Grainy or pixely monitor when gaming

[josh1002]

I’m using the Acer 27” GF276 and when I play games like Destiny 2 mostly, the display looks grainy/pixely. I know it’s not my resolution or anti-aliasing. Any solutions?

 

[LinuxDevice]

I've seen this too, but don't have an answer. I have a suspicion that the CPU isn't feeding data to the GPU fast enough. For example, I have a PCIe bus running only at revision 1 (2.5GT/s), though it is capable of revision 2 (5GT/s) so far as specs go. The GPU is capable of rev. 3 (8GT/s). My motherboard has no options related to PCIe speed settings, so there isn't anything I can do about it (and I'm pretty sure it is the mobo doing this since I had three different video cards all refuse anything but revision 1...usually a higher-speed capability automatically backs off to a lower speed if signal quality isn't sufficient).

FYI, I see this more on faster video cards...slower/older video cards don't show this.

 

[josh1002]

Do you think it my motherboard? Cause I have a gtx 1060 6gb and i5 7500 with a $50 motherboard lol.

 

[LinuxDevice]

Let me start with an observation about pixelation. If you use any kind of screencast or desktop video recording software you'll find that there are quality settings. In OBS (and some others) for example, there is an option for holding a constant quality. If the quality is set too low, then the recording will show similar pixelation even though the original is not pixelated. This is a big reason why I think it has to do with data throughput being starved...whether done on purpose through recording software, or for any other reason.

I have a motherboard which only runs the PCIe on video at older gen 1 speeds, though it should be running at gen 3 (I have three different good video cards which the motherboard always fails to go beyond gen 1 speed). On slower video cards I do not see pixelation. On faster video cards (ones capable of far exceeding PCIe v1 speeds) I see similar pixelation. It is possible that your motherboard is only driving the PCIe at rev 1 and could be causing an otherwise good video card to show pixelation. Starving through slow PCIe v1 isn't much different than purposely starving through video recording quality management software.

Some motherboards might have options for forcing PCIe speed. Mine does not. Yours is inexpensive, but it might be worth looking just to see if it shows what speed the bus is running at. If not, and if running at older/slower speeds, then you can probably blame the motherboard for starving quality through slow data transfer. I have no way to be sure because I have no way to force my PCIe bus to revision 2 or 3.

 

[StupidComputers]

I’m using the Acer 27” GF276 and when I play games like Destiny 2 mostly, the display looks grainy/pixely. I know it’s not my resolution or anti-aliasing. Any solutions?

Choose a better monitor. I just picked up the GF276 for $180 CAD, great price, bad monitor. Unplugged it 2 days later because it was destroying my eyes. Sitting here waiting for me to return it.
On the one hand, 27" is a lot to stretch 1080p over, but this monitor is stuck in a single overdrive mode as a "fix" by Acer to a previous problem I didn't care to read too far into. You'll notice overdrive it can't be turned off (if you still can on your model, do it!) This apparently causes it to be extra grainy. Even text scrolling ghosts on mine.. I really wanted this to be usable, big, fast.. would have been nice.

 

[LinuxDevice]

The pixelation I know for this particular case is different than "grainy". It's more like taking a high resolution bitmap for one subset of the visible display and greatly reducing the resolution followed by blowing the area back up ("blocky" instead of "grainy"). What used to be a single pixel is now something like a 8x8 pixel area taking on a single value instead of 64 separate values. If you ever watch the news and see the special effect of masking someone's face you've seen the same thing. Only for this case it appears randomly on different parts of the screen (often tied to a particular texture).

Think of it as similar to dropped frames, but it is a small area of dropped pixels which assumes the previous color since it has no new information. There may not be enough data transfer rate to avoid dropping some pixels. I see this with a PCIe v3 card (rev. 3 is 8GT/s) running on a system where the PCIe bus is only able to attain PCIe v1 speeds (2.5GT/s). The video card itself and the drivers are not at fault, it is the motherboard/CPU combination (the example is a Titan Xp on a very old motherboard/CPU combination). This motherboard has no way to force PCIe revision/speed, but some motherboards can do this. The problem there is that normally you can only force the bus to go slower, and if the system doesn't believe the bus has a good enough signal quality to go faster, you can't force it to try going faster.

In the case of a small random block of the texture being more "blocky" on a temporary basis (somewhat dependent upon the current texture) than "grainy" the monitor itself won't be the issue...and the display will show up correctly most of the time in every location, but then momentarily be starved of enough bandwidth and not be able to use the full resolution texture. Almost every video card review out in the wild talks about whether it is a fast enough data transfer rate, but the video card's abilities will never be tested if the PCIe bus isn't fast enough to keep up with the video card itself.

I am curious though about the mentioned Acer GF276. Was there the same issue when the image is changing quickly (like in a game) and when the image was stopped (like a static image)? Or was there an issue with everything all of the time? I see it is listed as an extremely fast 1ms response time with a TN panel and thinking it could be either the panel type cutting corners to have the fast response, but perhaps it improved if the image itself did not change quickly. Maybe antialiasing would help in that case, but I've never had a monitor with that fast of a response time.

 

[StupidComputers]

Yes there was ghosting, or perhaps reverse ghosting, of images when gaming, edges replicating themselves on either side with any movement. Same with text when scrolling. It wasn't random, it was consistent and affected the entire screen. There was no ghosting of static images, but they still looked horrible. Even the desktop.

Im using an rx 580 nitro+, so one of the best versions of a card that was release just over a year ago. Also using DP 1.2. This on an ASUS ROG mobo (z97), single card in a 3.0x16 slot.

The monitor I used before and still is a 2ms 24" 1080p over DVI-D, and it looks perfect in the same situations.

Gaming, browsing, even video looks quite off. I think this particular monitor is firmware locked by Acer into [Overdrive: Normal] because of an issue it was having where people had to RMA their monitors to get this done. I noticed when booting the overdrive setting was not locked, but it was just momentary. And 27" is large area for 1080p, so it was already asked to achieve a lot, before design setbacks.