Visual artifacts/red spots

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Visual artifacts/red spots

Hi there, playing The Witcher 3 right now and noticed some visual artifacts.

Spoiler ahead. First Griffin battle.

There are red spots showing up randomly on screen (for example, there is one over Geralt at 19 sec) and sometimes even coloured square artifacts (at 0:51 and 2:30). These appear regardless of having factory or custom overclock applied, but do not appear when playing with Nvidia reference clocks.

By the way, I'm using the 353.06 drivers, didn't play it with previous drivers so I don't know if same behaviour occurs with them. I also posted this at Geforce forums, so hopefully someone reads it and takes it into consideration.

Thank you.
 
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Witch patch are you on? Ever since patch 1.05 my game is mostly unplayable, but in the rare moments where I can play for even just 5-10 mins I get a lot of artifacting, like that. I also see a lot of like blue dots around spell effects. This only started after 1.05 for me. This of course is only one of the many issues I'm having, but just curious.
 
Witch patch are you on? Ever since patch 1.05 my game is mostly unplayable, but in the rare moments where I can play for even just 5-10 mins I get a lot of artifacting, like that. I also see a lot of like blue dots around spell effects. This only started after 1.05 for me. This of course is only one of the many issues I'm having, but just curious.

Yea, forgot to say that I'm on version 1.05. I had these artifacts on previous versions as well, and despite crashing to desktop sometimes, it's running very nice with no major bugs or issues.
 
tldr; oh, it's an OC card, nevermind. ;p

they appear to be occurring when you stare at the sun sometimes. possibly some pixel shader glitch. prob best if you post dxdiag, and contact support, and send them dxdiag as well, with the issue. either prob with game and compatibility of some gpus/drivers, or compatibility between you gpu drivers and your motherboard, as strange as it may sound. updating all hardware is a good place to start (bios if applicable). if upgrading motherboard bios, pay attention to your current bios settings, especially AHCI/IDE mode, etc...

try turning off some in-game graphics features, see if it fixes it, especially light shafts + bloom. it may direct you to where the problem is. and yea, try different drivers.

also, isolate those frames from the video and post screenshot.
 
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tldr; oh, it's an OC card, nevermind. ;p

they appear to be occurring when you stare at the sun sometimes. possibly some pixel shader glitch. prob best if you post dxdiag, and contact support, and send them dxdiag as well, with the issue. either prob with game and compatibility of some gpus/drivers, or compatibility between you gpu drivers and your motherboard, as strange as it may sound. updating all hardware is a good place to start (bios if applicable). if upgrading motherboard bios, pay attention to your current bios settings, especially AHCI/IDE mode, etc...

try turning off some in-game graphics features, see if it fixes it, especially light shafts + bloom. it may direct you to where the problem is. and yea, try different drivers.

also, isolate those frames from the video and post screenshot.

Id like to see a screen.
What's your GPU, vram usage?
Is the card heating up?
Did you try turning down the OC?
Try settings everything to defaults.
Have you verified game files?
 
tldr; oh, it's an OC card, nevermind. ;p

they appear to be occurring when you stare at the sun sometimes. possibly some pixel shader glitch. prob best if you post dxdiag, and contact support, and send them dxdiag as well, with the issue. either prob with game and compatibility of some gpus/drivers, or compatibility between you gpu drivers and your motherboard, as strange as it may sound. updating all hardware is a good place to start (bios if applicable). if upgrading motherboard bios, pay attention to your current bios settings, especially AHCI/IDE mode, etc...

try turning off some in-game graphics features, see if it fixes it, especially light shafts + bloom. it may direct you to where the problem is. and yea, try different drivers.

also, isolate those frames from the video and post screenshot.

Most cards are overclocked, so... :p

Staring at the sun isn't the problem, they show up randomly, even at night. It's either the game or video drivers fault. No other games have any kind of artifacts or other issues, they all run fine even with overclock applied.

I also didn't try decreasing graphics settings yet, I may give it a try later.

Id like to see a screen.
What's your GPU, vram usage?
Is the card heating up?
Did you try turning down the OC?
Try settings everything to defaults.
Have you verified game files?

EVGA GTX970 SC, GPU usage always nearing 99%, VRAM usage always around 1.8-2 GB, card is not overheating (max 72ºC), playing at Nvidia reference clocks gets rid of the artifacts, and as I said above I didn't try decreasing graphics quality yet.

Later I might try changing graphic settings and reverting to 350.12 drivers.

Here are two samples from another video I made just to check these red spots.





And here's a screenshot from the video I posted, showing a square artifact (that's definitely an artifact lol):

 

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Typically, seeing artifacts like this means that your OC is a bit too high, even if your temps are fine and it doesn't happen in other games. Try turning it down a bit at a time and see if it goes away. This game in particular seems sensitive to overclocking so I'd put my money on yours being a hair too high.

It could be a generic game bug, but that looks exactly like OC related artifacts.
 

acrzn

Forum regular
Try turning off the Bloom. It happens to me, not only in Witcher 3, but also in other heavy games like Dying Light. I was thinking it's a hardware defect, but not so sure. Mine is a GTX 660, not OC'ed as far as I know.

There are some rare occasions when I can play with Bloom turned on that doesn't happen. But eventually it catches on. :p
 
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Like someone has already mentioned, try turning off bloom, that works for me.

