Topic: Poor image quality in the distance

Hi all,


I have a problem with strong aliasing in the distance. Notice in the images that the close wall on the right looks fine, while a bit further, the lines of the wall and of the floor look terrible. The game is System Shock 2 with the Rebirth beta 1 and SHTUP beta 6 mods and the DDFix patch.

* anti-aliasing off, anisotropy off (in Nvidia control panel)


* anti-aliasing 8xS, anisotropy 16x (in Nvidia control panel)


Anti-aliasing and anisotropy seem to help a bit, but it still doesn't look good.

My system:
Athlon64 3700+
GeForce 7600GT 256MB
1GB RAM
Windows XP SP3

Drivers I've tested: 197.45 and 91.47. The problem is the same. I switched basically all the options in the Nvidia control panel on and off and couldn't fix it. Texture filtering set to Quality or High quality doesn't fix it.

The problem is the same without DDFix applied. I haven't tested the game without the Rebirth and SHTUP mods, but I doubt they're the cause.

So, any ideas? Did anyone else have this problem?

BTW, Deus EX HDTP looks fine, Thief 1 and 2 also have a bit of flickering in the distance due to aliasing but it's far less noticeable and everything still looks pretty good.

That doesn't look like DDFix is working. How did you install it?

DDFix is working. In Thief and SS2 the main menu is a little blurred and there's no screen reset when you enter the game or access the menu, compared to when DDFix is not applied. In SS2 I just replaced the executable with the one from http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=121449 and then added the dll and the ini files. You probably got to that conclusion because I brightened up a lot the images in Irfanview using "Auto adjust colours" in order to better see the negative aliasing problem.

I got to the conclusion because of the rather obvious colour banding on the walls. But that might be due to image manipulations.
Anyway, regarding the striping, it's a graphics card problem. It tries to show the far away objects in less detail to save on memory. I forget what the process is called, I'm sure someone knows, anyhow that's how the lines get jumbled all over the place.
Usually modern graphics cards get this done quite well, not sure why it's so obvious with yours. Try playing around with the driver settings a bit.

Thanks for the answers, Kolya.

I tested the game on a Core Duo laptop with Ati x2300, 1GB RAM, Windows XP - basically just copied the game folder and changed the paths in install.cfg. And surprise: the same problem. Here the anti-aliasing and anisotropy seem to be doing a better job, but the problem is the same when disabling them.

I tested another Nvidia driver, 169.21, but the problem was still there. I also tried running the original game, version 2.3, without any mods - same problem.

Tweaking the Nvidia driver settings doesn't seem to fix it. I tried a lot of combinations. I haven't played with all the Ati ones yet.

In the end you might just want to play the game. I mean SS2 isn't a graphics fest by today's standards which ever way you look at it. It has other strengths.

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