artifacting only in Anti-Citizen One. Screenshot

[Saturos]

Hi. I was wondering. In Anti-Citizen One HL2, in both the tunnel area where the manhack onslaught takes place, as well as the next section, There are some artifacting errors that seem to occur only at a distance. White lines arcross the ceiling and concrete sidewalks. It can't be my video card, because it only happens in this particular area of the game, and I have no such other problems in my other games. I tried everything, from dawdling in the console, verifying my game cache, and setting all the in-game settings to low, as well as my Forceware control panel. Even updating my video drivers doesn't help, and I'm positive I've done that correctly. I even tried scaling down my Direct X version down to see if that was the problem and still nothing. Here's the screenhot. It's more obvious when it's in motion though, and it's quite distracting. Look just left and right of the crosshair and on the ceilings. There may be other areas, but this is by far the most obvious example.
System Specs: AMD 2.4 GHz 3800+, 2 gigs of RAM, dual SLI GeForce 7600 GS gfx cards (256MB), K9N Platinum series nforce5 motherboard

 

[kineaesth]

I honestly don't see anything in that screenshot.

 

[Saturos]

Look closer, like I said, it's waaay more obvious when it's in motion.This is the best I could get short of a demo though. Which I wish I could send. In the screenshot, it appears alittle more gray than white. There's some on the left ceiling and one larger streak behind the third center column. It's further in the back, close to the wreckage. The artifacts are only visible in the distance, so I can't get a close up.

 

[Saturos]

Ok, I circled the spots so that folks can get a better idea. I know this may seem anal, but it's true that it's actually alot worse in motion. This artifact totally sucks and I wanna know the cause! Damaged, overworked video card perhaps? Or is SLI too quircky? Or maybe Gordon's glasses are busted because of all those damn manhacks and his astigmatism is kicking in?

 

[Nitre]

Try changing some graphics settings around, that might help.

 

[giant384]

those aren't artifacts....

try updating your driver.

 

[Saturos]

Nope, that's no good, I already tried that. Here's a thought though. I never tried installing my video drivers in safe mode. Would that make a difference? I doubt it. Here's my process:

1.downloaded 163.93 Forceware form NVIDIA.
2.Created Restore Point
3.Uninstalled drivers (while still in normal mode)
4.Booted in safe mode and used Guru3d driver cleaner.
5.Booted back in Normal mode and installed new drivers
6.Configured all setting to lowest, and worked my way up and guess what...
7.All that work for nothing.:hmph:

Yeah, I tried everything. Maybe the gfx card just got damaged somehow? But then again, none of my other games do this, not even FEAR. Someone told me that the new 163.93 Forceware drivers aren't optimized for the 7600 GS cards. I tried the 93.xx versions too, but to no avail.

 

[Saturos]

Well, after rigorous testing, un-installing of drivers etc., I have finally pinpointed the source of the problem, anti-aliasing. At first, I tried disabling and using the in-game settings and vice-versa, but I still get the artifacts. The only way to get rid of them is to turn anti-aliasing off completely, which I don't want to resort to, since it looks like a dog without anti-aliasing. I'm not sure whether or not if it's because of my video-cards' lack of pixel-pipelines, or a programming flaw due part to the developers. I have 7600 GS cards after all, which means it has everything the GT and GTX models have, but the specs are cut in half. Could someone provide a way to fix this for me?, or at least go to the tunnels in Anti-Citizen One and verify if anti-aliasing is flawed so I can get on with my life? The new drivers don't fix this issue either. I'm betting that my gfx card just sucks for HL2 due to the lack of pixel-pipelines and the narrow 128MB VRAM buffer, even though the framerates are spectacular.:|

UPDATE: Ok, so I googled "anti-aliasing artifacting" and found out that this is actually an old problem HL2 had long ago, but one I still have. Gabe Newell's solution about "Centroid anti-aliasing" and "pixershader modifying" seemed a little too obscure even for me. Being the head programmer, this guy's too smart for his own good. Could someone put this into simple step-by-step layman's terms for me on how how to fix this issue? I was reading his post he made in this forum and I was slobbering out the corner of my mouth.