i just bought a gtx280 from xfx , the XXX version. I runs smoothley but the shadows in games look REALLY AWFUL. the "stair" effect is very visible. The edges of the shadows are like BIG stairs,like squares. I set everything to high or very high, but it's the same no mather what i do. My question is this: is the gtx280 really that crappy or is it just mine to have that problem?? The graphics are great appart from the shadows. I really wanna see some answers from u guys who also have the gtx280,because it's very frustrating for me. Thanks i'm using vista 64 bit.,if that's of any help
yeah one thing to note is that you never mentioned what game you were playing.. So seeing as each game has an independent rendering engine, and video cards are simply processors that get told what to do by the engine.. No.
every game except crysis in every game that i installed after i bought the gtx. NFS pro street,especially in Alone in the dark 5 (really BIG stairs), Area 51,Mass effect (here the shadows are really crappy,especially on the characters faces,so i turned off the shadows),etc but not in Crysis and that's strange. I turned on AA and anisotropic but same results.
probably more settings/driver related than anything related to your hardware. NFS can be "fixed" by setting shadows to low in this case. In mass effect, as said on the page TweakGuides.com - Mass Effect Tweak Guide Code: In general, the shadowing in Mass Effect is a source of some complaints, as it can look quite glitchy at times. Rather than disabling Dynamic Shadows, which removes most shadows and thus reduces realism, you can adjust various shadow parameters in the game's BIOEngine.ini file to adjust shadow appearance. This is covered in more detail in the Advanced Tweaking section, see in particular the DepthBias, MinShadowResolution, MaxShadowResolution, bEnableBranchingPCFShadows, ShadowFilterRadius and setting descriptions for more information. Note: the common solution presented for fixing glitchy shadows - namely to set DepthBias=0.03 - doesn't actually work quite as intended; it removes certain shadows rather than fixing glitches. However it's probably the best workaround for removing glitches without completely disabling Dynamic Shadows altogether. Again, refer to the Advanced Tweaking section for details. TweakGuides.com - Mass Effect Tweak Guide being the advanced section. You can also try messing with resolutions.. Oblivion for instance, had really crappy jagged shadows over everyone, that was an engine thing rather than anything.. but you can modify it by changing the shadowmap resolution. Guess I shoulda been a little more clear though... the engines tell the drivers what to do and the drivers interpret that and send instructions to the graphics, graphics renders and displays and such.
The XXX edition is factory overclocked right? I think I remember reading some posts that some factory overclocked cards would only work when clocked back to standard speeds.
lol that's not the issue here... He is complaining about the jaggy shadows and that's not the GTX280's fault.
here's an example of what i mean here is Area 51, and it's like that in all the games that i mentioned,with the latest drivers from nvidia. it's just..........i hate it,i can't even play because it pisses me off,ruins the whole experience. Just enlarge this picture and see. OH and this is with every setting at max, with Anisotropic 16x !!!!
Antialiasing is the one that helps with jaggies. Plus it seems that it is an issue with the game engines. Not the card (aka it doesn't matter what card you use). Blacksite Area 51 has an issue with dynamic shadows. It's the game. Not your card/drivers.
Did u try turning AA on? and using supersampling? Download nhancer and try playing with the AA settings to see if the jaggies will go away. Also what driver are u using? did u try the latest 178 WHQL driver or the new 180.43 beta ones? I have a XFX GTX280 and i don't have shadows problems (but i don't have the Area 51 game to confirm it)
