Fog graphic glitches on NVidia GTX 970 (pictures)

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Originally Posted by araulkhar

fix is long for coming...

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I'm more worried about the bad performance of my GTX970 on this game than with squares of the fog, the improvement over my GTX570 is barely noticeable, i do see improvements it's just they're so bad it's not even making sense how this is happening, a GTX570 is a lot of generations behind.

Anyway this is understandable, it's obvious driver optimizations for a ton of games are coming, if we look at the past year driver release notes they are pretty much performance improvements for a lot of games for the most recent cards at the time, same will happen now, all we can do is pray this game will have priority in the driver fixes.

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Originally Posted by RobbieH

I'm more worried about the bad performance of my GTX970 on this game than with squares of the fog, the improvement over my GTX570 is barely noticeable, i do see improvements it's just they're so bad it's not even making sense how this is happening, a GTX570 is a lot of generations behind.

Anyway this is understandable, it's obvious driver optimizations for a ton of games are coming, if we look at the past year driver release notes they are pretty much performance improvements for a lot of games for the most recent cards at the time, same will happen now, all we can do is pray this game will have priority in the driver fixes.

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You realise the game uses Direct3D9 and is CPU bottlenecked a majority of the time, right?


you sound like E7ITE from guru3d, if you are, the benchmark is not cpu bound, while the game actually is.

Try running the game immediately after a patch and you'll get awesome performance, since theres no other players.

I bought a GTX 970 3 days ago and noticed this when i did 2nd coil turn 1 as well....

Also its pretty bad in this location as well, <pos> as seen in SS if anyone wanna replicate this problem....

Almost freaked out and glad its not just me.....

Fix prz!!!

http://mectradegroup.org/FFXIV/gcard1.jpg

did not tune anything, and driver is 344.16. Tried 344.11 also with same problem

344.48 WHQL seems to modify

I can confirm this issue is fixed with todays 344.88 driver release.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/78903

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Originally Posted by Franzisca

I can confirm this issue is fixed with todays 344.88 driver release.

http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/78903

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Detailed release notes:

http://uk.download.nvidia.com/Window...ease-notes.pdf

Can confirm the fog issue appears to be a thing of the past with 344.48. Here's Southern Thanalan, one of the areas I screenshotted in the original post.

http://i.imgur.com/kGgh98s.jpg

Have you guys been getting random crashing?

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Originally Posted by Squa11_Leonhart

You realise the game uses Direct3D9 and is CPU bottlenecked a majority of the time, right?


you sound like E7ITE from guru3d, if you are, the benchmark is not cpu bound, while the game actually is.

Try running the game immediately after a patch and you'll get awesome performance, since theres no other players.

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It depends.

The CPU bound areas are typically due to high population of Player Characters when the network and CPU are required to help render the objects. Running at 1440p in the middle of western than with nobody around, your CPU should never get over 30-40% depending on cores and clock. In Mor Dohna or cities, you should be at 100% CPU. DX11 will help a little bit there, but not much.

I will disagree though with the individual you replied to, I bought 2 EVGA 970 SC's to replace my 680's and the difference is huge, sure my heaven benchmark went up 1000 points, but at 1080p my fps when uncapped was over 180-190. To avoid Coil whine though I do have to set vsync, but it was enough for me to run out and grab at 1440p monitor.

The only major issue I have had is advanced lighting effects, like the portal to the 2nd Coil in Fallgourd or behind the bosses in instances. If I have SLI on, I get 120-150 fps depending on surrounding population, with all settings to max. As soon as that lighting effect gets into my field of view, my FPS drops to 30-40. I have another thread with screenshots of that. I did not have that issue with my 680's in SLI so its something with the kepler and maxwells and how they are using the SLI driver and the game. There are multiple people with 7xx's Titans and 9xx's in SLI, Triple and Quad all having the same issue and a separate thread open for that issue.

In order to actually raid, I have to drop to one GPU, but I am still getting 80 fps uncapped in instances. at 1440p, one GPU, settings to max with SweetFX and other AA running, that is pretty damn good performance from a 350 dollar card.

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Originally Posted by Schmak01

The only major issue I have had is advanced lighting effects, like the portal to the 2nd Coil in Fallgourd or behind the bosses in instances. If I have SLI on, I get 120-150 fps depending on surrounding population, with all settings to max. As soon as that lighting effect gets into my field of view, my FPS drops to 30-40. I have another thread with screenshots of that. I did not have that issue with my 680's in SLI so its something with the kepler and maxwells and how they are using the SLI driver and the game. There are multiple people with 7xx's Titans and 9xx's in SLI, Triple and Quad all having the same issue and a separate thread open for that issue.

In order to actually raid, I have to drop to one GPU, but I am still getting 80 fps uncapped in instances. at 1440p, one GPU, settings to max with SweetFX and other AA running, that is pretty damn good performance from a 350 dollar card.

