The Shimmers - Why, oh WHY GOD?!

[GIJersey]

I have tried just about everything to get rid of those blasted shimmers from my ground scenery in 2002. It is most visible when over metropolitan areas, cities, and airport runways. It is like the edges of the buildings and other objects as well as runways flash on and off. When over rural and mountain area's it is almost non exsistant? What the heck is causing my scenery to look like this?

Does anyone have any suggestions to once and for all get rid of this effect?

Mark "G.I. JERSEY" WWD/2N8

"There are three unusable quantities in aviation ... runway behind, air in the tanks, and altitude above."

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/User_files/3c64106041146c7d.jpg

[fbass]

Ah, the dreaded shimmers. Here is what I did based on what memory and graphics hardware I have.

1. Settings/Scenery/Display
Max all sliders except "Autogen Density" Make this "Normal."
Turn off all water effects - slider all the way left
Set maximum visibility to about 80nm
Check all the boxes on the lower, right-hand side of the settings screen

2. Settings/Hardware/Display
Transform and Lighting - check
Anti Aliasing - check
Bi-linear Filtering - on (check)
Enable Hardware Acceleration - on (check)

See if these settings fix your problem.

[alheeley]

This should fix the shimmers problem but take a big hit on the frame rate. I have to keep anti alias off to get a decent stable fps even on my 860 Mhz p3 with 64 meg geforce2 card.

[Simon Evans]

Shimmers are usually a function of anisotropic filtering and mipmapping. Experiment with the two settings until you can find a happy medium.

Simon Evans

[GIJersey]

Simon,

You stated in another post that you use both NVMax and GTU. I didn't think was possible? Don't they conflict with eachother? Or do they just write the changes they make into the registry?

It seems that GTU has more settings then the new NVMAX. Is GTU where you can adjust the Mipmap settings? Also I read a post over at guru3d.com that GTU dosen't support the 27.xx drivers.



Mark "G.I. JERSEY" WWD/2N8
Cape May, New Jersey USA
"There are three unusable quantities in aviation ... runway behind, air in the tanks, and altitude above."

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/User_files/3c64106041146c7d.jpg

[southie4]

I hope some great suggestions pop up here in response to your post because the "shimmering" scenery is the single aspect of Flight Simulator that has put a damper on my enjoyment of the game. Heck, right now I have two dozen high rise buildings floating in the East River but I assume that this strange phenomena will eventually pass and if not I can always look the other way. The shimmering is virtually inescapable and is number one on my wish list of hoped-for fixes. Please, fellow simmers, help those of us afflicted with the dreadful shimmers. We who suffer from this will all be eternally grateful.

Robert

Win ME
Pentium III, 1 ghz
512 mg ram
Radeon 7200, 64 mg
80 gig, 7200 rpm hd

[Simon Evans]

LAST EDITED ON Mar-02-02 AT 06:10AM (EDT)[p]Mark,

It is true that NVMax and GTU do not make happy bedfellows, but each has its uses and each writes to the registry in the same way.

There are a couple of anomalies where GTU and NVMax write the same function to a different area of the registry which results in ostensibly the same function appearing `off` in one but `on` in the other but that's easily dealt with. Simply don't have them both running at the same time!

Overall I'd say I prefer the functionality of the GTU over the simplicity and ease-of use of NVMax. GTU also offers `expert mode` - direct and quick access to the registry and even the settings the menu doesn't mention, for those brave of heart.

However, NVmax has less of a system resource `hit` when in use or minimised so can be left running on the desktop for quick changes of settings while experimenting.
I presume you had a good look at the tweak guide for NVmax here:
http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/geforce/index.shtml

Some interesting suggestions - don't quite see how they've arrived at the mipmap settings, for example, and the idea of anisotropic filtering as an alternative to FSAA is, erm, `different` (I'd put running in a higher resolution w-a-y above increasing anistropic filtering in my personal pecking order), but overall a very useful starting point for anyone not used to playing with the hidden settings on their NVidia cards - which is where NVmax really scores.

However, I'm seeing some interesting results using some of the lesser-known functions available only via GTU - have you tried just using Anisotropic 4Tap at level 1 or level 2 and leaving the other setting at Auto? Or the 6x6 FSAA mode? Or the ability ro switch OFF mipmapping and only have the far distant textures shimmer...
Great fun for a spare half hour, and the benefit of GTU is I can save those setting as presets which, when I switch I see the settings much more quickly - I don't understand why NVmax uses the menu system it does.

In both cases I am using the very latest betas - t24 for GTU , .43 for NVmax


Simon Evans