Camera Stuttering and Screen Tearing

[Soukyuu]

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.

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.

[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.

[tbui02721]

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.

[Lerend]

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.

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

[Drako]

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.

[Lerend]

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.

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.

[Soukyuu]

not the 30vs60 debate again...

[Lerend]

not the 30vs60 debate again...

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.

[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.

[Soukyuu]

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.