Question Need help from an expert on how to isolate the cause of my system's rendering problems?

[catboy]

I recently RMA'ed my 1080 Ti card that I used to have, because I was experiencing many different rendering errors in it with a bunch of different games.

The manufacturer held it for a month, and then they sent me a 2080 as a replacement.

After having used that 2080 for a couple of weeks, I realized that I am still experiencing the same horrible rendering errors that I experienced with my previous (1080 Ti) card, and I have no idea why.

I think my original card still must have had something wrong with it regardless of whether it was causing these problems, since they held it for a month and in that time, some of their reps said they were trying to repair it, before they offered me a replacement after a month.

So now I'm left wondering:

1. Did I own two defective GPUs in a row? or

2. Are these rendering errors caused by something else other than my GPU?

3. If they are caused by something else, then what, exactly, is causing them? Or at least, what could be the possible causes?

Although many different rendering errors occur for me, the most prominent, frequent, and annoying one, is that my games fail to render smoke/fog properly. Whenever a scene has smoke/fog in it, either:

a) every game looks as if I'm playing Silent Hill 2, because instead of rendering smoke/fog properly as the game is supposed to be doing, it instead fills my whole screen with endless, huge waves of smoke/fog everywhere.

Or it makes it look like I'm caught up in a middle of a sandstorm in a desert (even if I'm in an environment like city in the game), by causing what appears to be wafts of sand randomly to float through the air as if they were being blown out by an invisible machine, even in scenes that shouldn't have any sand floating in the air.

b) I've also noticed weird particles being rendered in the sky. Like if there is a scene with burning fires, then I will see a huge waves of sparks everywhere all over my screen, like as if I'm in the middle of blizzard that is filling my screen with orange dots instead of white dots (except it shouldn't have white dots either since these scenes are not a blizzard scene and not even winter scenes).

c) Or sometimes I see strange particles floating in the sky that looks as if someone had cut up a bunch of black plastic garbage bags, and then released the pieces into the sky during the middle of a tornado (in other words, I see bits of tiny black particles floating everywhere).

These rendering problems are preventing me from enjoying my games and they are also driving me insane. I need to know what I can do to solve them. But unfortunately I don't have endless amounts of money to spend on new hardware. And I don't even know for sure it is even a hardware problem or not. And if it is, I also don't know which hardware piece is causing the problems (originally I assumed it was the GPU, but maybe it's not?).

I've ran diagnostic tests on my RAM and CPU, and they always pass the diagnostics tests (but could they still be defective anyway?).

I've also already used DDU and did a clean re-installation of the newest NVIDIA drivers. Doing that has zero effect on these problems which I'm talking about.

I've also created a Dropbox that has many examples of in-game footage that I've recorded which demonstrate their rendering problems happening. If any of you are an expert on these kinds of matters and would be willing to take a look at those files in order to help identify what could be causing these problems, then I'd be happy to PM you a link to those files.

Can someone please tell me how I can finally identify the cause of & solve these problems? Or if no one on this forum knows the answer, then can you please at least point me to the best place on the internet where I can go to ask and where they will probably be able to tell me the correct answer?

 

[Stuka87]

For starters, could you list the games?

Also, you can attach the photos here. None of us are going to click on a drop box link and open whatever random files are there. Just put the images here.

This honestly doesn't sound like a GPU issue. It sounds like a settings over ride. But we need to know the game first.

 

[catboy]

For starters, could you list the games?

Also, you can attach the photos here. None of us are going to click on a drop box link and open whatever random files are there. Just put the images here.

This honestly doesn't sound like a GPU issue. It sounds like a settings over ride. But we need to know the game first.

It happens in a whole bunch of different games. If need be, then I'll compile a list, but I haven't made that list as of yet (as I had planned to use my Dropbox demonstration to illusrate the problem).

And with screenshots, some of the rendering may not be possible to depict properly.

For example, I have footage of my character walking towards, and away from, a wall which has leaves and vines and flowers growing on it. As I move towards or away from the wall, then the leaves magically transform/disappear/reappear right in front of my eyes, and completely morph into different leaves. The only way to demonstrate this properly AFAIK is by showing it happen in-motion via a video recording of it happening.

And I also have examples of other similar problems that will be hard to demonstrate without showing the motion of in-game footage, i.e. objects that magically appear or disappear in the sky as I walk towards them or away from them.

Having said that, I guess I'm in a "beggars can't be choosers" kind of boat, so I'll have to take the help that I'm able to get according to what the helpers want from me.

I have not yet made screenshot compilations of these problems, but I suppose I can revisit the videos and and then start making screenshots from them.

I'll post more in this thread once I've made the list of games I've seen rendering problems in and created screenshots from the video footage of those same problems.

As for it maybe being a "settings over ride," the thing about that is, I've already reset all my settings in my NVIDIA Control Panel back to their factory defaults, and doing that has no effect on these problems.

 

[catboy]

Here are some examples of screen shots where you can see what the sand/fog glitches look like. But the magnitude of the rendering errors might be much more apparent from the videos I have which show them flowing in-motion. You can see the same type of "floating sand" glitch in the shots from XCOM 2, and Red Dead Redemption 2, and Witcher 3.

