Question Low LoD / Low-res blurry textures across many games

[tmeyer1000]

This forum has helped me out a lot of issues in the past and I hope you can do it again.

I got a gaming pc with a graphical issue that persists across many games: Sometimes games use the lowest resolution textures and/or the lowest level of detail meshes. It's drastic. Here's an imgur album of examples.

My issues are similar to these forum posts:

Question - graphical issues

Hi guys, i have a big problem with my PC. Graphic textures not loading in games, there is no differennce between low or ultra high settings no matter what i do. It started about a month ago and i could not find any solution on google or even youtube. I reinstalled the windows,every drivers the...

forums.tomshardware.com

Question - low LOD on every game

when i changed from 1060 to 4070ti, every 3d game textures popping in when my character is more than 10 meters away from it. even older games where the 1060 worked just fine. used DDU, not formatted all windows 10, did the fast format over the old one for the new components. need a total format...

forums.tomshardware.com

Question - DESPERATE FOR HELP - blurry/grainy/bad textures on 4070ti in every game, no idea what to do

I recently purchased an incredible prebuilt from Origin, and I'm incredibly happy with the performance, but for some reason every doesn't actually look good. Games have textures that look blurry and sometimes low quality. Specs are: Processor: Intel Core i9-13900K 24-Cores 3.0GHz (5.8GHz...

forums.tomshardware.com

I've had this issue for years. Researching it made me think maybe it was a GPU issue (low VRAM? or just a defective card?) or a PSU issue. Well, I saved up until I could finally upgrade my pc this summer. Got a new 850W PSU and a 7900 XT. Uh oh: it made no difference at all.

I used DDU to get all old GPU drivers out of my system, reset everything to default, reset shader cache. I tested the RAM. It seems fine. I played with settings in individual games and in AMD Software. Texture filtering quality makes no difference. I tested multiple different drives-- doesn't matter if I'm running these games off of my M.2 NVMe drive, or an external SSD. No difference.

Hardware monitoring shows that my new system is nowhere near maxed out on memory, CPU usage, GPU usage, or VRAM. This system should be running modern titles at high settings no problem. And it does run well, it just looks bad.

As you can see in the examples, the issue only hits certain textures, not all of them. But it's not typical pop-in. In some titles (Street Fighter 6) the problem sometimes clears up eventually for certain objects, but over the span of minutes, and not for every object. For other titles, like Cyberpunk and FF7, they never go away.

I also have some games that don't have this issue at all. FromSoft games, Death Stranding, and Resident Evil 2 Remake are totally fine. (weird because SF6 and RE2 are both RE Engine games, and one of them works and the other doesn't.)

Since I've ruled out drive issues, and replaced the GPU and the PSU, that leaves, what, RAM? CPU? Motherboard, somehow? But I am out of disposable income. I can't replace anything else unless I'm really sure what the problem is. And anyway I can't find any info about CPU issues that look like this.

Grateful for any help or suggestions!

motherboard: Asus Z370-A
PSU: Corsair RM850x
CPU: i7-8700k
GPU: RX 7900 XT
RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport LT, 16gb

 

[stonecarver]

This can't be your issue but these kinds of low textures were common back when we were transitioning from games made with 16 bit and the old GPU's at the time were matched.

Later when our gear got better in those old games with newer GPU's had to go into the games config files and change from 16 bit to 32 bit and magic games looked great again.

Are we at that cross roads again and have to play with the config files of some games with the newer best of the best cards out today.

Is this your issue IDK but being as nothing else has fixed it maybe?

 

[tmeyer1000]

I sure hope this isn't just how things are now, but maybe. thanks for the reply

 

[tmeyer1000]

I reinstalled windows. rip to all my software preferences and browser history and stuff. oh well.

I feel like I'm going crazy. It helped somewhat. Here's a before and after comparison. In this case, it made a big difference, but it's still blurrier than it should be. I saw minor improvement across all the games I tested. There are still some low LoD / low texture assets, but not as many. I still have the same problem, and it's still much worse than it should be, but it's better than it was before.

Texture streaming issues are sometimes attributed to running out of VRAM. But when I got the new GPU, I went from 8gb VRAM to 20gb and it didn't make any difference at all.

Years ago, I messed with the pagefile for some reason. Maybe that was part of the problem, and now it's been reset? but there's some other factor as well?

 

[tmeyer1000]

I did more testing and: it didn't help that much. In FF7, in places that were all blurry before, it now loads nicer textures and then unloads them again after about a second, cycling a few times a minute. It's sure acting like it's completely out of VRAM, but AMD Software shows the correct amount. Task manager shows that the RAM is operating at the correct speed.

More forum posts of people with the same problem. Uh oh. These are years old and they never got fixed. One guy even tried replacing all the parts that I didn't replace and he never figured it out either...
https://linustechtips.com/topic/139...p-in-with-asus-tuf-rtx-3080/#comment-15151818

My 3070 won't load textures properly?

