Camera Stuttering and Screen Tearing

I played during Open Beta as well as shortly after Release and experienced these two issues. I've recently come back to the game hoping that these would have been fixed by over a year of video card driver updates or game patches, but it appears they still persist.

Camera Stuttering: It appears the game uses two different "behaviors" for the camera, with each one presenting this issue slightly differently. When using the mouse to control the camera, it seems as if the camera gets "caught" on any terrain that is not mostly flat, causing it to zoom in slightly (as if your back was to a wall and the camera zooms in as to not clip through it) and then immediately pop back out to your chosen camera distance. This causes the *terrain* to look jagged and stuttery, especially when walking downhill. The second case is when you use the keyboard to control the character. In this case the terrain still stutters, but typically much less, and instead your *character and nameplate* stutter instead. Again, the effect is most prominent when the camera is getting "caught" on walls or if you are walking downhill and it is getting "caught" on the raised hill behind your character, but in this case seeing my nameplate jitter up and down like i'm playing through an earthquake physically gives me a headache.

The second issue is a fairly awful case of screen tearing. It occurs and sort of moves up and down the screen like theres a wavy line moving up and down, but tends to favor the bottom half of the screen more than the top. It generally appears when i'm out in the field (when theres less going on and my FPS would be higher than 60) and goes away entirely in town when my framerates usually dip between 45 and 50. I typically have screen tearing issues in games so I keep Vsync on whenever the option is available, however there is no in-game option for it with FF14 and the "force vsync" options in Catalyst Control Center don't seem to do anything at all with FF14 (i've tried all 4, same issue).

My specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition 3.2 Ghz
Sapphire Radeon HD5850 1GB (only hits about 76C under max load, 11.11 drivers)
4GB GSkill DDR3 1333 RAM
Windows 7 Professional x64 (fresh install on a brand new SSD)
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD
25.5" Asus LCD monitor @ 1920x1200: 60Hz

I've seen a few older posts about these issues but with no resolutions, is there any word on a possible fix, or is this more of a "wait for the new engine and pray it gets sorted out" sort of thing?
Thanks.

Have you tried setting AA to 4 or 8x? that may help. To be honest I'm not sure what screen tearing looks like as I've never had it, but sounds like buffering will help the issue. Your specs look more than sufficient to run on medium settings, other than slightly low on ram. I hit about 4gb total when running not much other than ffxiv, and up to 5.5gb when I start browsing and watching videos.

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Originally Posted by nasomi

Have you tried setting AA to 4 or 8x? that may help. To be honest I'm not sure what screen tearing looks like as I've never had it, but sounds like buffering will help the issue. Your specs look more than sufficient to run on medium settings, other than slightly low on ram. I hit about 4gb total when running not much other than ffxiv, and up to 5.5gb when I start browsing and watching videos.

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I've tried AA x2, x4, x8, and off. It's not the models themselves that are jagged, its the camera movement that is stuttering. Low settings, high settings, doesn't matter. The screen tearing and camera stutter are still there.

As for the screen tearing, for the quick and dirty explanation it happens when the next frame gets drawn to screen out of sync with the rate at which the screen refreshes completely, causing part of your screen to be displaying the current frame while the remainder of the screen is still displaying the previous frame. It typically happens when you're getting a framerate higher than the refresh rate of your monitor (usually 60Hz). Enabling Vsync is supposed to limit your framerate to 60 even if your system *could* draw frames faster than that so as to not go over the refresh rate and thus never draw frames faster than the monitor can refresh them. Unfortunately, the game itself does not have a Vsync option built into the engine, and forcing Vsync in Catalyst Control Center has always had issues where it just *doesnt* enforce Vsync with a lot of applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing for more information.

As for my RAM, I have no idea what you're doing in the background where you're using almost 6 gigs of ram just watching videos o.O Idling with a handful of regular-use applications open i'm hitting about ~1.5GB usage and i've yet to find an application that's topped out the full 4GB. I'm running most settings in FF14 around the "high" range and everything looks beautiful and stable between 45 and 60 FPS (forcing vsync *is* capping me at 60 FPS, but the tearing is still there ><) aside from these two minor annoyances.

Further googling lead me to some threads where people claimed that D3Doverrider/Rivatuner/MSI Afterburner successfully enforced Vsync and eliminated their screen tearing issues, but i'd rather not run unstable and outdated tools and possibly damage my system just to get rid of an annoying screen line.

Don't quote me on it, but can it be an ATI issue? I don't see any screen tearing on my 260GTX.
Oh and MSI Afterburner is not outdated...

I had the same problem I believe its due to the vsync. I solved it on mine by forcing vsync on nvidia control panel. I know you said it wouldn't work for you but Im 95% sure this is the problem.

I just had this camera stuttering today in limsa, only happened if i fully zoomed out though, one zoom level below and everything is fine again. Maybe it's bugged..

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Originally Posted by Soukyuu

Don't quote me on it, but can it be an ATI issue? I don't see any screen tearing on my 260GTX.
Oh and MSI Afterburner is not outdated...

