Grainy/pixelated hair? «12...Next Go

Jean

Hi everyone,

I have a question about my graphics in the sims 3.
My game runs fine, no problems there.

But when I edit my sim in CAS (as well as in game it's also noticable) my sims hair seems to be grainy or ''pixelated''
How can I combat this? I've not always had this problem.

My specs are
i5 7600K 3.8 ghz
nvidia geforce gtx 1050 ti, 4gb
16gb ram

Can any of you help me?

Pictures of the problem:




you have to look closely in the second picture.
(the problem is the black ''dots'' surrounding the hair.. also, while not noticable on the screen, the hair itself is pixelated as well)

Jean

Nobody who knows?
My game itself is fine, the anti aliasing works there. It only seems to not work for my hair.
Also the grainy thing is an issue.

Does someone knows what to do?

igazor

You are running what is essentially a 2008-09 game on 2017-18 hardware. There probably isn't much of a solution for things like this. Even with a hefty 4 GB of video memory (vram) as you have, the game can only utilize at most 800 MB of it.

Jean

I just think it's weird that all of my game is rendered in anti aliasing but the hair isn't. Also the grainy and pixelated look wasn't always like this. It just suddenly came...

coco

I've noticed this all of a sudden with my game. It's really weird, just out of nowhere like you said @jean.

phoebebebe13

Try reverting back to a previous Nvidia driver. Are you both on the same driver? http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us

Jean

I recently updated my driver to the latest one. I've noticed that turning that one option in Nvidia panel off.. the top one where you can go until like 16x .. can't recall the name, but turning that off fixed it for me, at least in CAS. In game it's still slightly pixelly but not as much as it used to be.

phoebebebe13

@Jean Hopefully that helps others. If you see a change in your game after updating your drivers , my only suggestion is to go back to a previous driver to where your game played or looked better before. I have had to backdate drivers to get my game to play better. Sometimes an updated driver can cause game issues.

SimplyJen

Anisotropic Filtering? Sometimes settings via Control Panel can conflict with the games own settings. Screenshots are too small for me to really see but glad you found some sort of solution.

Hunter_Cottoneye

Probably in the next update of your graphic card you can solve the problem.

phoebebebe13

Hunter_Cottoneye wrote: »

Probably in the next update of your graphic card you can solve the problem.

That usually does not happen. NVidia and AMD do not update their drivers to accommodate any sims games. It's hit or miss if a driver will interfere with the sims games.

Jean

Yes anisotrophic filtering it is!
Only thing is now that it's application controlled, the floors look blurry in the distance... but yeah. Can't have everything.

coco

Sorry just went back and saw this. I will try the anisotropic filtering. It wasn't a huge deal in my game, just if I took a sim into CAS and changed the hair it would have small grainy squares instead of smooth hair texture lol. Not sure what changed suddenly to make it do that as I haven't purposely updated anything. There's always something going wrong with this game

coco

Turning off Anisotrophic filtering does fix it but I refuse to use that option when it makes playing the game look ugly. I have fiddled with the antialiasing settings in the control panel but nothing has made the grainy hair pixels go away. I only got this computer in November and never seen this sort of graphical problem before, even though my graphics card (GTX 1060 6GB) is recognised and way way better than the 630 I had before. All of my options are on high, including edge smoothing. I am now updated to the latest driver 390.77 with no change

From what I can tell, the problem started at the beginning of February. That's when I downloaded Nraas StoryProgression_Extra and StoryProgression_Career. I have taken them out, and all of the other cc I downloaded this month, just in case there was a confliction but things are still the same. I have reset my settings in game, restarted and turned them back up but it's still the same.

The grainy part as you can see appear on the shiny part of the hair. It appears in all saves. Sometimes it's less with cc hair, but still noticeable. In game I couldn't notice it as much.


I started a test game on an empty world and I'm not sure if I'm just being paranoid now but everything just looks a bit more jagged from afar even though my anisotropic filtering is back at 16x. It's more noticeable around the green chairs.


I feel like something between my graphics card and the game is conflicting but I'm not sure what to do about it now. Igazor helped me match my card to GeForce GTX 480, so it's not that. I'm out of ideas

Can someone upload their NVIDIA Control Panel settings for me? Since getting this computer I have never changed anything but I just want to check if I'm missing something here.

Edit to say: Even when I regenerate a brand new Sims 3 folder the problem is still there.

coco

After a bit of testing I can confirm that the jagged lines only appear when I'm in fullscreen with my fps capped at 60.


When I put my game into windowed mode the lines disappear, but my fps goes over 100.

