Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

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Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

I have recently installed the wrapper ENB in order to add environmental shadows to my game and to allow me more freedom in changing its graphics.

Unfortunately, my game has a lot of graphical artifacts or pixels showing up on distant objects whenever I move, and I have yet to find a way to make them go away.

https://imgur.com/a/mFSrA

This effect has been described in the past as a "Shimmer" or "Flicker" when moving, but I don't know what to call it.


Through research, I have found a possible reason is that this is Temporal Aliasing being caused by Bethesda's notoriously bad Negative LOD Bias. Apparently some NVidia Chipsets don't actually clamp the Negative LOD Bias to zero, so setting it that way in the Inspector or Control Panel does nothing.


I have tried many different things to solve this including

Setting the LOD Bias to 1 in the FalloutPrefs.ini,
Turning off the ENB Effects ingame,
Changing my LOD textures back to Vanilla,
Changing LOD Bias to 1 in the enbseries.ini (Not recommended but I wanted to be sure)
Using the hardware Anisotropic Filtering,
Using ENB Anisotropic Filtering (With hardware disabled),
Using Transparency Anti-aliasing from the Nvidia Control Panel,
Setting Negative LOD Bias to Clamp in the Nvidia Control Panel,
Using Multisampling x8 in the Nvidia Control Panel,
Using Edge Anti-Aliasing in the enblocal.ini,
Using Accumulative Anti-Aliasing in enblocal.ini
Disabling Hardware AA and using an FXAA effect.txt,
Disabling Hardware AA and not using an FXAA effect.txt

The only thing that removed the issue was removing the d3d9.dll from my game folder (Disabling the ENB entirely)


I have heard my options are to either find a way to clamp the Negative LOD Bias or to get Temporal Anti-Aliasing to hopefully fix it. (I heard there's "ghosting" with TAA, but honestly that's preferable to a bunch of dancing pixels whenever I move)

Is there a link to a TAA effect plugin that I missed, or possibly another way to fix this?

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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

There is no temporal antialiasing in the mod, only EnableAccumulativeAA one in enblocal.ini. And it do not look like that, but if you have it enabled, try to turn off. I dont know any other reason, mod do not produce this kind of bug, hear this first time.

PS: antialiasing is unsupported, forcing it in drivers or in game video options will break the mod.
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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

My apologies. In the interest of clarity, I'm looking for temporal antialiasing that will work with the ENB installation. I found that effect.txt allows people to write their own shaders and effects and is in fact how I'm currently getting FXAA to work on my setup.

I was perhaps wondering if it was possible that there exists a simple to implement method to add a Temporal Antialiasing code into effect.txt to achieve this.


Also the ENB setup technically doesn't cause these problems (Temporal Aliasing), it just replaces the things that Bethesda used to hide it. (Their negative LOD Bias) NVidia was supposed to fix this with the "Clamp" function, but it just doesn't work (Even though it says it does) and this problem is driver specific, so it doesn't happen on everyone's setup.


I only Hardware Forced AA from the Control Panel as a test. I am well aware that it breaks many things the ENB Wrapper uses. :)

Accumululative AA is also disabled and the artifacting problem persists.

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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

It is not the case when some effect disabled when you have antialiasing enabled, mod do not work at all, because it replaces depth buffer with another format (to allow capturing depth) and it physically do not support antialiasing, which looks like objects turns to transparent/unsorted bug.
Regarding lod, it is not fixable (unless rewrite shaders of all objects to manual lod sampling).
Temporal antialiasing cant be made in external shaders, because it need data from previous frame and some matrices. And i didnt made it internally, because of how game transparent objects drawed, i cant make temporal aa without making transparent objects buggy when camera moves or they moves.
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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

Wow. This is a far more complicated (and ongoing) issue than I previously anticipated.

I guess most people ignore it by just blurring their screen or by using a higher resolution to make it less noticeable.

It's unfortunate that adding it would be so much work, but I can also understand that it has its own share of problems anyway.
It's also quite a shame that FXAA is so inefficient at fixing the Aliasing problem from the get-go.


Have any other people mentioned this problem happening with their system, or is it unique to my own? I'm using a 32 bit operating system and an older card (GT640), so maybe that could be part of it?

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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

I still dont understand what problem you talking about. Of course people dont like no antialiasing, but this is requirements to make most of mod features to work. Temporal antialiasing can't get rid of aliasing of wires, fences and other thin objects on screen, so i did EnableAccumulativeAA. Negative lod bias do not have any connection to what you showed on animated image, its not that kind of thing, but with EnableAccumulativeAA=true mod do apply such offsets to draw objects multiple times, though you cant see this, because its not between frames like temporal antialiasing, but in each frame. Anyway, if you force antialiasing, dont ask me anything then, nobody knows what happen in this case, its about hardware limitations.
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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

My apologies I am very new to this, and most of the information I'm providing as far as what I think might be causing this was something I learned/read online for the many days I was looking for anything to explain what is happening.

Truth be told, I know very little about what goes on in the actual files so a lot of the things I say may make very little actual sense.

Your explanation of how the ENB (Please correct me if I'm saying this wrong) uses different information than what the Frame Buffer provides, gave me a lot of insight on how using the in-game Anti-aliasing is totally pointless.

All I know is that when I disable the ENB, I see tiny dots of light, and when I enable it, those dots are much larger. I wish I could provide more information, but at the moment I don't know if any of it would be helpful.

In spite of that, I really want to keep working on this to fix it. As far as what the current AA looks like:

The Accumulative AA gets rid of some of the pixelation on the textures themselves but isn't strong enough to take on the moving pixels. If there's a file somewhere that lets me tweak the values, perhaps that could yield some results.

The Edge AA in its current state was unfortunately less useful. It just blurred the edges of the geometry and made the whole scene look washed-out.

I have found that it's possible to run other wrappers, so they've mitigated the effect but it's still worse than the Vanilla.


I wish there was someone else with this problem, so we could compare notes.. :|

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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

tiny dots of light
What do you mean? Can make screenshot and draw area around them?
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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

It might be easier if I show images side by side just so you can see what the problem looks like.

With ENB Edge AA Enabled https://imgur.com/aNCT8N2

With ENB Accumulative AA Enabled https://imgur.com/RKTULmA

Without ENB with only Vanilla AA https://imgur.com/MWKLaiN

And here they are in motion

Edge AA https://imgur.com/lfnuEHW

Accumulative AA https://imgur.com/WbwjHWG

No ENB Vanilla AA https://imgur.com/kXdFRCn

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Re: Artifacting or "Shimmering" in Fallout New Vegas

:? What do you trying to tell me? That no antialiasing sucks? I know it, so what? I told that cant do anything, there are no dots, not any other artifacts, its just no antialiasing, like in any other game without my modigication.
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