GeForce 7900 + WOW = very bad texture shimmering

Hello guys,
I'm sorry because I can't speak German, I've always thought I had to learn another language besides English but never got either the nerve or time.
I'm experiencing a very evident texture shimmering with an ASUS 7900 GT and World of Warcraft.
I found an article on computerbase.de in the web stating that you modified some drivers and could solve the shimmering problem with a performance hit.
What pisses me off is that this news was written in 2005 now we are in 2006 and this issue was not worked out yet.
I hope some of you can help me with this bad issue I would have never thought I could have.

This is a link to a thread I've opened on forums.nvidia.com with all the things I did and the detailed problem explanation:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=14433

Thanks forward for help.

Hi, you have which problem directly, then. And what isn't all right with your 7900 GT, then

Greetings Steve

Terminator4 schrieb:

Hi, you have which problem directly, then. And what isn't all right with your 7900 GT, then

Greetings Steve

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I experience texture shimmering.
These are 2 links to videos that talk themselves:
http://rapidshare.de/files/20109858/wow_problem.zip.html
http://rapidshare.de/files/20135324/wow_problem2.zip.html

There's like a glittering effect on some textures mixed with a flickering effect.
That's very annoying.
I've tryed everything stated on forums: turning on hig quality, anisotropic filter 16x, antialias 4x, turn off the optimization... nothing's been useful.
It seams like no one except some mad reporters of some websites have been experiencing my same issues.

Perhaps she is broken?
I'm not sure, sorry
Or something is adjusted wrongly

Steve

Terminator4 schrieb:

Perhaps she is broken?
I'm not sure, sorry
Or something is adjusted wrongly

Steve

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As stated nothing is wrong or setted in a bad way.
If you read at that thread I posted on nvidia forums (where everything is explained in ditail) you would see that a solution was found right from this website which managed the drivers for removing this problem even though with a loss of performance.

what about Vsinc? try to turn it off

Nicht schon wieder oder??

JaY90 schrieb:

what about Vsinc? try to turn it off

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I tried both vsync on and off ^^
I tried everything in the drivers and game options.

hmm u should test the graphiccard with another pc

Unlucky I don't get any other pc to try it with but ATI Tools says it's artifact free.
In other games like oblivion I get the same shimmering, I had it also with 7800 GTX in that game.
I'd be just curious to know how to modify the drivers like people of this website did.

switch to the nvidia Driver Control Panel and set the Quality to "High Quality"

omg READ and THEN POST...
he tried it, no effect.
the card isn't broken, it's a known nvidia-problem.
in WoW you will experience this problem a lot stronger than in any other game.

the only way you can at least dim it down is to set it to HQ in the driver-settings

schnopsnosn schrieb:

omg READ and THEN POST...
he tried it, no effect.
the card isn't broken, it's a known nvidia-problem.
in WoW you will experience this problem a lot stronger than in any other game.

the only way you can at least dim it down is to set it to HQ in the driver-settings

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I found in this webpage http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1549&page=3 a link to a movie with the same issue in Counter Strike Source which runs on HL2 engine.
It's pretty obvious that this isn't something related just to WOW.
What's pretty weird is that Italian ASUS tech support hasn't other reports about this issue so they say it's prolly my videocard to be faulty.
I found in the web just other 2 complainings about this issue and were from people owning my same card. Is it just a case? Is this series of this brand to have such problems cos maybe the other manufacturers have provided bios updates meanwhile?

a BIOS-update will have no effect, just like the exchange of your card to another 7900GT.
it's simply the core of your card. nvidia messed it up. the shimmering is worse than on de gf6-series cards.

and why do you think they told you, that your card is bad?
right! they want to sell their products
unsatisfied customer = customer that switches to another label

the shimmering is due to the overoptimized anisotropic algorithm used by the latest nvidia cards. once you set the driver to hq-setting you will find the shimmering reduced greatly.
nothing broken there - just standard-quality straight from nvidia driver bakery ^^

riDDi schrieb:

the shimmering is due to the overoptimized anisotropic algorithm used by the latest nvidia cards. once you set the driver to hq-setting you will find the shimmering reduced greatly.
nothing broken there - just standard-quality straight from nvidia driver bakery ^^

