San Andreas Graphical Artifacts

[Sulphur]

Er, well, I dunno how to phrase this. I've got San Andreas up and running, that's the retail version, and I've noticed something curious.

 

In certain areas - where there are railings, or chain-link fences, I'm getting blue outlines on them. Like the sky's bleeding through the edges. It happened during the day, and with heat haze shimmer entire sections of fence would shimmer with a travelling, cloudy blue pattern, but only in a certain section of the map. Nowhere else. But again, there are certain bits like projecting edges or maybe even bits of scaffolding in a map where these blue edges arise... in one or two other areas. I'll post a picture if you need to see it. The thing is, I'm not overclocking the graphics card (BFG 6800 GT, which comes at a 20mhz factory overclock which I haven't touched) or the processor itself(3200+ AMD 64). I haven't noticed any texture corruption like dots and weird polygons anywhere.

 

And I haven't seen anything like this before - 'cept for maybe the Vulcan demo for the FX5900, where I'd get small white aliased bits in areas with specular highlights or edges. Haven't seen a peep of a problem with anything else - Half Life 2, Doom 3, Chronicles of Riddick, Psychonauts, RTHDRibl, nothing. That's both OpenGL and D3D I've tested. Far Cry had one slight problem with the 1.3 patch - instances of a certain type of grass flickered a little, presumably when scaling from low detail to high detail, but that was only for that one grass sprite or two that was instanced all over the place; the rest of the vegetation was fine. And what flicker there was is only noticeable if you're actually looking for it.

 

This is weird... are these graphics anomalies with the game or are they brought on by the card? Would appreciate it if anyone can help.

 

EDIT: Complete Machine Specs - AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester, BFG 6800GT OC, 1 GB (2x512MB) Dual-Channel DDR400 RAM, Windows XP SP2.

Edited September 15, 2005 by Sulphur

[Prelithe]

I sometimes get this. Usually gaps in between in the maps. Don't think this is a big problem, just some mistakes in the mapping process.

[Sulphur]

Thanks for the reply. That's what I was thinking, too, since this happens only in an area or two. Glad to know I ain't the only one who's noticed it.

[duvetlord]

This is most proberly a problem with the main game engine, It had the same problems on the console versions.

[GTA3Freak-2001]

Yeah that's normal for any of the 3D GTA's, the game just doesn't like alpha channels much and you get the ugly problem you're explaining.