AuzzPanda

Probably incredibly ignorant and useless but, have you tried making her hair highlights a tad lighter than the base? I usually find that helps with general hair issues

coco

Thanks @auzzpanda for the suggestion, but the pixels appear with any hair colour I change it to

coco

Changing Antialising - mode to Application-Controlled seemed to fix the jagged lines in fullscreen mode which was my real concern here. *knocks on wood*
It did not fix the hair pixel issue though. It actually seemed to get worse, especially for this one random lady.


I'm going to leave it for now because I did not really anticipate spending my Sunday trying to fix my game for the thousandth time. At least I have figured something out for the jagged lines though. Since I take a lot of pictures in game that was a huge concern.

SimplyJen

I use Nvidia Control Panel + Nvidia Inspector since inspector has a few more options but both work together. I'm not sure why the control panel conflicts with in-game settings for some but not all. The only problem I experience is screen tearing with a certain option enabled through Inspector but that's it. I have quite a few things adjusted with both.

My Control Panel settings:
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Antialiasing - Mode Override any application setting
Antialiasing - Setting 8x
Antialiasing - Transparency 8x (supersample)
Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA) On
Power management mode Prefer maximum performance
Texture filtering - Quality High quality
Vertical sync On

SimplyJen

Just checked in my own game tonight in case I haven't really noticed... I do experience this in CAS, not all hairs though. Not a trace of it in-game. I've always noticed a bit of jaggedness if I zoom out enough or turn the camera at a certain angle. Up close which is how I normally take screenshots, things are fine. It's probably because I play on a higher resolution native to my monitor so it shrinks down these kinds of things. I'm sure on 1080p it would be more noticeable for me.

I'm sorry you're so frustrated. Wish I could help.

coco

Thanks @SimplyJen I really appreciate you trying to help.

I turned Multi-Frame Sampled AA on and changed my power management to maximum performance so I will see if that makes a difference. If you don't mind, what did you change in Inspector? I had a look at the settings there but didn't want to change anything just in case I messed everything up.

About the jaggedness, I'm used to seeing a bit of it, but the game was acting like I had edge smoothing off completely. It was really obvious around door frames, bookshelves and other objects like that. When I zoomed out I could still see all of the rough edges.

The thing is, now that I've noticed the pixels a lot more I have gone back into my screenshots and looked at pictures from last month and I can see them a little bit there too. But it was never as bad as it looks now. I did a quick test in a new game and couldn't really see anything in game either which is a relief.

Also noticing a bit lately that everytime I'm in game and I alt-tab or press the windows key to get to the desktop, the game crashes. Last week I was doing a lot of screenshots for a story and checking them as I went and didn't get any crashes, it's not normal for me so I'm not sure what's going on there. Also had a thing last night when a friend gave me a dozen or so pose mod files and I put them in my folder but repeatedly every time I tried to open the game it crashed before even loading to the main menu. It was kinda scary, but I haven't tried to solve that one yet. My first guess is that I have some of them already and the game doesn't like duplicate files.

Ok finally I feel like I'm in the mood to give this another try so I'll go in game and see how it plays.

Odonata68

I was just lurking and this thread caught my attention. I haven't been in game (cas) in a while, so I decided to check this out myself.
Wow! I don't' know what happened, but most of the hairs in cas look just like that in my game.

Then there are a few that don't seem to be affected

It's not the actual hair coloring, but the sheen has been affected or how it's reflecting light.

This is cc hair, it's hard for me to tell if it's being affected. If it is, it looks better than the others.

Then there's this hair that clearly has a bright sheen but seems unaffected.

Older pic of a cas makeover session (last year maybe) and the shine doesn't appear to be pixelated.

I have a GTX 950. I wonder if this is from a driver update. Mine updates all the time it seems.

Odonata68

Ok, the cas hair thing was bothering me so I decided to check on my NVidia settings. I know that I've played around with them before, but I think a driver update may have changed something. So I restored all my settings to factory in 'manage 3D settings'. Then the only things I changed back were vertical sync-on and Multi-frame sampled AA-on because Gforce experience said my card supported it.
Anyways, it fixed the pixelated hair in Cas! yay!

SimplyJen

@Odonata68 Yay Glad you found a solution. I hope the same will work for coco. I do understand how annoying it is once you notice it though and a pain for those who take screenshots in CAS.

Since I don't notice it in-game, I won't bother fussing with my settings. I don't update my graphics driver unless a new game comes out or it makes sense to when I'm troubleshooting something. It's normal for graphics drivers to constantly have updates because new games come out all the time and drivers must support the games.

Odonata68

@SimplyJen I guess I was more worried about something breaking or wearing out, like my graphics card. I'm just glad it was a simple fix.

coco

@Odonata68
This is very promising! Thanks!
I will definitely try reverting my settings back because I had honestly given up hope.