Pixelated Shadows during Cutscenes?
I recently updated my graphic card (NVIDIA EVGA GTX 970 SC 2.0+) drivers (now December 21st version 361.43; clean install) as I was having a couple of odd issues (SWTOR would blink to a black screen...
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You seem to be like a saint among these forums. Thank you for your dedication! I placed my graphics card in debug mode. The microstutters became less apparent and the game was more fluid. Overall the microstutters I believe to be a fault of SWTOR itself. I had similar issues on my laptop and the stuttering is hardly noticeable, but understandable for an MMO of SWTOR's nature. More importantly the shadows still appear pixelated. It looks exactly like the shadow issues some players posted from many years ago in regards to patch 1.2 or so.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=216670
Take for example this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHP9j-SwfP8
However, unlike this video the pixelation only occurs for the shadows that appear on character's faces or bodies during in-game conversations. The shadows in the environment look great. All of this is being reported from Drommund Kass as I haven't had time to experiment elsewhere in-game. In game graphic settings are optimized in accordance with what was recommended by GeForce Experience. (High Shadow setting with 1024 resolution. If I increase the Shadow Map resolution the blockiness of the pixelation is minimized but still noticeable and my performance will decrease. This all occurs despite the fact that I think it's barely utilizing the GPU). Additionally, despite being in debug mode the black-screen issue still occurs when attempting to change in-game graphic settings.
I am not looking at stutters at present , likely easiest way to get rid of them is to create a profile or edit the existing profile for swtor.exe in the NVidia control panel , look for pre-rendered frames and set this to 1 , all going well the stutters you see should be almost gone.
Can you advise if any change if you completely remove the Nvidia Driver with DDU and do a clean install of 355.98 version , this is for the issue of minimise and restore to continue on black screen.
don't forget to adjust pre-rendered frames again in the control panel for the stutter
I'm working to adjust the drivers now. Would you be able to clarify (if you have any more technical insight) why new drivers are consistently breaking an "old" game? Why hasn't NVIDIA or Bioware been able to get their game to work on capable equipment? If I'm constantly needing to revert my drivers back, when can I update to the latest drivers for all of my other games/applications?
Swtor is based in Directx9Ex and is reliant on the video driver accordingly with Microsoft Directx
There are major driver issues across all 3 makers at present and all different, AMD are the easiest to fix at present, Nvidia are having multiple issues all affecting different hardware in different ways.
860M using Notebook drivers are worst affected at present the driver is still broken for most as an example, edit here
