Driver problem - anisotropic filtering

[sundog]

Hi,

I've been using Celestia since v1.2.3 and it has brought me a great deal of pleasure immersing myself in the wonders of our solar system. I've downloaded over TEN Gigabytes of planetary data (Blue Marble, SRTM30 etc.) All via a "56k dial-up modem" (and various download managers). Including my "works in progress" I have a little over 30 Gb of Celestia related files.

That should give an idea how much I use and love Celestia.

So, I am ever grateful to Chris Laurel and the other developers for creating this fine software.
Thankyou so much.


Well, over the years customizing Celestia with VTs and Add-ons, I have been able to cure any problems that arose, either figured it out myself or (more often) found the solution in the forums... until now.

The problem is not caused by Celestia. It appears to be a driver issue on my system.

I've been using nVidia drivers 56.64 for some time, and even though they were installed on top of 41.09 without uninstalling (done by a pc engineer swapping a gForce2 card for a gForce4), I've had no problems, except for a menu/overlay issue in fullscreen mode (solar system browser flickered rapidly). I've been reluctant to upgrade the drivers because each upgrade since 41.09 has been a 'downgrade' in performance on my system. (At least when benchmark tested on gForce2 before the card swap).

Well I finally thought it's time to resolve the overlay issue at the expense of a performance hit, so... I downloaded the 71.84 drivers, uninstalled the 56.64, rebooted and installed the 71.84.

Sure enough the drivers cured the overlay problem. But... the anisotropic filtering has gone.

Checking the render paths I found it still works with the "OpenGL Vertex program", but not with the "OpenGL Vertex program/NVIDIA Combiners" (4th render path).

After several tests and changing of the graphics settings I decided to go back to the 56.64 drivers. So, uninstalled the 71.84, reboot, installed the 56.64, reboot, set anisotropic to 8x, ran Celestia... still no filtering with the Combiners path.

I tried a few different divers, 41.09, 44.03, 53.04 even the 41.07 from the MSI cd that came with my card, (uninstalling the old ones each time) on two versions of Celestia 1.3.2 and 1.4.0. pre6. All yield the same results. I'm now back with the 71.84 drivers.

I'm not sure what has gone wrong, anisotropic filtering was definitely working in the 3rd AND 4th render paths with the old drivers. IIRC it even worked with the 41.09 drivers on the gForce2 Ultra.

Could installing the 56.64 "on top" of the 41.09 (as they were before) be the way back to anisotropic filtering with the Combiners path? Although it worked this way before, it's bad practice and I'd rather solve it another way.

Fine details on 32k Mars normal VTs (DDS 24bit uncompressed at the deepest level) just swims and ripples without the anisotropic filtering. Certainly spoils the immersion level.

So, could anyone shed some light on the problem?
Perhaps point to some files to delete or steps to take to make sure I'm clearing out all the old drivers. I tried deleting the C:/NVIDIA/Win9xME/56.64 and other driver directories once uninstalled, then installed the new drivers. The result is the same.
BTW I had shut down antivirus and all background tasks during the driver changes.


One final problem that has occurred during this driver swapping is I have lost part of the context menu on the right mouse click (in WinME). I can no longer create new documents e.g. right-click on Desktop > New > Text document (or Folder or Wordpad or...) It's just not there.

Anyone know how to get this back on the menu?
I had a look in the registry, but with little knowledge it's dangerous in there, so I left well alone.

The only thing I can think of which 'may' have caused this problem is that the 71.84 drivers add a new entry to the context menu. I had turned off this feature in the nVidia graphics settings prior to uninstalling. Could this somehow have also removed the new document listing in the menu? I would think not. But then, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes in windoze.


I'll be gratefull for any help with either of these problems.


Thanks


sundog

[Don. Edwards]

Number one the GeForce 4 can't render at 8x anisotropic filtering in the first place. The best it can do is 4x. I know I had a GeForce 4 TI 4600.
Now on the case of your driver woes. It is possible that you had a mix of driver version running on your system. This happened from time to time with the older Detonator drivers and the early Forceware versions. nVidia has in there wisdom decided to hide a few features that used to be available in the older drivers as well.
At this point the only way to remove all your drivers is to get the utility called Driver Cleaner. I don't have a direct link for the program but if you Google it you should find it. This program totally removes all versions of nVidia drivers from your computer. Than after a reboot you will be in basic 640x480 mode. You can than reinstall which ever drivers you wish. I would highly recommend that you use the newest drivers after using Driver Cleaner. If you still can't see an adjustment for the anisotropic filtering than there is a chance that nVidia has chosen to hide that setting from your particular model card for some reason. There are another 3 utilities that can enable the hidden features again. One is GeForce Tweak Utility, the next is Riva Tuner and probably the best and simplest to use is NVTweak. These utilities let you enable various features that may be turned off by nVidia. One feature is the ability to overclock your video card. But most of these utilities will need the newer drivers to work.
It is a possibility that by using the feature to hide vNidia menu items you added an entry into your Windows registry that has turned off this feature. By using one of these utilities you should be able to everything back.