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I noticed this too and I think it has more to do with the switch from 1080p to 1440p. I was running advanced lighting on high @ 1080p fine for months on my 680 SLI. I picked up an Asus Swift PG278Q 1440p monitor and still ran the 680 sli and noticed stuttering or frame pacing/dropping issues. I moved up to SLI 980s and the issue still exists on high advanced lighting. There is more than enough gpu power pushing for this not to be an issue, but the game is choking somehow. I'd say its either an effect that scales with resolution rather than having a set resolution itself (think full res DOF effects in other games) or its a drawcall/bandwidth issue. I never set my resolution back to 1080p to confirm this, but I highly doubt its related to the hardware itself.

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Originally Posted by Koroem

I noticed this too and I think it has more to do with the switch from 1080p to 1440p. I was running advanced lighting on high @ 1080p fine for months on my 680 SLI. I picked up an Asus Swift PG278Q 1440p monitor and still ran the 680 sli and noticed stuttering or frame pacing/dropping issues. I moved up to SLI 980s and the issue still exists on high advanced lighting. There is more than enough gpu power pushing for this not to be an issue, but the game is choking somehow. I'd say its either an effect that scales with resolution rather than having a set resolution itself (think full res DOF effects in other games) or its a drawcall/bandwidth issue. I never set my resolution back to 1080p to confirm this, but I highly doubt its related to the hardware itself.

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Might be something to check out this evening when I have some time. Curious at the least. The other person I know having this issue is running at 4k across 3 monitors with 4 Titan's

I've test new driver 344.48 with my Asus GTX980 Strix
Square fogs are gone, but i have stuttering problems from time to time

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Originally Posted by Mango

I've test new driver 344.48 with my Asus GTX980 Strix
Square fogs are gone, but i have stuttering problems from time to time

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to be expected, when the framerate goes below 60fps, several frames are shown more then once.

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Originally Posted by Squa11_Leonhart

to be expected, when the framerate goes below 60fps, several frames are shown more then once.

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I wonder if he is talking about the SLI issue. I didn't get a chance to try it at 1080p last night since I got on just in time for raid.

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Originally Posted by Schmak01

Might be something to check out this evening when I have some time. Curious at the least. The other person I know having this issue is running at 4k across 3 monitors with 4 Titan's

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Tested standing next to the Coil2 portal when Odin was up. Only one other player near the portal in fallgourd. Facing south so only the portal and water in the view port and occlusion setting is on so geometry for the rest of the map is a limited issue.

1980x1080 all settings maxed (EXCEPT advance lighting normal) 140hz I'm seeing 47% and 67% load on my gpus. 1304mb vram used. 140fps. CPUs all 4 cores loading around 40-48% ram usage 2331mb.

1980x1080 all settings maxed 140hz I'm seeing 67% and 74% load on my gpus. 1398mb vram used. 122fps. CPUs all 4 cores loading around 40-48% ram usage 2330mb.

2560x1440 all settings maxed (EXCEPT advance lighting normal) 140hz I'm seeing 70-87% (bouncing)% and 81-90(bouncing)% load on my gpus. 1342mb vram used. 140fps. CPUs all 4 cores loading around 63-81% ram usage 2334mb.

2560x1440 all settings maxed 140hz I'm seeing 60% and 66-73(bouncing)% load on my gpus. 1512mb vram used. 76fps. CPUs all 4 cores loading around 36-52% ram usage 2352mb.

So interesting trend. Advanced lighting does impact fps negatively at both resolutions, but the impact at the higher resolution is much much greater. Also of note, Cpu and GPU utilization is all over the place. With advanced lighting on at 1080p i'm seeing higher gpu load, slightly more vram usage, and about the same cpu usage, as expected.

Up the resolution and gpu utilization seems to drop along with cpu utilization with advanced lighting on compared to with it off. Vram usages shoots up and fps drops. Oddly though, when advanced lighting is on normal, CPU usage spikes 20% higher than 1080p, but drops lower than 1080 when advanced lighting is on.

Also of notice, at 1080 either setting, the gpu load in sli seems balanced and constant. Upping to 1440p the gpu utilization on both cards seems to become erratic, bouncing all over.

I'll disable SLI in a moment to test it out with a single card.

EDIT single card pegs 99% load all the time with advanced lighting on high or normal. ON normal i get 100fps flat, so it can't even hit my 144/140 gsync refresh which is expected. With advanced on high it stays at 99% use but the fps drops to 88fps.

It must be said, that while 70+fps sounds fast, with this advanced lighting setting on high, even with a gsync monitor, this FPS is a stuttery mess. It's the game choking in some way. The picture is not smooth.

Advanced lighting is a dynamic effect that recalculates based on scene information to determine what is and isn't being cast on, it will be a choke on the cpu on normal conditions, but the current SLI profile might be suffering a bit of cpu overhead that is choking it more than when a single card is used.

might profile the threads view with process explorer and see if theres more cpu usage in the nvidia driver.

