what do you call this shimmering effect?

[Leon86 13]

I tried to reduce the shimmering in the distance by clamping lod bias, disabling anisotropic sample option and put stuff at high quality in nvidia control panel, but in a helo it's still there.

seems to have something to do with the cockpit, in 3rd person you dont really get this.

anyway, what this effect called? I've seen it before in arma titles and also in battlefield 3.

[nicolasroger 11]

Not 100% sure, but it looks like Z-fighting

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Not 100% sure, but it looks like Z-fighting

You may be right - http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Z-Fighting

Z-fighting describes a very complex problem which spreads across many games and many graphic cards including the two big companies nVidia and ATI. In game it shows as a very fast flickering texture. This is because the texture itself consists of different layers. If those layers cannot be strictly separated from another as it is with z-fighting you see the flickering. If your interested what it is exactly, have a look at this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting

[Leon86 13]

that kind of explains everything, especially the airfield being a complete mess.

[CalinTM 1]

It's normal happens in full open world games. This is a measure that the engine capes some things at high distances down to not stress the CPU/GPU and maintain a good fps.

[Leon86 13]

Might be "normal" but it's very annoying when it's there.

[max power 21]

The way the algorithm for finding the differences in distances between two surfaces works, it becomes increasingly more difficult the further away they are. Eventually, rounding errors mean that which polygon is shading the screen may change per pixel. That is to say, everytime the zbuffer tests to see which polygon is shading a pixel, it may get a different result every pixel, every frame. It's just an artifact of high view distances in 3d.

Edited March 17, 2013 by Max Power

[CalinTM 1]

Check battlefield 3 maps while in hely or in jet, and check also the shadow map rendering while getting far from objects. It's normal for every open world game to have this "issues" to not stress the GPU too much, because you don't need super clear rendered image while getting very far from the ground, like in the first video with that hely.

[chrisb 196]

Skyrim on this forum, got to smile at that..:D

[Leon86 13]

another bit of z fighting, but in rubble.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?149139-Weird-Lighting-Shadow-bug-that-was-present-in-Arma-2-seems-to-have-also-appeared-in-3/page2

and someone made a ticket

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=3666

[DieAngel 0]

Z fighting is not going away, when you have two surfaces close together, the further away they are the more the rounding errors will affect the rendering precision, to the point where it starts flickering.

This is essentially the ground and the water surface going over and under eachothers.

[charliemilk 10]

Just change the weather to cloudy and thus look at pretty clouds instead of the airfield. :p