U3+8800GT+169.x = Bloom/Glow Artifacts

[Traveller]

Hi2all,

I'm posting my issue here for lack of an Unreal 3 "Technology" sub-forum and it deals with several U3-based games, mainly Gears of War and Bioshock.

I played both games without incident on a Windows XP-based rig with my old 7900GT + 163.44 (Bioshock-specific) drivers, but then I "simultaneously" upgraded to an 8800 GT 512MB & 169.02 drivers in December, which is when I noted the following problem:

Atrifacts appear around brightly-lit street lights, neon signs, etc. There are other areas which have this type of lighting applied, but the above two examples are most obvious and occur frequently. In Bioshock this is part of the "post-processing" rendering. My guess is that it's Bloom "shading" being applied. As for typical HDR scenes - highlighted scenes (sunlight etc.) there are no artifacts.

The best way to describe the corruption is if I stand in front of a street lamp (or neon sign) in either Bioshock or Gears of War and then move slightly to either side, I see an odd checkerboard-like pattern that is the same color as the light being emitted. The problem is only visible at certain angles as all other angles the glow (bloom) appears correctly.

Here's a few pics so you can see what I'm referring to:



I searched / Googled etc. but I couldn't find any mention of the problem (of course it's not the easist thing to search for either ) Thanks for any info you may have on the topic

p.s. I haven't changed any settings in the nVidia drivers apart from triple buffering (to "on", as I almost always vsynch) and I changed the texture rendering quality from "Quality" to "Higest Quality".

_____________________________________________
Traveller - Geneve * Melbourne * Miami * Wien

C2D E6850@3.00/ P5B-D/ 2GB XMS2-6400C4 DDR2@883/ eVGA 8800GT Bulk@675M1950/
Audigy2/ Seagate VII SATA in RAID1/ XPsp2-DX9c-nV169.02

[alcom77]

Try 169.28. They are the latest betas and correct issues specific to UT3. They will probably give you a performance boost too.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=10

[Traveller]

and correct issues specific to UT3.

Hi & thx for the suggestion and even though I may just give the drivers a run, I'm not sure a UT3-specific driver is going to fix a more generalized* Unreal 3 Engine problem - particualrly when the UT3 Demo had none of the issues this new driver apparently fixes...
*I say generalized because Bioshock and Gears of War are from two different developers...
I'm just surprised I'm the only one who's noticed it... (or the only one this artifact bothers, 'cause in UT3, you would most likely be moving waaay too fast to notice it, lol ) It's not so distracting in GoW, but it is in Bioshock where it's used in copius quantities and if there's any game where you really want to "stop to smell the roses", it's Bioshock

[[s§s]Bison_Boy]

I noticed it in UT3 with the stock 8800 GT vid drivers and I thought that is was just corona added on purpose!

[btcomm]

Don't know why you are using such old drivers, if the beta's don't work for you there are still official drivers newer then what you're using there.

169.21 can be had from nvidia's website.

[Traveller]

Don't know why you are using such old drivers...

old, huh?, They were the official WHQL drivers in December when I bought my 8800GT - but I guess that's like last year's news (lol).

I've DLed the 169.21 and I will give 'em a go tonight

Bison_Boy, the "corona", when properly rendered, IS on purpose. It's the "glow" that accompany's a bright light source and is even more "glowish" in a hazy / foggy environment. It's the few coarse pixels that aren't supposed to be there that represents the artifacting.

[alcom77]

There is a newer Forceware driver with the same iteration number: 169.28 but these are WHQL certified and don't carry the warning, "recommended only for those with issues related to UT3."
http://downloads.guru3d.com/

In my experience, every new nVidia driver release is better than the last unless you're using ancient hardware. My Geforce 3Ti 200 actually got slower with each release after the 44.71 drivers came out.

[champdee]

I'm trying the new beta drivers mainly for performance and havn't noticed much in the performance department. I think it just fixes problems such as what the OP is experiancing. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

[Traveller]

...it just fixes problems such as what the OP is experiancing.

I went ahead and tried both the 169.21 WHQLs as well as the 169.28 betas (I also play Crysis and installed the 1.1 patch which also needs the 169.28s).

Unfortunately, no difference and the same exact artifacts are there. As champdee noted, there is a zero performance increase for U3 games nor did 3DMark06 change, but Crysis gained a 1.5fps increase in the gpu benchmark. This could however be soley due to Crysis' own patch & not so much the drivers... .

As for my artifact, it's back to the drawing board...