Testing Apex, the textures if many assets are switching between low-high texture options. Can see that strafing back and forth. I went to another game and it was the same. Benchmarks aren't seeming to do it (although the shadows in heaven on the first houses are shimmering, which a friend confirm...

linustechtips.com

I'm just using this thread to keep notes at this point.
Could it be something BIOS settings? One suggested fix was using XMP in the bios menu to boost RAM speed, but my speed is already where it should be. Maybe there's something else in there I can use

 

[stonecarver]

Have you ever installed

Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015​

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145

If not do the 64 bit---- first----- restart PC than do the same for the 32 bit, restart and see if you see better results.

 

[tmeyer1000]

I can't install either the x64 or x86 version from that link. The installer says I have a newer version and then shuts down. (when you install a game, it often auto-installs whatever the newest version is, right?) There is no 32-bit version at that link.

I'm glad you're still making suggestions though. I owe you one for giving it a shot

 

[tmeyer1000]

Good news: There's a zillion settings to adjust in the Asus UEFI BIOS Utility, and some of them seem like they might be relevant to memory performance.
Bad news: I don't know what any of them do and there's not really any official documentation.

I did some testing with different EZ performance presets, then reset the utility to all default settings. No change.

Poking around in there more without knowing what I'm doing seems dangerous. Plus it would take me a thousand years to try out different permutations of settings.

 

[helper800]

Good news: There's a zillion settings to adjust in the Asus UEFI BIOS Utility, and some of them seem like they might be relevant to memory performance.
Bad news: I don't know what any of them do and there's not really any official documentation.

I did some testing with different EZ performance presets, then reset the utility to all default settings. No change.

Poking around in there more without knowing what I'm doing seems dangerous. Plus it would take me a thousand years to try out different permutations of settings.

Please do not mess around in BIOS if you do not know what you are doing. Memory settings in BIOS can and will make your system unstable and cause file corruption. Please leave BIOS at default settings with XMP enabled.

This could be a storage issue, no? What is the storage device the game is stored on? Have you tried uninstalling the Visual C++ Redistributable's in programs and features to allow the games to install a fresh up to date iteration required for that specific game? I have seen such issues in games for years.

Most of the time there is nothing you can do about it because there is something tagged wrong in the configuration files of the texture itself in the game. For example, if the highest resolution texture for a particular model is tagged to be used for medium texture settings instead of the maximum setting then it will display the wrong texture detail. Another reason would be for LOD settings if the wrong LOD setting was assigned to the wrong distance for a texture. Lets say that the same texture is set to maximum quality at distance 4 instead of distance 1. This would mean that the texture will look better at distance 4 than distance 1.

This is all to say that your PC is likely running fine and that the games configuration files for certain texture detail levels at certain distances could be incorrectly set by the developers of the game. A way to check for this is to look at streamers that show what settings they play at walk by the same exact texture you are having problems with to see if they are also having similar issues with the same or different textures. I hope this helps!

 

[stonecarver]

Than it's down to majorgeeks.com

https://www.majorgeeks.com/#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015&gsc.page=1

The only other solution to why some of your games have issues and some don't could be a game update your missing.

Your issues your having were so so common back in the Windows XP days but is less rare today.

Back than it was make sure you were up to date on all Microsofts .nets

Update your Direct-X , not really an issue today except some .dll need to be readded as Direct-12 removed some that effect older games.

Update your GPU drivers to latest OR revert to an older stable working one.

Make sure windows was fully updated.

Most of these steps have gone away BUT on those rare games even today I have had to dig deeper with old school solutions to resolve something here or there.

I have multiple copies of c++ 2015 saved everywhere as we march on things get removed from net.

 

[stonecarver]

And just an FYI the Microsoft page is working to download both 64 and the 32 bit files.

I just tried and both are now in my downloads folder.

 

[helper800]

Is resizable BAR enabled?

 

[tmeyer1000]

Update: I think reinstalling windows made more of a difference than i thought. I'd been testing mostly by loading into the same spots in SF6 and FF7 over and over again, and I didn't take into account that those are both just kinda jank games, and I was specifically looking at problem areas. I tested some other games and it's better than it used to be. Cyberpunk started to look better after I drove around the world for a while, like there were assets I needed to clear out of a cache? Or something?

I think helper800 was right: it's more on me to fine tune individual games. Am I going to learn my lesson about investigating issues thoroughly before posting about them on forums? idk maybe.

resizable BAR seems like a good idea for something to try next. for me it would require a bios update first and i'm done messing with that for a while.

thanks for the suggestions, everybody.

 

[helper800]

Update: I think reinstalling windows made more of a difference than i thought. I'd been testing mostly by loading into the same spots in SF6 and FF7 over and over again, and I didn't take into account that those are both just kinda jank games, and I was specifically looking at problem areas. I tested some other games and it's better than it used to be. Cyberpunk started to look better after I drove around the world for a while, like there were assets I needed to clear out of a cache? Or something?

I think helper800 was right: it's more on me to fine tune individual games is probably true. Am I going to learn my lesson about investigating issues thoroughly before posting about them on forums? idk maybe.

resizable BAR seems like a good idea for something to try next. for me it would require a bios update first and i'm done messing with that for a while.

thanks for the suggestions, everybody.

I believe you made a completely valid post. If everyone thoroughly investigated all their issues we would not see 1/25th the posts.