Bioshock 1 Graphic Glitch, GTX 660?

[Batman55]

I finally got around to playing the first Bioshock.

The CPU and GPU are both brand new. It's a DELL XPS 8500, Quad core i7, and the video card is nvidia gtx 660.

I was a little disappointed that even with everything on max settings, it didn't seem to look good enough. It is true that you cannot improve Anti-aliasing as the game doesn't support it. And physics animations are also going to be choppy no matter what. But I thought there must be some way to improve things. So I checked the tweak guides and noticed that you could go into the nvidia control panel and increase anisotropic filtering. I changed it to 8x from the game's default 4x. I also changed the Havok physics from running on 2 threads to 4, in the user.ini file.

The game played fine for an hour. Then the graphics got strange with black squares appearing and some textures became green and fuzzy. I looked up this problem in Google and it seems most people think it is a bad sign, the video card could be overheating. But how could my GTX 660 overheat with a game from 2007..?

Anyway I quit the game and turned the AF back to normal, but left the havok physics multithreading alone. After reloading, the glitches were gone, but that doesn't mean anything yet--they could reappear.

I'm not sure if the glitches are the result of that "slight tampering" I did or something else. Is it possible that it could be from a hardware problem/overheating? That just doesn't seem likely. What do you guys think?

 

[ryan27968]

that isnt a very new card. you are indeed stressing your gpu with a 2007 game. try adjusting the fan speeds manually to keep it cooler with gpu boost 2. also, maybe you should start saving for a newer card.

 

[Mousemonkey]

that isnt a very new card. you are indeed stressing your gpu with a 2007 game. try adjusting the fan speeds manually to keep it cooler with gpu boost 2. also, maybe you should start saving for a newer card.

Really? So how old is it then and new does a card have to be to play a game from 2007?

 

[ryan27968]

it is about 1 year old so not too bad. but this is a mid range card, not a top of the line.
i would just run it at 4x antialiasing. have you tried increasing the fan speed?

 

[Mousemonkey]

it is about 1 year old so not too bad. but this is a mid range card, not a top of the line.
i would just run it at 4x antialiasing. have you tried increasing the fan speed?

It doesn't need to be a top end card because the problem is not the card it is the way the game is coded.

 

[Mahisse]

I strongly doubt the problem is sourced by overheated graphic card. Your card should be more than fine to run the game but it's well known that forcing Anti Aliasing via the GPU's control panel can lead to graphical glitches. Especially if the game doesn't support AA to begin with.

 

[Batman55]

I strongly doubt the problem is sourced by overheated graphic card. Your card should be more than fine to run the game but it's well known that forcing Anti Aliasing via the GPU's control panel can lead to graphical glitches. Especially if the game doesn't support AA to begin with.

I haven't forced AA at all, I left those settings alone.

I did however change AF, which is Anisotropic Filtering. The game has this at 4x by default. In the nvidia control panel, I simply changed it to 8x AF.

I don't understand how this change would lead to overheating. I played Half Life 2 episode 2, from 2006, with everything maxed and 16x AF, and my card did not overheat.

The other possibility: maybe the glitches happened because of slight incompatibility with my GPU's drivers?

 

[Batman55]

that isnt a very new card. you are indeed stressing your gpu with a 2007 game. try adjusting the fan speeds manually to keep it cooler with gpu boost 2. also, maybe you should start saving for a newer card.

As the other posters implied, it's not likely that I'm overheating the card.

About having a mid-range card, this was the best card available for my power supply, besides the GTX 660 Ti. To safely get a better card, I would have needed a new power supply, which can be very aggravating to do for an OEM system.

 

[ryan27968]

i think that af filtering will have the same effect as increasing the aa. its simply not the way the game was meant to be run. x4 is the most the game supports.

 

[Batman55]

The black squares occurred again tonight. It's like a bunch of flickering black squares that cover over specific textures. This occurred even after restoring the AF to the default setting.

I refuse to believe this could be the result of overheating. Trine 2 maxed, for example, made the GPU get toasty but no glitches happened.

Is there anything else that could be causing this? Could it simply be slight incompatibility with the video card drivers, given that this game is from 2007?

 

[ryan27968]

thats unlikely. try resetting everything to default settings.

 

[Mahisse]

Did you overclock the card??

 

[coozie7]

There's no problem with the cards power, my E6600/HD5770 could run Bioshock smoothly.
First, give yourself a level playing field and reset everything to defaults, check the game is fully patched, update the sound and video drivers if updates are available and run Dxdiag to check for possible software issues with DX.
Are you using the DX10 effects? They can be twitchy.
How hot is 'toasty' ?

 

[Batman55]

There's no problem with the cards power, my E6600/HD5770 could run Bioshock smoothly.
First, give yourself a level playing field and reset everything to defaults, check the game is fully patched, update the sound and video drivers if updates are available and run Dxdiag to check for possible software issues with DX.
Are you using the DX10 effects? They can be twitchy.
How hot is 'toasty' ?

When you say reset everything to defaults, you mean in the Bioshock profile in the nvidia control panel right?

The game is fully patched, version 1.1 is the last update.

I am using the DX10 effects. Maybe that could be causing it?

In any event the problem is very minor at the moment, it seems to occur only in specific places within the game, and it's just a small black square. I even searched the Net to see if others have the issue, I found some posts that have a similar story, their card and CPU are good enough but black square syndrome happens anyway.. it's just once in a while, and harmless.

 

[Batman55]

Hey guys, Bioshock is still playing well despite occasional black squares covering the same kinds of textures here and there. It's not really an issue and it only happens in certain places, never randomly.

But just a few days after this began, I noticed something odd about my Yahoo Messenger application. The opening animation is now covered by, you guessed it, a black square. This is the first time in 10 years of using YM that such a thing occurred. Could there be a link to the problem in Bioshock? Could it indicate my GPU is going bad?

 

[Zegarat]

I realize that this post is old but I will include an answer just in case you still haven't found out what's causing it or if other people need an answer. You'll have to disable High Detail Post Processing, no idea why that works (And can't promise that it WILL work for everyone.) but it does.