GTX 460 not antialiasing??

[VenomX]

Hi!

A little over a year ago I bought a new computer, didnt have time to fuss with components so just grabbed a prepackaged Dell (Vostro) with an i7 2.8 Ghz processor and 6 GB ram. Bought Crysis and Modern Warfare 2 mostly just to test out performance and the internal GTS 240 card handled the games fine, got addicted to Crysis and have been playing it regularly ever since.

About a month ago the fan on the GTS 240, apparently of notoriously bad quality, started bonkering out, producing heavy and very random noise regardless of any cleanings I would do so I finally grabbed a new Gigabyte GTX 460 card to replace it. Turned it on and ahh, wonderful silence. However, as soon as I started up Crysis, something was terribly off with the graphics. I had previously played on Low/Medium settings so I cranked everything up to High/Highest instead to see if that would help. All the textures, shadings, water, particle effects etc suddenly turned stunningly beautiful, but something was still horribly off somehow.

Finally I realized it was the edges that seemed to not be antialiasing properly. I played around with the antialias setting a bit, but while it does seem to cause some minor changes between 0x and 16x, not even at the 16x settings do the edges look good. Still very jagged, crisp, sharp pixley edges along pretty much every line, especially where a dark object is rendered against a brighter one. Even the regular white chat text overlayed on the game background is hard to read because of the s***ty antialias. I noticed the nVidia control panels offer some options for manually enforcing antialias and override the settings of individual games, but upping that to the max didn't seem to change anything either.

I reinstalled Modern Warfare 2 just to see if it was specifically a Crysis issue but nope, MW2 looks just as horrible and un-antialiased as Crysis does, jagged crisp lines around everything even on the maximum (here 4x) antialias setting.

Now, I've read online that people have had issues with more recent settings on the GTX 460 card and since the driver that came with the card was (I think) 275.33, I decided to try with what seems to be regarded the "last safe bet" for the 460 cards - the 258.96 version. However, no change, still the horrible edges around everything in both games.

Has anybody else encountered this problem, or have any suggestions of something I could try? 

[Aussie Allan]

  Do you have the entire Nvidia Driver Package installed.... some have said that the latest (280.26 I think) has issues......I have had none!......people are hard pressed when asked what the issues are..........more like a friend of a friends mothers,Brother told me!

  When Nvidia drivers have had problems.........it quite often was not uninstalling the driver package completely before loading the newie .... try this first so we can rule out a driver issue

                                                BESIDE THE POINT BUT

  Dell make fair to good laptop for medium business use, but fail with towers except in the business class ..... if you had a one year warranty ..... the fan probably failed on day 366 ....Procured hardware quality controller of the hardware Dell use ...... is questionable at best in years of fixing many machines people put in front of me.


 I resonantly put a machine together for a friend to a strict shopping list..........parts came to about 760 pounds......I added 200 on for the build labour and my time to load it up ...... he had a grin from ear to ear while handing me an even grand of fun tickets while telling me Dell wanted 2600 for the same spec...............Find a friend thats into computers for your next machine.

  Aussie Allan

 

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

A stab in the dark but what about updating the motherboard's BIOS version and of course there is also the GPU's firmware too.

[VenomX]

  Do you have the entire Nvidia Driver Package installed.... some have said that the latest (280.26 I think) has issues......I have had none!......people are hard pressed when asked what the issues are..........more like a friend of a friends mothers,Brother told me!

  When Nvidia drivers have had problems.........it quite often was not uninstalling the driver package completely before loading the newie .... try this first so we can rule out a driver issue

Thanks for your input! Just to be sure I'm not messing up here, how do you make absolutely sure you've uninstalled the entire old driver package and that none of it remains (running win7 here)?

Dell make fair to good laptop for medium business use, but fail with towers except in the business class ..... if you had a one year warranty ..... the fan probably failed on day 366

Haha, very good guess! Not exactly day 366 but I was maybe two months past the warranty time when the fan started failing.

And yeah I'm aware of the issues with brand name computers, this is actually the first computer I haven't built myself from scratch but last time I did so was 8 years ago and I just didn't have time to fuss with reading up on recent hardware specs - just wanted something that worked and price wasn't as important. Besides the graphics card I'm pretty happy with the rest of the can.

A stab in the dark but what about updating the motherboard's BIOS version and of course there is also the GPU's firmware too.

Thanks for your input as well, definitely something I might try when I get done ruling out driver issues.

As a sidenote and as an oldtimer who started my geeking days in the 80ies I must say I'm more than a little disturbed to notice that Gigabytes G logo is almost a complete ripoff from Commodores classic red and blue C. Is nothing sacred anymore? 

[Dark Mantis]

A stab in the dark but what about updating the motherboard's BIOS version and of course there is also the GPU's firmware too.

Thanks for your input as well, definitely something I might try when I get done ruling out driver issues.

As a sidenote and as an oldtimer who started my geeking days in the 80ies I must say I'm more than a little disturbed to notice that Gigabytes G logo is almost a complete ripoff from Commodores classic red and blue C. Is nothing sacred anymore? 

Yes, now you come to mention it the similarity is amazing! I can't say I thought of it before but now you have mentioned it I will never look at it in quite the same light.

