weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 I have shadows and shader on.You can see the massive flickering behind the tanks and mostly in the buildings.At the 13 second mark I turn off shadows and all flickering is gone.At the 24 second mark I turn shadows back on and again you can see how bad it is.No issues at all with CMBN shadows on.The video is with shadows and shaders on.Even without shaders on which is not in the video I get flickering in vegetation and behind the tanks and vehicles.Only when you put shaders on does it flicker alot in the buildings. watch in 1080 if you have it I have nvidia geforce gts 240. Other than this I love the shadows and new shader,soldiers look awsome, gives everything a new depth and detail.I hope this can be fixed. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 It seems the LODs are bringing out this problem a bit more so than CMBN (I haven't done a direct comparison yet). The 'shaders' will put shadows from objects onto other objects or self-shade an object. The LODs seem to have a more severe issue with the shaders, although shadows in CMx2 have always had aesthetic issues. Part of the problem, as I understand it, is with the nature of the 'camera' and its ability to be positioned at a lot of view angles/elevations. This nearly 'free' camera makes shadow generation a difficult issue. 'Soft shadows' would be much more pleasing, but they have a very high framerate hit associated with them. At this point I'm not sure what can be done to improve the look of shadows in the game. I guess Phil will continue to look at this, but I don't know if a truly graphically satisfactory solution will be found. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Work will continue on shadows. The particular problems you've noted are inherent in the way that computed shadows work, and exacerbated by the hoops CM's camera needs to jump through. Schrullenhaft has the rights of it - it's certainly not an easy problem, but we'll keep chipping away and hopefully making them look better. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 With shadows on in CMBN and CMSF it looks fine and is more than acceptable.With shadows on in CMFI it is not acceptable.With shadows on and shaders on its even worse, so for me its not an "upgrade".It is a downgrade.I will play with shadows off and hopefully it will be addressed and patched.Please dont misunderstand me, the shadows on and shaders look spectacular on the soldiers and many other things like walls.The issue is massive flickering on the buildings and tanks sunny side. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 Phil and Schrullenhaft Do you guys see the same thing on your computers that I have posted in the video?Especialy the masssive shadow flickering on the buildings? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 Is this a video card issue?Are there settings I can change on the card to improve the shadow flickering? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Phil and Schrullenhaft Do you guys see the same thing on your computers that I have posted in the video?Especialy the masssive shadow flickering on the buildings? Yep, for buildings. I know what causes it - as I noted, the particular problems you've noted are inherent in the way that computed shadows work. Buildings are made up of (relatively) large polygons at angles that don't always play nice with lights, and their size just exacerbates things, especially at the edges of the shadowed area. When you get the lights at unfavorable angles themselves or directly behind the camera, it's worse. As I said it's not an easy problem to solve, but we'll keep working on it. Given the great effects that shadows + shaders have visually I'd certainly prefer if people wanted to keep both on at the same time. For vehicles though... no. I'm wondering if the problem might be worse on your card / driver for some reason. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GreenAsJade Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 What a LOD? GaJ 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 How do I know if my drivers are upto date on my nvidia geforce gtf 240?And if they are not, how do I update them? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xian Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 What a LOD? GaJ I think it stands for: Level of Detail - but don't quote me on that. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bertram Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Level of Detail is right... Basically it is a method of displaying things (like tanks) with a model build of lots of polygons when they are close, and swapping the texture for one with less polygons when they are further away (when you cant see the details anyway). You can have several different textures for a model, with different levels of detail, for different distances. Pro is that it makes it possible to have models with large number of polygons, and still display a large number of models, as long as they are not all close up. Drawback is that you have to make all those different levels of the models and that you have to swap them when you zoom in or out. Things can look weird when one part of a model switches to another LOD sooner then another part of the same model, or when a model is right on the edge of a distance where the models are swapped, and they swap in and out, causing some flicker. edt: you can also get situations where you run out of video card memory, and a lower level of detail texture is loaded for some textures (because they obviously take less memory). It depends on the program and the video card drivers what happens then - sometimes you slow down, sometimes some models are buils with less detail, and sometimes part of models are less detailed. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 Ok guys ,Phil,BF Team, I am a major supporter of the direction your going in. And if your telling me the attached video clip is the best that can be done ( ) with the movements on these buildings and that your aware of it and are working on it,then there is nothing I can do about it , Im not a programmer and don't know anything about lod or computers at this level.Im still hoping this is a bug that can be fixed. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Ask us what we think of video card hardware and drivers and we'll tell you. But be prepared, it isn't a "family friendly" commentary The primary problem here is as Phil described. Because CM's camera and sun positions aren't hardcoded, we have to leave a lot of the effects up to on-the-fly calculations instead of highly optimized specific routines. Lots of tricks when the variables are limited simply aren't available to us. On top of this we have the fun and joy of experiencing, through the eyes of our customers, the extremely wide range of visual behaviors based on individual systems. Even two people with theoretically the same cards, OSes, and driver versions can have wildly different results (partly because hardware companies implement secret revisions to production runs over time). I can not emphasize how much that SUCKS for developers. Especially ones without armies of programmers. Which is to say any one person's experience isn't necessarily typical. For whatever reason, Weapon2010's experience is worse than what I've seen throughout testing. And that might be a good thing because we know it can look better. Perhaps a driver update will take care of the problem (eventually), perhaps the next revision of our shaders will help. All I can say is what Phil has already said... we will continue to try and work around the technical problems and never accept "this is as good as it can get". Because it sucks to see some customers having a less-than-optimal visual experience. