Flickering Grass and Game-Data Access Issues

[Hickory]

There's nothing that sticks out there -- graphics drivers and DirectX installed. When I mentioned a clean reinstall, I did mean Oblivion, not Windows by the way. It's important to remove all traces of Oblivion when you are reinstalling and troubleshooting. I see that you format your drive, but some people install games to other partitions/drives. Also it's important to run Oblivion completely unmodded a few times, to guage if the issue occurs only when mods are added.

[TJADER]

Oh this is the exact same problem I have and I have the same gfx card as you do, Hickory. I have been trying for a long time to get this fixed but without success. I hope you'll fix it.

[Tenlethar]

Oh this is the exact same problem I have and I have the same gfx card as you do, Hickory. I have been trying for a long time to get this fixed but without success. I hope you'll fix it.

 

Its me who has the problem :) Hickory is the kind person who offers his help. But anyway, i hope WE can fix this problem, because its terribly annoying.

 

However, i don't think its related to the graphics card - since i tested it with NVIDIA (GTX 470 and 480) and with ATI (4870 and 5870) all with the very same results.

 

@Hickory

 

I have tested it with a clean setup as well. Vanilla oblivion install, fresh, no mods. Unfortuantely - same problem :(

[Hickory]

I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for you both, particularly since you've tried with several graphics cards, one that I know does not cause this. I only have one last avenue of exploration (for want of a better term): have you checked that any of your graphic driver profiles are not causing this. I know that with ATI profiles get preserved when you install new drivers. It may be worth checking them, and maybe setting a default profile for testing. Other than that, I cannot for the life of me think what else may be the culprit.

[Tenlethar]

I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for you both, particularly since you've tried with several graphics cards, one that I know does not cause this. I only have one last avenue of exploration (for want of a better term): have you checked that any of your graphic driver profiles are not causing this. I know that with ATI profiles get preserved when you install new drivers. It may be worth checking them, and maybe setting a default profile for testing. Other than that, I cannot for the life of me think what else may be the culprit.

 

Thank you for the input! Its calming to know someone understands the pain :)

 

When i tried out several cards, i'd always cleanly remove drivers and when installing NVidia drivers they now have an option "clean reinstall drivers" (or so) which removes all old profiles as well.

 

Since i also tested on another OS (Windows XP 32-Bit) i am pretty sure it has nothing to do with the settings.

 

Aside from that, i also tested with a vast variety of different settings (my fingers were almost bleeding from launching Oblivion.exe) - i tried out all the tricks, LOD bias, trilinear buffering, literally all there is to try (unless someone has another idea, which would be great).

 

To no avail :/

[Hickory]

Falling back on searching for ideas from others, I found this piece of advice for nVidia cards.

 

I will quote it here, in case anything happens to the link.

 

 

Possible nVidia Control Panel culprits include:

 

Default setting (3) of "Max Frames to Render Ahead" is set too high. Try setting it down to 1 or even 0.

 

Attempting to force Anti-Aliasing in the nVidia Control Panel whilst simultaneously having HDR lighting effects enabled in the game. Set all of the Anti-Aliasing settings to "Application Controlled." Do the same with Anisotropic settings.

 

Try setting "Negative LOD Bias" to "Allow" (the default is "Clamped").

 

Be sure that "Image Settings" is set at "High Quality."

 

"Force Mipmaps" works fine at "Bilinear" setting.

 

"Trilinear Optimization" seems to work better if disabled ("Off')

 

NOTE: RADEON cards have roughly similar adjustmenst that can be made via the Catalyst Control Panel.

 

 

You might check out the following guide, if you haven't already:

 

Tweak Guides for Oblivion

 

 

 

 

 

[Tenlethar]

Falling back on searching for ideas from others, I found this piece of advice for nVidia cards.

 

I will quote it here, in case anything happens to the link.

 

 

Possible nVidia Control Panel culprits include:

 

Default setting (3) of "Max Frames to Render Ahead" is set too high. Try setting it down to 1 or even 0.

 

Attempting to force Anti-Aliasing in the nVidia Control Panel whilst simultaneously having HDR lighting effects enabled in the game. Set all of the Anti-Aliasing settings to "Application Controlled." Do the same with Anisotropic settings.

 

Try setting "Negative LOD Bias" to "Allow" (the default is "Clamped").

 

Be sure that "Image Settings" is set at "High Quality."

 

"Force Mipmaps" works fine at "Bilinear" setting.

 

"Trilinear Optimization" seems to work better if disabled ("Off')

 

NOTE: RADEON cards have roughly similar adjustmenst that can be made via the Catalyst Control Panel.

 

 

You might check out the following guide, if you haven't already:

 

Tweak Guides for Oblivion

 

 

 

 

Thanks Hickory! I wish i could still try that - for the sake of a little hope - but i found the same post and i tried those settings. But nothing :/

[Hickory]

Falling back on searching for ideas from others, I found this piece of advice for nVidia cards.

 

I will quote it here, in case anything happens to the link.

 

Thanks Hickory! I wish i could still try that - for the sake of a little hope - but i found the same post and i tried those settings. But nothing :/

 

Shoot! I'm out of ideas. Hopefully, somebody who's come across this before and knows the answer will see your post. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. :sad:

[Tenlethar]

Falling back on searching for ideas from others, I found this piece of advice for nVidia cards.

 

I will quote it here, in case anything happens to the link.

 

Thanks Hickory! I wish i could still try that - for the sake of a little hope - but i found the same post and i tried those settings. But nothing :/

 

Shoot! I'm out of ideas. Hopefully, somebody who's come across this before and knows the answer will see your post. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. :sad:

 

You did what you could, man. Thank you! And there is some development here - i hung out in the chatroom today and spoke to a few guys there. One of them said that my problem is probably related to faulty/conflicting/wrong data that is stored in my savegame (!!) and that is a pretty interesting point if it is true. Because the savegames were one variable which during all my testing never actually changed. The savegames were always the same. I thought that as long as i did not load any mods into vanilla Oblivion when testing, and as long as i don't spice up the install, nothing could be wrong with using those savegames.

 

So tonight i'll run a few short tests and see if the savegame is the issue. I'd be relieved if so - yeah, i'd have to play over or fix this, but that also means i'd finally be able to play at all :)

 

Lets see!

[TJADER]

Falling back on searching for ideas from others, I found this piece of advice for nVidia cards.

 

I will quote it here, in case anything happens to the link.

 

Thanks Hickory! I wish i could still try that - for the sake of a little hope - but i found the same post and i tried those settings. But nothing :/

 

Shoot! I'm out of ideas. Hopefully, somebody who's come across this before and knows the answer will see your post. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help. :sad:

 

You did what you could, man. Thank you! And there is some development here - i hung out in the chatroom today and spoke to a few guys there. One of them said that my problem is probably related to faulty/conflicting/wrong data that is stored in my savegame (!!) and that is a pretty interesting point if it is true. Because the savegames were one variable which during all my testing never actually changed. The savegames were always the same. I thought that as long as i did not load any mods into vanilla Oblivion when testing, and as long as i don't spice up the install, nothing could be wrong with using those savegames.

 

So tonight i'll run a few short tests and see if the savegame is the issue. I'd be relieved if so - yeah, i'd have to play over or fix this, but that also means i'd finally be able to play at all :)

 

Lets see!

 

I have tried the saved games, and made new games from start - but I still got the grass and self shadow bug. Gah, this is the most irritating bug I have ever encountered.