Texture Flashing Worse since graphics card upgrade...

Hi all,

I recently updated to a better nVidia graphics card, and now there are lots of inworld objects that show more texture flashing than they did before. Several items are my own creations that looked okay upon creation, that now have changed to show texture bleeding upon a little zooming out.

At first I thought it was just my items, and perhaps I hadn't been careful enough.. but then I noticed an expensive house I bought shows the same problems - places where doors/walls and windows/walls meet are unattractive because when I alt-cam around, they bleed incessantly. I'm pretty sure the house creator would have noticed this... or that I would have noticed it when I had that house rezzed several months ago, before the new card.

I sent a ticket to LL but they suggested it might be a RC issue... I'm thinking it's probably a setting in my graphics card that I am unaware of...

Has anyone else had and successfully fixed this issue? If so, I would love to hear from you.

Sera

How are you defining "flashing" and "bleeding"? There are many common graphical issues that could fit those names. Screenshots?

Hi Chosen, thanks for the response. Here is a link to screenshots. I forgot to replace the one "bleeding" word in my last post with "flashing", flashing is more appropriate imo. I believe some people call it z-flash, but in at least one of these objects, as you will see in the pic, the prims aren't so close together that they should cause that issue. This problem occurs both when I am actively panning around, and also when my cam is not moving and is simply resting on the object.

Here is the link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lokslowprimfurniture/

This pics are a little small to scrutinize all that well, but I see what you mean in most of them. The "flashing" doesn't look like an alpha sorting issue, which was my first thought. It looks like Z-fighting, or what SL residents tend to call "flicker".

Just in case anyone reading this doesn't know what we're talking about, Z-fighting is caused two or more parallel surfaces are so close together in space that the camera-Z distance (depth) between them becomes less than the equivalent of one pixel on your screen. The renderer doesn't know how to draw two surfaces in the same space at the same time, so it does the best it can to choose which parts of each get drawn in each frame. The result is the appearance of "flickering" between the two from frame to frame.

Typically in SL, a difference of just .002 meters is enough to prevent Z-fighting up to a considerable viewing distance. Your cross section pic (number 00 seems to show a depth of way more than that. So yeah, something appears to be wrong.

Just to be sure it's not an issue with the new viewer, try installing the old one, and see if things improve. If it gets better, then you know it's not your video card or its drivers that are the problem. Stick with the older viewer for the time being, and then maybe try the next version whenever it comes out.

If viewer version makes no difference, then my next guess would be drivers. Try replacing whatever driver you've got now with something out of the 175 series, if it's available for your card. 175.19 is what I'm currently using, by the way.

If that doesn't work, try the newest driver available. And if that doesn't work, maybe there's an issue between SL and the particular card you've got. Which card is it?


You might also want to try playing with the camera focal length settings. Ctrl-0 makes the camera more orthographic, shortening the depth field. Z-fighting will be more prevelent if you've pressed ctrl-0 at all, and will get worse the more you press it. Ctrl-8 will make the camera more fisheyed, lengthening the depth field. Z-fighting will become less and less prevalent the more you press ctrl-8. Ctrl-9 returns the focal length to the normal default setting.

I think you mean ctrl-9 will return the view to default? But thanks for that tip!

Thanks for the suggestions... it must be a problem with my drivers because the last four viewer releases continued to have the problem. Sigh. Hopefully I can use the older drivers suggested, but I'm not sure because it's a newer card. It's NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+/PCI/SSE2. I shall go look. Thanks!

I'd love to say that one of the suggestions worked, but sadly after a few hours of tinkering I couldn't get the flashing to go away. I tried going back a few viewers, going back to the suggested Nvidia driver and when that didn't work, going back one more, neither of which fixed the problem.

Not sure what else to try... other than waiting and hoping. Will go to JIRA, I don't know what to think other than it's an issue with SL and Nvidia9800gtx+

Yes, I did mean ctrl-9. Typo.

Sorry nothing worked. It sounds like maybe the 9800GTX+ is treating the z-buffer differently from how other cards do. To confirm that, you'd need to take a depth snapshot of the same scene with two different cards, using the exact same carmera angle and distance. It would be a kind of a pain to do, but it would certainly be interesting to compare the results.

I have added a JIRA entry for my issue, if there are any other Nvidia9800GTX+ users with this graphical issue, please vote for it. Thanks!

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12752