the eVGA precision ocing util and underclock your card's memory clock by 100mhz and see if you still see the artifacts... might just be a mem chip which is stressing.. but if it's only doing that in dx10 mode maybe more or a driver issue..
 
Enable overclocking, then reduce your clock speeds by 20-30mhz on core/mem. If that makes the problem go away, RMA the card.
 
Try the 177.92's. I tried all the newer ones I could find and a couple of older WHQL drivers before settling on these.
 
I am also having the same problem. Using the new 178.15s off Guru. So is most likely not a hardware problem. Must be the newer drivers. But it is not enough of a problem to make me want to change drivers, at least not in crysis when it only effects the shadows in the distance.
 
Thanks for all the replies.

Here's an update:

I am still seeing the problem when using DirectX 10. I am using the latest NVIDIA driver v178.24. I tried underclocking the core to 560MHz and memory to ~950MHz using the EVGA Precision tool, but I still see the same flickering as in the video above. I have no idea what to make of it.

I've been playing in DX9 mode just fine for the most part, but it just bothers me to know that the card may be defective.
 
I tried the 180.43 driver and see the same thing. It's mainly the character shadows that are flickering. The temperature doesn't seem to go above 65C. Maybe the hardware is faulty?

I don't know if it means anything, but the Nvidia DX10 demos (Medusa, Cascades, and Adrianne) look fine. Maybe GoW and Crysis stress the hardware more.
 
Reviewing the .wmv in your original post, I agree that it's a game or driver bug, not a hardware issue. Artifacting is when you get huge slabs of material that aren't really there.

Found an interesting note on gamespot:
I was playing Dead Space the day before yesterday and the shadows were good. Today i installed Far Cry 2 and noticed that the shadows were terrible - they flickered and were extremely rough. I loaded up Dead Space and same problem. Does anyone know what the cause could be?
Click to expand...
 
bump..

I am having the same issue in LOTRO with DX10 shadows and 180.xx drivers.... unfortunately, I can't roll back to 178.xx without loosing SLI capabilities thanks to Nvidia only allowing SLI on 180 drivers.. the conspiracy theorist in me wants to almost think they did this on purpose to penalize the people running SLI on intel chipsets.. lol. At any rate, looks like the problem has been around in LOTRO at least for over a month and still no fixes. thanks Nvidia! ...not... /rant
 
I also have a GTX 260 and I am having the same problem as you in the same games you mentioned. I also get flickering shadows and texture thrashing in Tomb Raider Legend.
 
revenant said:
bump..

I am having the same issue in LOTRO with DX10 shadows and 180.xx drivers.... unfortunately, I can't roll back to 178.xx without loosing SLI capabilities thanks to Nvidia only allowing SLI on 180 drivers.. the conspiracy theorist in me wants to almost think they did this on purpose to penalize the people running SLI on intel chipsets.. lol. At any rate, looks like the problem has been around in LOTRO at least for over a month and still no fixes. thanks Nvidia! ...not... /rant
Click to expand...

What do you mean by this, SLI is not supported with older driver? Is this on the X58 chipset?
 
yes, there is no SLI on x58 unless you use the 180.xx or higher series driver... or at least, I sure can't get it working with anything but a 180 series driver.. but yes, this is x58 chipset only.
 
FYI, the 185.20s did not fix the dynamic shadow issues with DX10 in lotro.. in fact all dynamic shadow textures were missing on the ground, but they showed up on grass, walls, rocks, other chars, etc... but nothing on the ground. very strange.. back to 181.00 for now.
 
I think its very likely that its driver issues.

I experience such texture and shadow flickering in Crysis too. and I'm using 9800GTX+
I recall my old 6800 also use to have texture flickering in some games too.

We can only hope future drivers will fix it, though I doubt so. You shouldn't need to worry about your hardware, they are fine.
 
gave that a try and it didn't change anything... thanks for the suggestion tho. FYI, it's for sure a driver issue.. everything works great on 178.xx but I can't enable SLI then. :(
 
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