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GF3 Problem - anyone else?

A

Arcanthis

Junior Member
I just bought a GF3 (Prolink) and am having an annoying problem, most noticeable with FSAA in Direct3D. Of the few games I play, this is most noticeable in Anarchy Online. Take a look at a couple of screenshots;

Opening Logo - You can clearly see the horizontal and vertical lines over the image. Without FSAA those lines are not there.

Omni1 - Here, I have highlighted the noticeable artifacts with yellow ovals. The cursor left those marks along the bottom status bar.

This appears to only be affecting 2D overlayed bitmaps in Direct3D, the 3D image is unaffected. I can also get similar artifacts in Half-Life D3D (but it's fine in OpenGL) and Grandprix 3. However, in Tribes 2 I can see no obvious problems. The game looks fine in either D3D or OpenGL! Of course, Tribes2 may not use 2D overlays, or whatever...

I've tried numerous drivers, BIOS settings and 3rd party Nvidia tools. I run Win2000, but I've also tried the card in another PC with WinME and had the same problems!

Do I have a hardware problem, or software? The fact that the problem followed the card to another PC makes me lean to a hardware fault.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Alex
 
If it's any consolation, you aren't alone. I have a VisionTek GF3 and I get the same corruptions and artifacts. I've seen the lines and slightly-corrupted text and graphics in several different games. In a couple, I also see black lines between polygons. Turning FSAA on and off makes some of the problems go away but raises new ones. I really hope this is a driver issue which will be corrected and not some sort of flaw with the new AA hardware/methodology in the GF3. It's an amazing chip with a lot of capabilities and potential, but I find it just a bit disappointing that the flagship product makes some of my programs look noticeably worse than my older cards.

 
Well, I bought this card specifically for FSAA in Anarchy Online. At the moment that simply is not working at all acceptably. Unless someone can come up with some fast advice that works, I'm going to at least try and swap the card for another. I suspect it is a driver issue, but then again, I'm told by others that they don't have this problem (in Anarchy).

I had hoped these sorts of problems were a thing of the past...
 
It's not the card!
The problem here is the game engine.
The renderer in these game engines are the problem. Most likely check for the latest patches or the such for the game it self. It seems like the game engine renderer has a problem with sending bitmap widgets to the GeForce 3 rendering engine.
Again Not the Card but the Game is the problem!
 
It's possibly the game I guess, as I didn't see the problem in Tribes 2.

BTW, I installed the 8.03 drivers and the problem has disappeared, but there are other issues. I suspect that these drivers are using supersampling as FSAA is slower, is the GF3 properly supported on drivers prior to 10+?
 
I, too, can almost buy that it's the game engines that are having problems. It just seems that there are an awful lot of things having problems. Almost every game I have installed right now seems to have some sort of artifacts or corruptions. I've experimented with a few different cards, and all these same games look fine on them, so if all these games have a rendering problem, they only seem to have it with the GF3. If this is just a driver issue, I hope it gets corrected soon, but it's persisted through several versions I've tried from 10.xx up to 12.60. I'll give the 8.xx drivers a try, but I was under the impression that support for the GF3's new functions started with the 10.xx series. Is this true or have I heard incorrectly?
 
Okay, I gave the 8.03 driver a try. It corrected most of the anomalies I was seeing, though not quite all of them. However, even though the card is installed as a GF3, its functionality has been reduced to that of a GF2, so this is not really an acceptable solution for me. I'm still having kind of a hard time believing that the anomalies are entirely the fault of the game engine, since enabling/disabling the AA makes some of the problems appear and disappear. The AA should be entirely transparent to the rendering engines.

Admittedly, many of the things I still play around with aren't the latest and greatest, and one of the very newest things I have seems to be alright with the GF3, so hopefully as game, driver and DirectX technologies continue to advance, these issues will fade away.
 
