Shadow glitches on 7600GT

Gothrak · Unread postby **Gothrak** » 06 Jun 2006, 12:39

Hello there! I used to post here, some of you may remember me. If you do, then to you I say, "Hello there! I'm glad to see you again."

I have a technical problem. On my new system I get nasty jagged lumps instead of shadows; constantly shifting horror pixels with weird Lovecraftian angles. I don't like them.

On my old system (with a Radeon 9800 PRO), I had nice, proper shadows. I get these demon shadows no matter what my graphical settings are; even on the highest settings, with everything else looking picturesque.

I'm using the latest drivers and motherboard drivers, and I haven't seen this problem mentioned anywhere on the forums (I spent a whole five minutes searching!) So now I come to you - yes you, the person reading this right now, I mean you individually - awaiting your wisdom.

Oh, and the CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ dual core, and I have 2GB of RAM. Because these things are important to know.

Gaidal Cain · Unread postby **Gaidal Cain** » 06 Jun 2006, 14:02

I have no idea what the problem might be, but it's a distinct pleasure to see you back.

Since your stories are hostedon CH, there might be some who never saw you in action who still has had the pleasure of reading your (brilliant) stuff

Gothrak · Unread postby **Gothrak** » 06 Jun 2006, 14:58

I had no idea those stories were still around, let alone hosted on CH - now that brings back memories. And ruins years of therapy, but I guess that can't be helped.

It's nice to see the site is still running and the forum is still here, as well as friendly faces like yourself; as for myself, I'm just getting started in Heroes V and I'm enjoying myself so far. I've noticed three major things:

1. The AI seems to have improved from Heroes IV, not a great feat considering that Solitaire had better AI than Heroes IV.

2. Necropolis is still crazy good when combined with Necromancy + Raise Dead, just like in the last two games... although in the last game it wasn't Necropolis, it was some sort of stupid mishmash of Inferno and Necropolis underneath a dumb name. Let's never speak of it again.

3. The Mighty Gorgon seemingly hasn't returned. I can't say for sure that's it not hiding anywhere, because I haven't checked a list of neutral creatures... but it's not recruitable. As some of you might remember, I considered the Mighty Gorgon to be the best thing since somebody spent 2 gems and 400 gold to upgrade Bread to Sliced Bread. I will miss my Doom Cows.

As for those shadows, they're freaking me out. The Familiar is particularly bad, it's like he's standing on a giant twitching spider. I've been trying to download various nVidia drivers, I might stumble upon the solution.

theLuckyDragon · Unread postby **theLuckyDragon** » 06 Jun 2006, 16:04

OMG Gothrak's back!

Gaidal Cain · Unread postby **Gaidal Cain** » 06 Jun 2006, 20:16

Gothrak wrote: As for those shadows, they're freaking me out. The Familiar is particularly bad, it's like he's standing on a giant twitching spider. I've been trying to download various nVidia drivers, I might stumble upon the solution.

Now you've got me wanting a screenshot

I guess it isn't a DirectX driver problem? Apparantly, there's a slew of different versions under the same name, though having the one one seems to lead to not being able to play at all instead of weird shadows.

Kalah · Unread postby **Kalah** » 08 Jun 2006, 13:03

Yey! He's back! *running off to make a news item and tell everybody...*

Oakwarrior · Unread postby **Oakwarrior** » 08 Jun 2006, 13:27

Wooohooooo!!!
I was JUST rereading your article

HealingAura · Unread postby **HealingAura** » 08 Jun 2006, 14:14

I've never heard of you before Gothrak but your words of wisdom sure made me laugh a lot

. Especially the multiplayer tips

I too hope the gorgons will be in Heroes V but I do prefer them to get a not-sneezing attack

Minmaster · Unread postby **Minmaster** » 08 Jun 2006, 14:16

yup i would guess its a directx issue

omegaweix · Unread postby **omegaweix** » 08 Jun 2006, 15:49

I think i got the same problem too, rest of the graphics are übernice but the shadows look like swarms of black pixels, really ugly, even on 1280x1024 and graphics quality set to "ultra high"...

...first i thought this was intended but a few screens on the net and ultimately this post made me believe, it's something that should be fixed...

...tried the latest nvidia driver for my 6600GT and even 2 beta's but nothing changed...

....so IF this is an issue because of directX.... what could I possibly do?
Reinstall it?
Got the newest version known to me (the one shipped with Heroes5, guess!)

On my behalf,

Thanks for future advice

Mirage · Unread postby **Mirage** » 08 Jun 2006, 15:50

You may also want to try the omega drivers instead of nvidia drivers to see if that helps. www.omegadrivers.net

There may also be video card settings that are overriding the game settings so check outside the game and play with the general vid card settings to see if that helps at all. Good luck.

Wolfshanze · Unread postby **Wolfshanze** » 08 Jun 2006, 15:53

Well it might help to know exactly which version of Nvidia Forceware drivers you guys are using and/or have tried... I've found a surprising differance in grahic effects from one set of drivers to the next, and the most current official set is not always the best to use. Sometimes older or future beta drivers are better then the official ones.

omegaweix · Unread postby **omegaweix** » 08 Jun 2006, 16:20

Well, since i got Heroes 5 i had the 84.43 forceware beta (for Oblivion) and now switched back to the "official" 84.21 (and YES, i always deinstall my old drivers properly and completely before reinstalling)...

.... but with both of them, eye cancer because of horrific shadows!

And the video card settings are all eh... "application dependend" (sorry, got a german Windows and I don't seem to be able to translate this properly :-/ )...
...so this shouldn't do any harm...

... maybe i'll try those omega drivers, thanks for the hint... and Gothrak, if you try them too, please inform me, if it works (or not)!

Cheers!

edit: horrific

Akul · Unread postby **Akul** » 08 Jun 2006, 18:36

THE GREAT GOTHREN IS BACK!!!!

My peasants are so happy to see youi again!

Lord_Haart · Unread postby **Lord_Haart** » 09 Jun 2006, 17:26

Great to see you back

Some screenshots might help identify the problem, but I'd agree with the above suggestion of checking DirectX version first.

omegaweix · Unread postby **omegaweix** » 10 Jun 2006, 09:55

.... or something completely different!

Dear Gothrak, maybe you could try this, it helped for me...
....after responding in this threat yesterday I found something interesting in the user cfg. (normally found under my games/ Heroes 5/ profiles /"yourname"/ user.cfg.... just opened it with the text editor).

Under the value gfx_shadows_quality i discovered it was set to default "0", so i changed it to 4 initially (thought it had the same quality stages like the normal graphic detail, from 0 to 4), which resulted in very smooth shadows but very strange overall graphic behaviour...

....then set it to 1 and the shadows are overall more smooth and less pixelated now.... maybe some more trying can improve the quality but i haven't tried yet since it worked sufficient for me...

And one question to the community, are there other options in the user file to improve the graphic appearance, cause my machine can handle the Heroes engine quite well so i' might be willing to optimise it a bit qualitywise...
....for example "gfx_texture_mip", what's that one doing? My value there is being set to 0...
...or "terra_quality"... has anyome tinkered around with that one so far?

Cheers

drapichrust7 · Unread postby **drapichrust7** » 14 Jun 2006, 05:27

I don't know...
I have just bought Gigabyte 7600 GT Silent Pipe II, and have no problems with shadows or anything else.
So it looks that there is something wrong with your hardware.

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Shadow glitches on 7600GT

Shadow glitches on 7600GT

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