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From what i've managed to skim from ancient forum posts around release, it seems like ATI cards are affected by this a lot more (probably due to the poor vsync enforcement). The tearing is definitely a vsync issue and I read a few people fixed it by using MSI Afterburner to enforce 100% Vsync.

However, I have a Sapphire card, not an MSI card, and the last official update to afterburner was v2.1.0 released on 2/15/11, almost a year ago. I'd rather not take the risk of it not playing nice with the latest drivers or a non-msi card just for a little bit of screen tearing.

As for the stutter, it's driving me up the wall :/

As long as you don't play around with voltages/clocking, all it does is monitoring though.

An update on the camera stuttering: It seems to go away completely while riding a Chocobo. I don't know whats different in the camera when riding a bird and walking, but while riding the camera smoothly transitions between positions when it gets pushed forward by terrain behind your character. When walking it just jarringly snaps back and forth.

I got this same issue, with 2x 5770s. It hasnt bugged me enough to adjust settings, but i might try vsync and see what happens..

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Originally Posted by Lerend

An update on the camera stuttering: It seems to go away completely while riding a Chocobo. I don't know whats different in the camera when riding a bird and walking, but while riding the camera smoothly transitions between positions when it gets pushed forward by terrain behind your character. When walking it just jarringly snaps back and forth.

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For me it's the opposite! I found that there are some vertical camera positions that cause the stuttering and riding a chocobo seem to bring me to one of them.

With in the game, go to the Main Menu -> Configuration -> System -> and set your Max FPS to 30. This will help with the screen tearing. It may help with your shaky camera issue. If not, I suggest you position the camera higher above your character.

I have the same problem. ATI Control Catalyst will not fix it. It's usually a problem with Full-Screen. I unfortunately will just deal with it because I hate playing a game without Full-Screen. I did notice that the screen tearing and ripping went away in windowed mode though to test the theory.

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Originally Posted by Laraul

With in the game, go to the Main Menu -> Configuration -> System -> and set your Max FPS to 30. This will help with the screen tearing. It may help with your shaky camera issue. If not, I suggest you position the camera higher above your character.

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Yes, forcing my max FPS to 30 will get rid of any screen tearing issues (since 30 FPS is less than the 60hz refresh rate of the monitor). However, it also has the side effect of taking a beautiful game my rig *can* run at higher than 60 FPS consistently and making it feel like i'm playing through a mountain of sludge. Capping FPS at *half* of what is typically considered to be an ideal performance point is not much of a solution.

Forcing Vsync with MSI afterburner or ATI Tray Tools does properly enforce Vsync and fix the tearing in FFXIV (unlike doing it through CCC) and everything runs nice and pretty aside from the camera stuttering issue. Even with my camera positioned higher and looking at a slight downward angle it's still not enough on some of those steeper hills, and it's nice to actually be able to see where you're going. I guess i'll just tough it out until 2.0

I've yet to test Vsyncs effects, but I wanted to report that the odd tearing effect happens on choco or on foot for me. Also changing to 30FPS should have no noticeable impact on your game. The human eye can't even process more then 30fps, so you cant tell any difference. Also I've been running on 30FPS cap sense they released that option, so i know setting it to that doesn't fix this problem.

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Originally Posted by Drako

The human eye can't even process more then 30fps, so you cant tell any difference. Also I've been running on 30FPS cap sense they released that option, so i know setting it to that doesn't fix this problem.

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I'm not sure where you got that information, but its a common misconception. The human eye can most definitely discern the difference between things above 30FPS, it's just an exponential curve where as the FPS continues to rise your ability to discern the difference with the naked eye begins to diminish considerably. It's actually more in the 100+ FPS range where the gains are so negligible that it stops making a meaningful difference. However, those types of framerates are impractical in the world of computer gaming, which is why 60 is the de-facto goal for performance.

30FPS is enough frames to make the animations still look "smooth enough" that it's easy for your mind to fill in the gaps between frames (as opposed to say, 15 FPS, which doesn't supply your brain with enough stimulation to fill in the gaps and looks choppy) , but it doesn't provide an optimal visual experience as everything feels very sluggish as if everything in the game world was trying to move around while totally submerged in water, and you also lose out on a lot of the details of the image.

Feel free to google the issue, there are numerous examples, test presentations, and scientific documentations of the topic.


Now back to the original topic. Things like RadeonPro/ATI Tray Tools/MSI Afterburner *WILL* force Vsync in FFXIV and remove that awful tearing effect, however it does not fix the camera stutter effect (in fact, it seems to make it noticeably worse). If anyone found a fix for the camera stutter, i'd love to hear it.

not the 30vs60 debate again...

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Originally Posted by Soukyuu

not the 30vs60 debate again...

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It's not so much a debate as it is scientifically proven fact :) I'm not gonna sit here and argue over it, but capping your game at under half of your normal framerate is definitely not an acceptable solution for the problem.