This game is just bad for OCing on a 970 I think.
 
Visual Artifacts or Red Spots are tied to your RAM, maybe you dont have enough RAM or you OCed your RAM too much?

I dont Overclock myself and i am not that tech savvy but I do know that Visual Artifacts and Red Spots are Memory problems.
 

GD2X

Forum regular
I was getting this issue, as soon as I dialled back on my overclock however it seemed to fix the problem. Had zero red dots since.
 
As I posted earlier, this happens with any kind of overclock applied, be it factory overclock or custom overclock, using Nvidia reference clocks fixes it.

I also reinstalled 350.12 drivers, the game now seems to have worse performance and is stuttering a lot, but the artifacts are gone even when using factory overclock, but are still there when using a custom, higher overclock.

So it might really be an issue with the 353.06 drivers.

Now I will reinstall 353.06 drivers and try different graphics settings.

Visual Artifacts or Red Spots are tied to your RAM, maybe you dont have enough RAM or you OCed your RAM too much?

I dont Overclock myself and i am not that tech savvy but I do know that Visual Artifacts and Red Spots are Memory problems.

My RAM is not overclocked, 2133 MHz is it's default frequency, and this game doesn't even get close to maxing my RAM.

---------- Updated at 07:39 PM ----------

Reinstalled 353.06 drivers, changed a few graphic settings, and the artifacts are gone. Set them all back to Ultra, and they didn't come back. But they still show up with a custom overclock enabled.


Before when I had the artifacts I was using custom settings on the ini files, now with the default in-game Ultra settings they are no more.


What the hell is going on? Could be the custom ini settings causing all this trouble?
 
Maybe some settings in the .ini files shouldnt be changed,

If its possible think you can share with us what settings you changed and turned back to default so that everyone can know and avoid this problem?

This might also give people an insight into what problems these settings might give us.
 
This is definitely overclocked video card. I had this issue when overclocked my 970 to 1500 core. When I downclocked it to 1455, red dots had disappeared.
 
Maybe some settings in the .ini files shouldnt be changed,

If its possible think you can share with us what settings you changed and turned back to default so that everyone can know and avoid this problem?

This might also give people an insight into what problems these settings might give us.

I'm not sure if the custom ini settings could cause such behaviour. I basically increased shadow quality and rendering distance, doubled texture draw distance and budget, and decreased Hairworks antialiasing.

Hairworks antialiasing:
changed to 2x (Default = 8x, I think)

Shadow tweaks:
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2 (Ultra = 1)
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=2 (Ultra = 1)
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2=3 (Ultra = 1.5)
CascadeShadowmapSize=4096 (Ultra = 3072)
CascadeShadowQuality=2 (Ultra = 1)
FoliageShadowDistanceScale=108 (Ultra = 54)

Texture streaming tweaks:
TextureMemoryBudget=1600 (Ultra = 800)
TextureStreamingCharacterDistanceLimit=100 (Default = 50)
TextureStreamingHeadsDistanceLimit=20 (Default = 10)

I edited them based on the Geforce performance guide: http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/gu...ormance-and-tweaking-guide#config-file-tweaks
 
I am having the exact same problems as the OP is having. Since about a week now, I have two MSI GTX 970's (Gaming edition). First, I played with just one 970, and I had no problems whatsoever. When I bought and installed the second, I didn't have any problems at first (other than that the SLI didn't seem to work quite right). After the latest patch, everything was running great - I had no problems, no stuttering, nothing at all.

Since yesterday though, all of a sudden, small red dots started appearing. At first, there were just a few, and after restarting the game, I didn't see them anymore. I thought they were a small bug, and didn't think much of it. As of today, they're back in full effect; now they're also blue and green, and every once in a while, large texture squares accompany them.

I turned of SLI and I still have them with just the one card. I placed the new card in the master slot and that one does not have any dots or flickering problems (although the dots still appear in SLi-mode, even with the new card in the masterslot). Still though, the game runs absolutely great with SLI. The dots are just very annoying. I installed my drivers anew, after a clean de-install, but that didn't help. To make matters worse, the dots now also appear in other games (such as GTA5 and DA:I).

I even tried underclocking both cards, but that did not seem to solve anything either.

I am at a loss here. Should I fear my (half year old) card is about to expire? I've read quite a bit about overclocked cards causing problems, but so far I've had no problems with either of my cards whatsoever. It's only since yesterday that the dots started appearing.

Can anyone tell me if it's hardware of software related, and what I could do to fix this?

Thanks in advance for any replies
 
Try turning down the factory oc on the cards. I am using 970 ftw sli, but when I had one card I oc'd the hell out of it and it cause me red dots in witcher 3. I turned off my oc and left the factory one and it worked fine.
 
I tried that; that is to say, I don't know the first thing about over-/underclocking, but turning down both the coreclock and the memoryclock by at least 300 (through MSI afterburner) still gives me the same problems. The dots are mainly blue now, btw. Especially during nights, they're very visible. It's as if I'm looking at a particularly starry night (but then with ugly, pixelated blue, green and red stars).

It still doesn't explain why it happened all of a sudden. Entire weekend: no problems whatsoever. Yesterday/today: dots everywhere.

Should I perhaps roll back my drivers to an even earlier version? I went back one thusfar.
 
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