texture quality smoothly changing while walking

[Rael]

Hello. I am writing here cause i cannot create new topics. I have problem i Witcher 1. When i am playing the game i can see the texture quality smoothly changing whole walking. Like there was moving line of sight behind which the quality of the texture is worse. You can clearly see it on the movie especially when you look at the road's curbs (the hq texture is brighter and you can see the curb changing color)

I am attaching the movie. Dont know why but the movie records with very low fps but the effect still is visible (just look at the curbs changing color.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kdvZ_VvGyeOUNXgnIbp2PwnXji75zSsF/view?usp=sharing


I have everything set to maximum in game settings.

 

[devivre]

Post moved.

It‘s a bit difficult to see with the choppy framerate and the rainy weather in the game.

In general, did you use any mods and what pc specs are you playing with?

p.s. the technical section is not restricted and anyone can post here.

 

[SigilFey]

Hello. I am writing here cause i cannot create new topics. I have problem i Witcher 1. When i am playing the game i can see the texture quality smoothly changing whole walking. Like there was moving line of sight behind which the quality of the texture is worse. You can clearly see it on the movie especially when you look at the road's curbs (the hq texture is brighter and you can see the curb changing color)

I am attaching the movie. Dont know why but the movie records with very low fps but the effect still is visible (just look at the curbs changing color.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kdvZ_VvGyeOUNXgnIbp2PwnXji75zSsF/view?usp=sharing


I have everything set to maximum in game settings.

Yeah, the video is not clear enough (resolution-wise) to see what you describe.

What I think it is, based on your description, is that you have discovered bilinear and trilinear filtering. When TW1 came out, the technology to create "smooth" transitions using numerous layers of anisotropic filtering and mip-maps did not exist. So, almost every engine of the time used the same technique to draw far-field images in ways that would not bring the graphics cards of the time to their knees.

Bilinear filtering offered a distance from the camera at which textures would switch to a lower-resolution that used compressed data, making distant texturing possible without dropping to 3 FPS. The effect was a clean line at which the near-field graphics became a blurry mess (by modern standards.)

Trilinear filtering was a technique that tried to improve visual quality by blending textures in the "middle field," somewhat smoothing out the transition effect. But you would now have two distinct "lines" where the textures became successively more blurred.

Anisotropic filtering existed, but it would mostly affect only near-field textures, and it would sometimes make the bilinear/trilinear blending stand out even more. (So, near field looked so much better and far-field looked so much worse because of the stark contrast in detail. It depended on the game.)

For TW1 on modern systems:
Be sure to set trilinear filtering, and it's up to you if you want to use anisotropic or not. You can force it through the GPU's control panel, up to 16x, and it will augment the in-game settings to make textures overall much sharper.

But no, nothing you can do will get rid of the "lines" by default. It's inherent graphics processing for the time. There may mods like ReShader packs that can blend it out. Check the Nexus!

 

[Rael]

Post moved.

It‘s a bit difficult to see with the choppy framerate and the rainy weather in the game.

In general, did you use any mods and what pc specs are you playing with?

p.s. the technical section is not restricted and anyone can post here.

I don't know why the video records in such bad quality (I used windows game bar). I'll gladly take any hinsts how to record it better (will maybe try just recording the monitor with the smartphone the old way when i get back home ). The game is vanilla without any mods. PC is RTX, 4080 Ryzen 9800x3D, 32 GB RAM. Everythig i game set to maximum. I'll try to post better screen recording soon.

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2026

Now it should be clearel. Still most visible on the curbs. You can clearly see how the texture changes. I the game the line is also visible on the payvment. Google drive butchers quality on preview so either a YT link:

(still worsens quality i think) or raw file that needs to eb downloaded: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S2aRomffgTH-XFNZB4B-N2nECKlkVBkU/view?usp=drive_link

 

[SigilFey]

Yes, it's what I describe above: bilinear/trilinear filtering. That's the nature of the engines that were used at the time.

 

[Rael]

Ok, thank You for claryfiying. However when i look at different playthroughs like here:

it seem to not be such harsh effect and the road seems uniform till the very far sight :/

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2026

Ok, i found the way to make this much better looking. Aparently ingame anistrophic filtering does not work at all with modern drivers (DX 9 problems with modern drivers?) or just works poorly. Forcing driver side anistrophic filtering x16 makes the transition much less harsh.

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2026

Ok, it is even weirder. Apparently somehow although the ingame anistropic filtering was set to 16x it did not work at all (either the game or driver ignored the setting?). I needed to turn it off and back on both in nvidia panel (now set to "under app control") and in game and now it magicaly works without even forcing 16x on the driver side , I guess somethig must have been messed in translation between nvidiaa driver and the game. Now I understand more and more why console gaming is more popular XD

 

[SigilFey]

Ok, thank You for claryfiying. However when i look at different playthroughs like here:

it seem to not be such harsh effect and the road seems uniform till the very far sight :/

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2026

Ok, i found the way to make this much better looking. Aparently ingame anistrophic filtering does not work at all with modern drivers (DX 9 problems with modern drivers?) or just works poorly. Forcing driver side anistrophic filtering x16 makes the transition much less harsh.

Post automatically merged: Mar 6, 2026

Ok, it is even weirder. Apparently somehow although the ingame anistropic filtering was set to 16x it did not work at all (either the game or driver ignored the setting?). I needed to turn it off and back on both in nvidia panel (now set to "under app control") and in game and now it magicaly works without even forcing 16x on the driver side , I guess somethig must have been messed in translation between nvidiaa driver and the game. Now I understand more and more why console gaming is more popular XD

You're...barely scratching the surface of the insanity that is PC gaming, tweaking, and customization.

To answer the points:
1.) It is there in the playthrough video. It's just that when the videos are captured at lower resolutions, it's blurred out because everything is a little blurred out.

2.) Graphics card settings (the ones you set in Nvidia Control Panel, for example) are program overrides. They're there to provide a driver-level solution if there's something wrong with the game-level settings (or if there are no game settings for that sort of thing.) That's always been the case, since the 1990s until today. (In general, either works, but sometimes you'll get better results with one or the other, be it performance or image quality.)

3.) Backwards compatibility with games is spotty on PC. Modern OS versions (Windows 10/11) don't usually play nicely with older games. You'll need utilities to get games from DirectX 9.0c days, or even further back to the DirectDraw or Glide3D days, to even launch on modern systems. Mods sometimes exist in the form of "wrappers" that can smooth out the visuals of older games. Mileage will vary, obviously. Unfortunately, even consoles have now succumbed to this. One you may want to try is cnc-ddraw, which works well with a lot of <DX9 stuff.