Shimmering, Oh My!
There you go, yes, I said it, “shimmering.” Specifically “texture crawling,” caused by either aggressing filtering or really bad LOD. I notice it using the Dell 2405FPW LCD. I believe the brighter contrast and crisper image coupled with the fact that the screen is just physically larger at a higher resolution all amplifies the problem and makes it extremely visible. I don’t notice it in all games, but there are a couple games in which it did negatively impact my overall level of gaming immersion. While this is another raging Green Vs. Red argument found many places on the Net, we have never specifically addressed it as we have never truly seen it impact our gameplay, but that is simply not the case with our 24” widescreen display.
We found in World of Warcraft there was horrible texture crawling on the ground as you walk through the game. It is most notable on coble stone or dirt paths through forests. Comparatively, texture crawling is much worse on NVIDIA GPUs than on ATI GPUs from our experience, but rest assured this is a problem that is present in both teams’ technologies. I noticed distinctly that moving from a NVIDIA-based GPU to the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX or XL very much reduced this “shimmering” problem in World of Warcraft as textures had less crawling. However, there was still some noticeable. Texture crawling is definitely worse on the GeForce 7800/7900 GPUs though. We were using the default driver settings for both NVIDIA and ATI.
We also noticed texture crawling in EverQuest II. Again on the ground, though this game wasn’t as bad as World of Warcraft. I didn’t really notice it or find anything distracting in games other than those mentioned above. It seems that World of Warcraft is the worst of them all when it comes to shimmering, and it was quite distracting on the large widescreen LCD.
What do we think about this texture crawling issue? We don’t like it and we hope NVIDIA makes some improvements with their filtering quality in their drivers soon. We are aware that you can force a higher mode of texture filtering by turning off some of their optimizations, but honestly we’d like the default filtering quality to simply be better without having to turn off optimizations by hand in their driver control panel. Be aware that some folks are much more alert to this shimmering issue than others, so if you have not seen it, I suggest you don’t go out and look for it.
Do understand that the reason NVIDIA leaves these harsh filtering optimizations on is two-fold. First, on smaller displays, it simply does not make a difference to the vast majority of gamers out there. Second, it gives NVIDIA based GPUs better benchmark numbers. And in the land of video card marketing, where the size of your ePenis score is king, you don’t want to give up a few benchmark points lest you have the other team waving their ePenis back at you.
If NVIDIA is going to leave these optimizations on by default in the driver, and they are well aware that these optimizations negatively impact your gaming experience on larger displays, that is the ruler we are going to judge them by. We will continue to point out filtering issues where we see them impacting our gameplay.