I've been having problems with my GF3 (Asus v8200 Deluxe) as well. I haven't tried FSAA much, but it seems to work fine. However, some Direct3D apps/games crash! For example, Black and White looks fine and runs without a hitch, but Unreal Tournament crashes during the intro video, and 3DMark2001 freezes during the Demo and while loading the Nature demo! Consequently, my OpenGL games work fine. Quake III looks beautiful, and Unreal Tournament works fine in OpenGL mode!

I have tried both the supplied Asus 12.10a drivers and the nVidia 12.60 drivers, plus Via's 4in1 4.29v and 4.32v drivers, and nothing solves the problem. Nothing is wrong in the BIOS, but what scares me is that all of these things worked fine with my GeForce256 SDR. So much for nVidia Unified Driver Architecture!

If anyone else has problems with an Asus v8200 Deluxe and an Asus P3V4X mobo, please post here so we can try to find a solution. I don't want my $400 investment to be for nothing!
 
Well, my understanding is that the GF3 multisamples for FSAA which takes two or more copies of the screen image and 'blends' them. Now, there must be some D3D interaction in this process as if it was entirely 'inside' the GF3 I would expect to see the same problems in OpenGL.

I guess this means the anomolies are there in D3D mode without FSAA just not evident, which does seem to be the case with Half-Life as I can see similar but less obvious problems without FSAA, even with a GF256. In OpenGL everything looks 100% and play is smooth to boot!

It seems others are seeing the same thing in AO as well (I've been posting all over) so it looks less and less like a hardware issue. I can live with it if it's a application/driver issue, assuming it will be resolved in the not to distant future of course...
 
Since the GF3 seems to be able to render well when operated as a GF2 or in OGL mode, I will agree that the problems are (hopefully) not hardware-related. Obviously, there is some hardware/driver/DirectX interaction going on, so it's kind of hard to pinpoint the ultimate source of the anomalies. Some programs look fine, while others look relatively bad, so obviously there is something about the game's implementation involved. Maybe some games are are calling certain driver functions that others are not? If indeed it is only a driver issue, I do hope it gets addressed soon. It just worries me slightly that it's persisted through so many versions of the drivers.
 
Well I've got five people telling me on the AO boards that they have the same problem. One of them states he also had the same problem with a Voodoo 5, and also with his new GF3. Looks more and more like a driver/application issue doesn't it?

I've found another prob with AO though, running at resolutions 1280x960 or 1600x1200 with T&L causes screen lockups! Without T&L at those resolutions it's fine. This got me worried again 🙂 I tried the T&L @ 1600x1200 with Black and White and it was fine, thank god! BUT, B&W locks up with AA at any resolution after the starry effects at the start!

Damn, I thought these sorts of problems were a thing of the past.
(On the other hand, Nvidia's OpenGL ICD is solid... damn D3D!)

 
Just wanted to comment that I haven't had any problems whatsoever with my Gainward GeForce3...EXCEPT corrupted textures in Midtown Madness 2 rendering it unplayable.
 
Having the same problem, most notably in AVP..

None of the weapon Icons or text are identafiable(sp?)

Everything else runs like a champ..
 
Well, I suppose the GF3 is a fairly "revolutionary" chip in that they made some rather big changes at many of the blocks/stages, so I guess there's bound to be some kinks to work out. I really wasn't expecting to have quite so many artifacts, though. Granted, each game that has a problem is having a different issue. In one, it's corrupted text and textures, in another it's black lines between polygons, and in still another, some 2D overlays get out of alignment. I suppose this could indicate that quite a few applications just have minor incompatibilities with the "new way of doing things."

Where the GF3 works, it works very well and looks very nice, so maybe as more games come out written for DX8 everything will get better. I saw somewhere that nVidia is making some major additions for the next driver set to enable more of the hardware features. Here's hoping that they fix more problems than they add. 🙂
 
when using AA in unreal tournament i'm getting those same lines/artifacts that are shown in your 2nd screen shot. I didn't have that problem with my V5 5500, any of the drivers and dx8.0a.

T-bird 800
Asus A7V
Visiontek GF3 w/ 12.41 detonators
512 crucial ram @ 222
30 gig IBM ATA100 HDD
Directx8.0a
 
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