And I also included shots from various other types of rendering errors which I also experience on the same system.

I included two shots from AC: Odyssey (at the bottom of the list) to demonstrate how the same branch has no leaves on it, then when I scroll the camera whilst standing in the same spot, the leaves suddenly appear.

In the shot from Shadows: Awakening, the rendering error is in the fog around the ice tower, which shows white/lines dots that form into a rectangle shape, which aren't supposed to appear at all (and they don't when I watch other people videos showing the the same fog from that same ice tower in that same game).

The shot from just above Shadows: Awakening, also demonstrates what I mean with weird black dots in the sky.

I have other examples too of more rendering errors, but this website told me "you may only attach 10 files" so I had to stop with these ones.

 

[Guru]

It's just Red Dead 2 that has issues with rendering dust it seems, everything else looks very normal to me. In AC: Oddisy its just how the engine renders the game, when objects are in focus its rendering them fully, otherwise its just conserving performance. Its just a performance technique many game engines and games do.

Witcher 3 seems perfect to me, it does have the occasional fog and dust cloud, but those are weather effects, unless you have dust effects ALL the time, that is a different issue. To me seems like you have some rendering issues with Red Dead 2, I suggest you try the other API that is available, for some people DX12 is more stable, for other is Vulkan, check between the two and see if that helps, go to the settings and make sure you disable fog, ambient light, grain, blur, those type of filers and see if that helps, make sure you aren't forcing certain settings like blur, grain, vintage, fog, etc... through Nvidia's Geforce now.

I suggest you also disable Nvidia's image sharpening as well, it can cause the occasional issue.

 

[catboy]

everything else looks very normal to me.

With all due respect, I am certain that is not correct. Perhaps the magnitude of these rendering problems is not evident in the most of those screenshots, but it is extremely noticeable while actually playing the games, or watching the video footage that I've recorded of them and posted on Dropbox. While playing the games, the are huge clouds of sand/fog/smoke blowing all over the screen constantly, in places where they are not intended to be appearing.

Here's proof that Shadows: Awakening rectangular grid of dots is not supposed to be appearing in the ice pillar smoke, as it doesn't for this player when he's at the same exact object at around 22:23 :

So why is my system drawing those dots when it shouldn't be doing so?

And for the other games: it seems like my computer is rendering dust/fog/smoke incorrectly in any & all games that feature dust/fog/smoke in them. What seems to be the case is that if the game includes a small smoke effect, like a tiny puff of smoke from a cigarette, then somehow my computer is converting that into huge giant smoke clouds that envelop the entire game world.

Some of these problems are certainly impossible for me to convey properly via screenshots, such as the sparkling silver dots that float in the air to the left-hand side of the character in the Black Flag screenshot as posted above, but which are very hard to see on a stagnant image, yet quite clearly noticeable when the camera is moving in my footage of that scene.

Also, I didn't include screen shots of leaves that change right before my eyes as I move further to or close away from them, or objects that similarly appear or disappear out of thin air, as that is also hard to capture with screenshots, but I do have video of those problems too, which again, make the problems very evident.

I've attached to this post some more examples of rendering errors I experience.

By the way, hopefully you guys will be able to see that the smoke grenade from the Siege game shows smoke floating up out of the concrete all over the place, away from the spot where the actual smoke grenade is located. That's an example of what I'm talking about, of how the my system is rendering things incorrectly, and putting dust/smoke/fog in the wrong places, and also way over-doing how much of it that it draws.

A similar thing happens in Red Dead Redemption 2. Whenever characters are smoking in that game, huge waves of smoke appear everywhere all over the screen, not just at the tip of the cigarettes where it is supposed to be. Instead of just putting smoke a bit of smoke at the place where a character is smoking a cigarette, the game instead renders the effect as if 50 Mack trucks were blowing their exhaust fumes all over me simultaneously, or something like that.

Likewise, the second shot I've attached from Siege in this post shows yellow & silver particles, which shouldn't be there at all, floating all over the sky, similar to the black and silver particles that are floating all over the sky in my final Red Dead Redemption 2 screenshot from my previous post, which also shouldn't be there at all.

And in the final shot attached to this post, you can also see another close-up view of those strange particles near the character's legs that is placed at the most left-hand side the screen. I'm sure that's another example of my system rendering something incorrectly.

 

[Stuka87]

Being that its in almost all games, it seriously sounds like either a mod that you forgot you had on, or a control panel setting. I would go through the nVidia control panel and verify everything is on default as the control panel settings will override in game settings.

 

[Guru]

Well you posted another wall of text, but didn't actually answer any of my questions. Did you go to GeForce Now and disable any game settings you have for games there? Make sure any custom filters you might have are disabled, go to Nvidia's control panel and set it to default settings, make sure Nvidia's image sharpening is turned off as well, I'd probably reinstall the driver as well, try different drivers as well, sometimes older drivers can be more stable for certain users.

Again, do all this and report back if there is any difference.