Anyway, how 'bout that camera stutter? I've about had it with Radeon cards at this point between their mediocre performance in FFXIV, wonky shadows, poor catalyst control center implementation, and the AA texture flicker issues in Aion.

I don't think the camera stutter has anything at all to do with your video card. Rather, it's a programming logic issue - something purely on the coder's end, and it won't be fixed until they patch it.

To illustrate, think of it this way - whenever you move your mouse or your character, the camera responds by changing its rotation or the position it's 'looking at,' respectively. Each frame, the camera has to update the position it's looking at and its own position, (both in x, y, and z cartesian coordinates), and its own angular position (yaw, pitch, and roll).

The stutter is noticeable because they took the simplest form of updating-per-frame there is: "for each frame, new position = old position + this frame's delta/change." So whenever you're walking downhill, the camera is instantly displacing itself downwards however many units you 'fell.'

They could, instead, implement what's called linear interpolation, which results in a much more smooth and natural transition between "new position" and "old position." Each frame, instead of just instantly jumping to its desired point, it travels - usually half, but it's determined by whatever coeffecient > 0.0 and < 1.0 that you want - a percentage of the way to its desired point that frame. So if the camera's at (0, 0, 0) and needs to move to (10, 20, 30), linear interpolation would make it move to (5, 10, 15) the next frame, (7.5, 15, 22.5) the next, and it'd keep going half the distance each frame.

The basic math for it is "for each frame, camera's new position = (coefficient between 0.0 and 1.0) * ((desired position to look at, such as the player's location) - (camera's current position)) + (camera's current position)"

It's much better for aesthetic purposes. With a name like "linear interpolation," it sounds fancy and all, but it's still fairly easy to implement, as illustrated.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation as to why the camera stutter, at least, isn't a problem that originates from your end.

I don't think it's that simple Doman, because for me the stuttering goes away if i change camera angle and/or zoom in and out, but I agree it's a software issue, not a hardware one.

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Originally Posted by Doman

I don't think the camera stutter has anything at all to do with your video card. Rather, it's a programming logic issue - something purely on the coder's end, and it won't be fixed until they patch it.

To illustrate, think of it this way - whenever you move your mouse or your character, the camera responds by changing its rotation or the position it's 'looking at,' respectively. Each frame, the camera has to update the position it's looking at and its own position, (both in x, y, and z cartesian coordinates), and its own angular position (yaw, pitch, and roll).

The stutter is noticeable because they took the simplest form of updating-per-frame there is: "for each frame, new position = old position + this frame's delta/change." So whenever you're walking downhill, the camera is instantly displacing itself downwards however many units you 'fell.'

They could, instead, implement what's called linear interpolation, which results in a much more smooth and natural transition between "new position" and "old position." Each frame, instead of just instantly jumping to its desired point, it travels - usually half, but it's determined by whatever coeffecient > 0.0 and < 1.0 that you want - a percentage of the way to its desired point that frame. So if the camera's at (0, 0, 0) and needs to move to (10, 20, 30), linear interpolation would make it move to (5, 10, 15) the next frame, (7.5, 15, 22.5) the next, and it'd keep going half the distance each frame.

The basic math for it is "for each frame, camera's new position = (coefficient between 0.0 and 1.0) * ((desired position to look at, such as the player's location) - (camera's current position)) + (camera's current position)"

It's much better for aesthetic purposes. With a name like "linear interpolation," it sounds fancy and all, but it's still fairly easy to implement, as illustrated.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation as to why the camera stutter, at least, isn't a problem that originates from your end.

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Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. This is pretty much exactly whats going on, the camera updates instantly whenever something non-transparent is between the camera and the back of my character, causing it to jump back and forth between positions as I move without any sort of smooth transition between the two. It definitely seems to be an engine thing, considering that it happens more with the "mouse" camera than it does the "keyboard" camera (why they used two separate sets of camera code is beyond me), but with so few reports of the issue and so many people saying "my camera doesnt stutter, I have no idea what you're talking about" I was beginning to think the game just hates me.

Now to toss it in the bucket of "hope it gets fixed in 2.0" issues I guess.

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Originally Posted by Lerend

From what i've managed to skim from ancient forum posts around release, it seems like ATI cards are affected by this a lot more (probably due to the poor vsync enforcement). The tearing is definitely a vsync issue and I read a few people fixed it by using MSI Afterburner to enforce 100% Vsync.

However, I have a Sapphire card, not an MSI card, and the last official update to afterburner was v2.1.0 released on 2/15/11, almost a year ago. I'd rather not take the risk of it not playing nice with the latest drivers or a non-msi card just for a little bit of screen tearing.

As for the stutter, it's driving me up the wall :/

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Just use the afterburner bro, it's not the Brand you need to worry about, but the card, all ATI cards in a series across the brands use different drivers, all the cards are made in the same way, so if MSI makes the same type of card that you use from Sapphire, the Afterburner utility will have full support for it, the brand is nothing more than the card's paintjob.