[absic]

The Logo was probably designed for/by runn3R. 

[Dark Mantis]

You are probably quite correct there absic as he does have a special affinity with the old Commodores!

[Aussie Allan]

  This is more a bible then a tutorial but it is definitive and up to dated .... the days are gone of putting a det driver one over the other

                 http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1174372&mpage=1

  Also there an exellent app for uninstalling anything ... set to it's stongest setting .... will even rip out the hard drive

 Aussie Allan

[absic]

Wow, a lot to wade through there Aussie Allan but it makes sense and is well worth reading.

I haven't noticed these uninstall problems or driver issues when overwriting with an update on the ATI side of things but it is something to consider even, for those of us using these GPU's.

[VenomX]

  This is more a bible then a tutorial but it is definitive and up to dated .... the days are gone of putting a det driver one over the other

                 http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=1174372&mpage=1

Thanks for an interesting read, I went through all the directions and manually uninstalled every NVIDIA component, did a clean reinstall of the recent 280.26 version downloaded from nvidia.com and... same problem again. No and/or horribly bad antialias in both Crysis and MW2 

Just to illustrate what I'm talking about here's a quick screen of an ocean view from Crysis, ironically this was taken running on the max (16x) available antialias setting:
http://imagebin.org/171582

Note the section I've magnified at the top, where the ship in the background and also the island does show a slight bit of smoothing on the edges but the palmtrees have clearly been left completely without any antialias at all. Commodore is not entirely irrelevant in this thread because those palmtrees look like straight out of a c64 game. And to think the reason I fell in love with Crysis was its beautiful photorealistic nature 

Anybody have any idea what could be causing this issue? The ship and island is obviously partially antialiased, could this be a hardware issue with the card being broken somehow? Or is it just a matter of plowing through every single driver released until I (if ever) find one that works properly with games?

Needless to say Modern Warfare 2 looks just as crisp and bad, and this is the third driver I've tried now.

[Dark Mantis]

Whilst it is possible that it is merely a driver problem, I think after trying several and having no improvement rather identifies it as a hardware issue. Maybe worth just trying a driver that is much older and see if the image is still the same.

[Aussie Allan]

 I have very strong suspicions that it's ............................before I say, is there any way you can put your current GPU in another computer running the same picture/game with similar setting...........this will emphatically rule out the GPU ...... reducing what we need to concentrate on.......I hope this makes sense to you too!

  Aussie Allan

[VenomX]

I have very strong suspicions that it's ............................before I say, is there any way you can put your current GPU in another computer running the same picture/game with similar setting

Actually no, while I have other computers the next step down is a P4 I put together maybe 8 years ago and I doubt it would even manage to run Crysis (or any comparable game) at all.

Is there anything else I could try?

I really am getting more and more puzzled by the ship and the island though. The thing is, the island, palmtrees, and even the ships on the horizon are all 3d models (no "painted backgrounds" in this game) that can be driven up to with a boat and walked around on. So why on earth would the card decide to apply SOME antialias to the ship/island models but none whatsoever to the palmtrees? Doesn't make any bit of sense to me  

Although honestly the antialias on the ship is pretty crappy too compared to how it's supposed to look, but at least some little effort to smooth the lines by blurring has been applied there.

[Aussie Allan]

 If it will fit into the p4 and run ........do it...........better then nothing..........you need to find out if the antialias is doing it's dance

  Two things need to happen.............delete and do a fresh clean install of the game.........check you have the "Full" driver Package 280.XX (including PhysicsX)....... check all setting to do with rendering................then test!

  Number two.........you have to put this card into another machine to see if it does the same or even simular......you may have to consider.......even a PC shop you trust.......anyone with a board that will run the card with eye candy.

  Aussie Allan

[VenomX]

Two things need to happen.............delete and do a fresh clean install of the game.........check you have the "Full" driver Package 280.XX (including PhysicsX)....... check all setting to do with rendering................then test!

Well, reinstalling the game didn't help (with Crysis nor MW2), same issue still and I am running the full 280.26 driver including PhysX installed according to that other long text with all unnecessary bloatware discarded. Haven't had time to find another computer to stick the card in yet but I managed to get something else to happen.

Checking through different settings configs I somehow managed to get the game to respond to the forced AI settings in the NVidia control panel. I set that to the maximum (I think it was 32x) and the following happened (notice palmtrees):
http://imagebin.org/171773

Unfortunately, the game still looks very bad compared to how it looked on my GTS 240 because the antialias is apparently just "slapped on top" of the game-rendered image, but at least it shows that the video card - hardware-wise - is at least capable of applying anti-alias at all. So the issue seems to be that when the card is set to just follow the programs/games own instructions for antialias, it just somehow fails to listen to what the program wants and subsequently ignores the antialiasing instructions altogether unless it's in the "forced" setting.

Not sure if that sheds any light on anything. I also found this other guy on the nVidia forum with a GTX 465 and EXACTLY the same issue as me with no antialiasing in games, so at least I'm not alone in this problem. Sadly the other guy hasn't gotten any reply to his thread so it wasn't of much help otherwise, also not sure what brand of card he had