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Yes, I read it on forums. What's weird is that this problem was reported at the time of 6800 series. Since then it's gone by an year and there's still the same issue.
Another strange thing is that it seams to be personal: some people notice it, some people don't.
I called a famous shop here playing the part of a customer and the guys there played the same game and they said they didn't have problems.
Next I talked to their technician and he said it was a driver problem, because it was something that I couldn't see in every app.
I called ASUS too yesterday and they said they didn't have other reports about this issue, so they told it could be a faulty graphic card.
I called a guy that works for a magazine like computerbase here in Italy and he said it was a driver issue.
Now, it's pretty weird that there's a lack of reports on this problem.
What can I do to report this to nvidia?
In the new beta drivers 87.08 the problem is still there.

Plus about the high quality switch some magazines state it produces a huge performance loss, others state it's just a 5% performance loss.

the whole "issue" started off with the geforce 6 series. i experienced it for myself in ut2004. but i have to admit i didn't notice it straight away, because back then the shimmering was still subtle.
with geforce 7-series it seems the quality-mode has gone really really bad and it was only the 78.03 driver that brought relieve - for high-quality that is, quality remained the same.
though the fact that the driver-team was able to implement an algorithm which is mostly resolving the shimmering textures - at a cost of fps that is - leads me to believe that this is simply nvidian tactics.

why don't they admit that they deliver poor quality?
because the majority doesn't seem to notice.
and why don't they notice?
i guess there are a few reasons for that
1) they don't play games on the pc ("this solitair is mighty funny, i love this game!")
2) it only appears when anisotropic filtering is enabled ("what's this anti-trophy? where can i buy it?") hell, i've seen people using the standard windows-drivers for their graphics so they don't even have the option to use enhanced filtering.
3) af only recently made it into ingame-settings and even if it's there, casual gamers won't be interested in finetuning the game's performance.
4) they have bad eyesight or are simply blind.
5) they don't care ("i thought that was normal...")

what we have here is a few geeks (us ^^) complaining. the others aren't interested.
this cunning plan enables nvidian graphics cards to gain some fps, which results in longer benchmark-bars, which represents the company's ePenis.
the lack of coverage on this issue is due to the fact that it's not that easy to provide evidence for your claims. the only appropriate way seems to be to provide high-resolution high-bandwidth videos which will definetly produce a whole lot of traffic. and so far nobody with cards from both ati and nvidia seems to have done comparisons between them either.
and again, most reviewers aren't provided enough time with the cards to do some in depth research. they need to write an article to get some clicks. as long as there are the typical benchmark-bars they get clicks.
btw. the benchmarks on computerbase are done with nvidia-cards running hq-settings

to the performance-drop when using hq: the assumptions differ because the drop can differ greatly depending on the game and the settings used. there is no absolute number for this.
but as long as it's playable you should be ok, right?

When you're extremly gaming additect, I would recommend to switch to an other video card as the X1900XTX from ATi, which definitly kicks ass...

I never tried it, but aren't there alternative drivers like Omega etc.?

riDDi schrieb:

2) it only appears when anisotropic filtering is enabled ("what's this anti-trophy? where can i buy it?") hell, i've seen people using the standard windows-drivers for their graphics so they don't even have the option to use enhanced filtering.

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I agree on everything you said, though it's still a pain in the ass having a card like this messed due to a driver issue.
There's one thing though I wanna focus on.
You said this thing appears just when anisotropic filtering is activated.
I made a try with anisotropic forced to be deactivated via nHancer but the problem was still up there.
I tried first with aniso off and next with both aniso and antialias deactivated. Both had no success with solving this problem.

Do you enable AA & AF in the driver or in WoW (when it's possible, I dont have WoW )
You could try to set in the Driver "Application controlled" (<- I hope I translated it right )
And enable the AA & AF in WoW.

Good Luck =)