Texture pop-ins?

[Grinchey]

Join Date: Feb 2012
Posts: 3
PC Experience: Very Experienced
Texture problems across all games
Hello all,

Lately I have been having problems with texture pop-ins, where textures seem to load slowly when I am in view of a new environment in a game, e.g when I turn around in game. Here is a link to the definition of what I mean Texture Pop-in (video game concept). Here is an example of a texture pop-in, however, mine isn't quite as bad as what is shown in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU8XHb7Omh4

It happens in all games such as CoD4, BF3, Skyrim, Black Ops etc. I doesn't do it to an extremely large degree, but here and there, there would at least be a few unrendered textures on cars, roads or grassy areas.

I have tried everything from reinstalling drivers, reseating my card, memtest, temperatures, stress test and all.

My specs:

ATI Radeon HD 5750
4GB DDR3 RAM
Core i5 2400k
250GB SATA HD
650W Hytec Aito

Thanks in advance.

 

[AntiZig]

you're running at the settings at which your card is not enough to render the scene at proper speed.

 

[Grinchey]

It happens in all games, whether they be Battlefield 3 or tetris. I don't believe that is the situation AntiZig. But thanks anyway for your reply.

 

[AntiZig]

watched the video you liked now ( couldn't access it from work) that effect actually has to do with the game engine and the speed of your GPU + CPU.

I've read this technique very long ago I'll try to explain the best I can, the game engine is coded so it renders the simple scene right away if say you spin around very fast you probably won't need to see the high res textures. If however some amount of time passes (idk typically it's in 100 ms or there about) if the texture remains in the scene the higher resolution of it is rendered to the scene.

that being the general concept the said time can vary from game to game and might be adjustable within game settings or might not be. Also, the texture pop-in "time" after the engine gives the go ahead for it to load will also depend where does the texture need to be loaded from (typically from RAM to VRAM) and how fast the operation can be completed depending on your CPU and GPU. The amount of high res textures the GPU can render will also be limited by your VRAM, if you're turning the GPU will take time to determine which textures it no longer needs, dump them and load the new ones in their place (this would happen if you're topping out on your vram)

as far as tetris having pop=ins, you jest, tetris is not 3d last time I checked, unless you've found a mutated version

how much vram is your 5750?

 

[Grinchey]

Well my graphics card has 1074MB dedicated memory, 1780MB shared and total available 2807. \

 

[HEXiT]

most of what you have done will have no bearing on your texture problem. it probably lies with 1 of these 2 reasons. either your pci-e is set to the wrong width ie x1 or x4 instead of x8 or x16 (go into bios and make sure its correctly set... double check with Gpu-z).

or you have a hard drive issue... run chkdsk to make sure the hdd is fully functioning then get a trial of ultimate defrag to order your disk...
you can set it up on basic settings to get and average x2 performance gains over a fragmented or badly ordered disk... just use auto setting with put files close to mft set the ratio to 20% front 80% large/rar or avi files at the back of the disk....
other things that can help

1) move your page file to the front of the disk (again with ultimate defrag)
you can also if you want get very precise placement if you wish buy ordering what directories or files go in the disk in what order (but thats time consuming and beyond what you really need)

2) raid your system drive you should get 2 identical drives and set them as raid 0. the drives work best if there not green drives and the spinpoint f3 is excellent for this kind of setup just a shame drives are ridiculously expensive atm compared to last year.

3) upgrade to ssd...

4) if your hdd has more than 2 partitions consider deleting 1 of them as each partition will slow data transfer by 10% for each and its cumulative so the 3rd partition can be as much as 30% slower than the primary of a single partition disk.

5) set your page file to no more than 1.5 times the actual amount of ram you have. this can dramatically improve performance if the page file is overly large or none existent.

6) make sure your drives arent being turned off to save power via the windows advanced power settings.