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 Steve, Thankyou for your quick response and I really don't like being "Negative Nelly".I have been buying your products since 1999 and that won't stop anytime soon, not with all the cool stuff coming.I love all the new stuff in CMFI and this is not going to stop me from playing.Is there anything I can do on my end to make it look better without turning shadows off ?Ive messed with all of the option levels and combinations with no luck.How do I know if my drivers are up to date? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 You're definitely not coming across in a negative way. Based on your videos (very helpful, thanks!) clearly we agree with you that your experience should be better. Best thing to do with the drivers is assume you are out of date. Even if you manually updated a month or so ago they could be out of date now. Just go to nVidia's website and download the latest drivers for your Geforce GTS 240 card. See if that helps out. Sometimes newer drivers actually break things, but more often than not they fix them. As an aside, here is a website I just found that shows side by side speed benchtests: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+GTS+240 steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noob Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 How do I know if my drivers are upto date on my nvidia geforce gtf 240?And if they are not, how do I update them? Go to this website to update your drivers: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/home.html 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weapon2010 Posted August 3, 2012 Author Share Posted August 3, 2012 Ok the drivers are updated with no new results, here is a video after driver update( ), not worse or better. Steve are you saying if I upgrade my video card to say the gtx 670, I shouldnt have that flickering shadow issue? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Battlefront.com Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Bummer the driver updates didn't do anything specific to this problem. Well, there might be other things improved at least. I would never recommend a specific card to anybody. The array of cards out there is dizzying and each one has it's quirks. Heck, even a specific card type can have different quirks depending on when it was manufactured (hidden updates to the hardware). What I can say is I don't think what you're seeing is what most people are seeing. Which means if you change your card to what one of those people are using, chances are you'll be all set. Though I never say "absolutely" because the video card interacts with other bits of hardware in a computer and therefore it's possible for two cards to perform differently in two different computers. If you're looking to upgrade your card anyway (seems it's pretty far down the performance spectrum) it's a good idea to make a post and see who here is using that card and if they are happy with it's handling of shadows. That's about the best I can suggest. A reminder... we hate this situation far more than you guys do. Steve 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sfhand Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Ok the drivers are updated with no new results, here is a video after driver update( ), not worse or better. Steve are you saying if I upgrade my video card to say the gtx 670, I shouldnt have that flickering shadow issue? Have you tried changing your settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel (Manage 3D Settings)? My laptop video card is a NVIDIA that is not quite as powerful as your card yet it has none of those problems. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted August 3, 2012 Share Posted August 3, 2012 Many cards will have the flickering shadow issue in some form, at least on buildings, due to the way that shadow generation works. The severity will depend on drivers, make and model. On vehicles, it is less likely that a lot of people are seeing it, though, and more likely a driver or hardware bug, unless it's very minor. ATI, Nvidia, and Intel all have interesting shadow bugs in their own right, and other hardware / driver bugs that contribute to things like flickering shadows, which actually involves a few separate parts of the hardware's inbuilt capabilities. ATI, for instance, is very, very particular about what functions are passed to its cards. Technically it supports all of them; in reality a vast swathe of them will cause visual anomalies. This limits us in our ability to do things like fixing shadows, even beyond the technical limitations that CM imposes. As mentioned, we will keep working on this. I wouldn't worry about changing your hardware to fix it - there's absolutely no guarantee that anything like that will work unless as Steve says you track someone down and love the way their shadows look, and even that's not 100%. On the other hand, we *can* guarantee that we'll try and make the code produce nicer shadows. Any card you own / buy / dream about late at night may someday produce shadows that look better than the current ones. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ranger33 Posted August 4, 2012 Share Posted August 4, 2012 Phil, just in case you didn't see my thread from the other day, I have an ATI card (HD 5770) and the new shaders make the shadows much, MUCH better than they were in CMBN. I am getting the issue discussed in this thread, but for me it's an improvement . The vehicle shadows in particular were totally broken for me in CMBN, with shadows being cast on both sides of everything and other weirdness. So, progress is being made, you guys will get it there eventually. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HardRock Posted August 4, 2012 Share Posted August 4, 2012 Ask us what we think of video card hardware and drivers and we'll tell you. But be prepared, it isn't a "family friendly" commentary Steve I feel your pain:) When I first bought a PC (286) I said "a separate video card?" after using a C64. The PC wasn't meant for gaming although it had the computing power. Computers or at least video cards need to be socialized;) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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