I tested the effect with 1080p and the numbers, although better, still show the same issue. With SLI on not looking at the lighting effect, I would get 180+ fps and full bar on the SLI overlay, as soon as I look at the object, it drops to 60-70 fps, and SLI drops down to only 1/4th usage. This is telling me it is definitely something with how the effect is being handled BY SLI and it is forcing the rendering maybe to one card and its confusing it? the SLI bar pulses with the animation.

CPU at the time is never more than 55-60% all pretty much FFXIV. Precision X being ~2% of that number then 1% system processes.

Adding some screenshots, the SLI bar is actually at the highest point in the pulse on the first, then away its fully loaded. This is at 1080p not 1440.

http://i.imgur.com/h684D4I.png

http://i.imgur.com/WEhzGsv.png

As stated by the other person, my CPU actually drops when the frame rate does. GPU does as well. Its like the engine doesn't know how to send the data properly through SLI

overall % of cpu usaged is not an indicator of anything. Please understand that the only thing that indicates a cpu bottleneck is the % per thread usage displayed by tools such as process explorer.

multicore cpu's will never show full loading on direct3d9 (or 11 for that matter) and still will hit direct3d overhead bottlenecks

as i have pointed out numerous times before, this game game uses up to 5 cores at best and a good majority of the cpu time is in the driver, where directx info is processed.

http://s25.postimage.org/qvxqyn91n/mor_dhona1.jpg

http://s25.postimage.org/jtztcg5fv/mor_dhona2.jpg

http://s25.postimage.org/e781spsaz/east_shroud2.jpg

http://s25.postimage.org/km72pdz0r/east_shroud1.jpg

Wow.. I'm getting the latest Asus GTX980 Strix and now you're scarring me with all those issues.. :confused:

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Originally Posted by Fonou

Wow.. I'm getting the latest Asus GTX980 Strix and now you're scarring me with all those issues.. :confused:

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This is only SLI that is having the issue, which is what leads me away from CPU being the problem as it was never an issue with my 680's in SLI, which I ran in 1080p with settings the same other than the resolution without issue. I'm almost 100% certain this is a driver issue with the SLI setup for the 700's, Titans and 900's for nvidia, as earlier cards and crossfire cards do not have this problem. If it is a CPU bottleneck and the driver (Nvd3dnum.dll I take it?) would be at more than 14% and would still be an nVidia driver issue, that needs to be worked out with SE and nVidia. I get that being DirectX 9 requires more CPU, but the fact this ONLY happens with SLI and ONLY with newer cards means something is not playing nice otherwise all cards would have this issue.

Hopefully you can make more sense out of this, but here is process explore for it with the problem and FPS is at 30...

http://i.imgur.com/PxzdCPi.png

Utilization for FFXIV is only 26%, for the threads 8.5% for the nvidia driver, 8.16 for the client

then when I turn away and it goes to 150 fps, SLI goes full throttle:

http://i.imgur.com/SLk14Yt.png

So perhaps you can help explain since I am a bit out of my element, why does the CPU and GPU drop when the lighting effect is in view, then when it is out of view, it jumps up with the framerate? If anything wouldn't we expect the CPU to go higher even if it is capped at 25% (1 core) for the video driver if the CPU was the bottleneck? To me it seems like something in the drivers is causing it to flake out with SLI on when it tries to render that effect. Like it is unsure of which card to push to, so it just does nothing.

Also I wanted to make sure that you know it wasn't sarcasm :) I know a lot of people are having this issue and if we can get to the root cause, without me having to run back to my 680's and others switching to AMD then we are helping a lot of people. It seems SE and nVidia aren't too concerned with it.

I also noted in your screenshots in Mor Dohna, I expect my framerates to drop in high populated areas. That's going to happen period no matter what card SLI or not. That is a limitation with not just DX9 but MMO's in general.

Being alone, in Fallgourd Float, looking at a single object and the framerate dropping so low, then just moving the camera 200 pixels to the left and it going back is not normal.

You're actually getting more than 12% on the main threads O.o, something you don't see on single cards.

SLI must be multithreaded, anyhow... not the point.


I haven't found a way to test in fallguord, its fairly active on Cerberus.
But yes, I suspect the drivers D3D9 recompiler isn't optimised for the 9x0 architecture at present.

Latest word is Dx11 client might be available by the end of the year. Lets cross our fingers that this would resolve the lighting issue. Dx11 should have a ton of optimizations for things like this I would think.

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Originally Posted by Squa11_Leonhart

You're actually getting more than 12% on the main threads O.o, something you don't see on single cards.

SLI must be multithreaded, anyhow... not the point.


I haven't found a way to test in fallguord, its fairly active on Cerberus.
But yes, I suspect the drivers D3D9 recompiler isn't optimised for the 9x0 architecture at present.

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I can also go to Wineport and test, with the first coil entrance there, if it is still up... I haven't looked around wineport since 2.2