Graphic anomoly?

[dogboy73]

I've just noticed this weird problem with the HL2 floor textures in my game. If you open the image above & look at the steps - Notice the way the texture suddenly breaks. Why is that happening? I didn't notice it the whole time I was playing through the game before. I've not made any changes to the gfx settings. Someone suggested it might be something called 'tearing' & to enable V Sync in HL2 but this doesn't make any difference to this problem. (This pic was with V Sync Enabled). I notice this on all floor textures. Especially when there are clear details in the texture like on these stairs. Noticed it in CS Source also. On prodigy it really showed up on the train tracks.

Any ideas? I'm sure it wasn't happening before. I would have noticed it surely? Maybe I was just to thrilled to be playing the game at all after all the problems I'd had with crashes & stuttering.

Cheers.

 

[Axyon]

You have a very low Anisotropic Filtering setting. Go into Options >Video > Advanced, look for the dropbox entitled 'Anisotropic Filtering' and set it to something like 8x or 16x. That should solve your problem.

 

[dogboy73]

Ah ha! That sorted it. Actually I only set it to x2 which is good enough for me. Weird how I never noticed it before! I finished playing through the game last night but I don't recall seing that before. Like I said, At first I was just glad to be playing the game after the problems I'd had so maybe I wasn't paying much attention to the details.

I did change the settings mid way through the game after reading through the 'Tweak guides' HL2 article. In this it did say that Bilinear filtering was preferable to Trilinear filtering because the difference in appearance wasn't that great for the performance hit! So mid way through the game I changed this from Trilinear (As recommended on my system) to Bilinear. Even x2 AF looks better than either Bi or Trilinear filtering. I'll stick with that & see how it goes (It round 2 for HL2 this time on HARD! :E

 

[Axyon]

Ah ha! That sorted it. Actually I only set it to x2 which is good enough for me. Weird how I never noticed it before! I finished playing through the game last night but I don't recall seing that before. Like I said, At first I was just glad to be playing the game after the problems I'd had so maybe I wasn't paying much attention to the details.

I did change the settings mid way through the game after reading through the 'Tweak guides' HL2 article. In this it did say that Bilinear filtering was preferable to Trilinear filtering because the difference in appearance wasn't that great for the performance hit! So mid way through the game I changed this from Trilinear (As recommended on my system) to Bilinear. Even x2 AF looks better than either Bi or Trilinear filtering. I'll stick with that & see how it goes (It round 2 for HL2 this time on HARD! :E

You're right, 2x AF does look better than Trilinear filtering. Most people tend to use 8x AF as an average nowadays, although it's absolutely fine to put it up to 16x since AF has a miniscule impact on FPS.

 

[dogboy73]

You're right, 2x AF does look better than Trilinear filtering. Most people tend to use 8x AF as an average nowadays, although it's absolutely fine to put it up to 16x since AF has a miniscule impact on FPS.

Really? I thought the higher the AF setting the higher the performance hit because distant textures remain sharper. I thought this was the same for AA as well? I also have AA on x2 which looks fine to me. I've always tried to achieve a nice balance between performance & looks. Previously HL2 looked great & was smooth as a whistle (Apart from the odd st-st-stutter when certain events took place. Nowhere near as bad as before though).

 

[Axyon]

Really? I thought the higher the AF setting the higher the performance hit because distant textures remain sharper. I thought this was the same for AA as well? I also have AA on x2 which looks fine to me. I've always tried to achieve a nice balance between performance & looks. Previously HL2 looked great & was smooth as a whistle (Apart from the odd st-st-stutter when certain events took place. Nowhere near as bad as before though).

Well, you're correct in thinking that. There is an impact, but it's really very small indeed. AA on the other hand is a huge hit on performance the higher it goes.

Try it for yourself - crank it up from 2x AF to 8 or 16x and note the change in FPS. It shouldn't be much at all.

 

[TEDR]

thanks i'll try af up to 16x i too thought af would effect fps as much as aa did

 

[dogboy73]

Cheers. I'll give that a go. I leave AA on x2 though.

To be honest I've never messed around with the AA & AF settings on my games becuase I didn't fully understand what they did! I understood AA from Photoshop but I was basically happy to let the game decide on the best settings & at most mess around with things like texture detail & lighting FX etc. Actually, It's the problems i had wit HL2 which made me take the time to delve a bit deeper & find out what was what! Thank heavens for the Tweak guides. The HL2 Tweak guide is very detailed. It's surprising how teakable games are - I think the HL2 guide stated there are 1800+ codes (CVARS?) for HL2!! Many of those seem to be performance/gfx controllers.