Now there is another possibility. You did not state what version of Windows you are using, and how old that install is. If you using Windows 98, 98se, or ME and the install is over one year old than you are do for at least what we call in the industry as a dirty install to clean things up. If you running Windows 2000 or Windows XP and the install is a year old the same thing may be the problem. I work as a computer repair technician and I can tell you Windows does not do well when the install is over a year old. Especially if you have been doing any installing and uninstalling of programs. The other problem is registry bloat. After time the registry get full of all sorts of junk entries and they can play havoc with your system and your setting. I have to do a clean install on my personal machine for this very reason.
If you feel you are confident enough to tackle a reinstall of Windows on your own than I recommend that you give your system a fresh start. If you are not confident to do the job yourself than you may want to take it into a local computer shop and have then do it for you. I really can?€™t try and troubleshoot any farther without knowing what Windows version you are using. I can give you step be step instruction on how to clean things up if you would like me to. But it is not for the faint of heart.
So I will await further info from you.

Don. Edwards

[sundog]

Hi Don,

You are right in saying I had a mix of driver versions, v56 was installed onto v41 but all ran fine except for the star/solar system browser, it flashed in fullscreen mode.

quote: "If you still can't see an adjustment for the anisotropic filtering than there is a chance that nVidia has chosen to hide that setting from your particular model card for some reason."

I think you misunderstood my rambling post , I have the slider to adjust the anisotropic filtering, I can adjust it from: off > 2x > 4x > 8x and it works (even 8x) in the 3rd render path (opengl vertex program) but not in the 4th render path (opengl vertex program/COMBINERS).

You must have got mixed up with the "antialiasing" which only goes to 4x. Even that works fine since I un-commented out the "AntialiasingSamples" in celestia.cfg and changed the value to 1, this turns "off" antialiasing in celestia, but in the nvidia graphics settings I have turned off "aplication controlled" for both antialiasing and anisotropic, they both work fine, but only in th 3rd render path.

quote: "At this point the only way to remove all your drivers is to get the utility called Driver Cleaner"

Thanks, I will search for that and give it go. Hopefully that will clear the dead wood.

quote: "You did not state what version of Windows you are using, and how old that install is."

WinME, it's in my signature. What I didn't mention is that it's fully patched and was installed on the 3rd of May 2004. So, yes it is due for another install but I was hoping that wouldn't be neccessary just yet. I need to get a DVD burner to back-up some large files that wont fit on CD. And I hate having to install MS updates while I'm online. Do you know if there's a way to get downloadable updates for WinME? As in, not actually installing while downloading.

quote: "I work as a computer repair technician and I can tell you Windows does not do well when the install is over a year old. Especially if you have been doing any installing and uninstalling of programs."

Ha ha, WinME in particular doesn't do too well after 1 month install. I've found it to be more unstable than Win95. I don't do much installing and uninstalling, I have only a few main progs; Celestia, Photoshop, Pantshop pro, a download manager (leechget) and the main essentials; firewall, antivirus, adaware, spybot S+D. But I do have many "large" files 1Gb+ which get moved around occasionally and written to when I update them. Would this cause any problems? or does a defrag keep it in order?

quote: "I can give you step be step instruction on how to clean things up if you would like me to."

That would great. As I said, I don't want to reinstall just yet, so a few instuctions to clean things up would be ideal.

Ok, I'm going to locate and try "driver cleaner" to see if that gets my graphics card in order.

Just to clarify, my only other problem, which hopefully you can give some guidance, is when I right-mouse click on the desktop or in windows explorer, the context menu is missing the option to create new documents, such as a new text document or new folder or winzip file, wordpad etc. My guess is a few entries are needed in the registry. I've had a nose around in there, but unless I have instructions to say "find this entry and change its value to XYZ" then I don't touch anything.

So I'll go and find "driver cleaner" now, and let you know how it goes.

Thanks Don.


sundog

[sundog]

Don,

I found driver cleaner v3.3 and followed the instructions.

Well, it munched it's way through what seemed like a few hundred files, including my "nvidia dxt tools", but that's no problem. Unfortunately, after installing the 71.84 drivers I still get no anisotropic filtering in the 4th render path (combiners). Oh well, at least my drive had a light spring clean, and everything else (graphics wise) is fine.

Thanks for pointing out that tool. Seems to clear alot of dead files.
I just need to remember to put my dxt tools in a different folder when I use it again

I'm out of time now so I'll check back later.


sundog

[Don. Edwards]

Sorry about that, it ahs been well over a year since I last saw the driver panel for a GF 4 TI class card. Most of the machines I work on have GF 2, 3, or 4 MX400 cards.
Windows ME, well we in the service industry loath and detest this version of Windows.
It is a royal pain in the butt. It sounds like you are trying to keep things to a minimum on your system. Defragging should be taking care of any of the file movement but it may not be doing a good enough job. The type of install I am referring to as a dirty install is basically an upgrade install on top of your present install. This tends to clean things up but it leaves most if not all of your programs intact and functional. There might be a program that might need a reinstall but a dirty install usually will leave everything working while it clears out the registry and builds a new one.
Another thing to consider is moving to Windows XP. Even the Home Edition is miles ahead of ME. I now you probably do not to put more money in Microsoft?€™s pockets but it?€™s a really good alternative. Besides the fact that you would be moving to the NTFS file system that does a much better job of keeping things organized and it can self repair any damaged files that it comes across. It is also more secure than ME and still has recent updates. The online updates for ME are going to be closing up soon so this might be as good a time as any to make the upgrade. Your system specs are totally inline with running XP Home Edition. Also for us XP users there is a team that regularly put together a full downloadable CD that has all of Microsoft?€™s updates. That way you don?€™t have to keep downloading them all the time. Unfortunately they don?€™t make one ME and no one does at this time. There is one for Windows 98 SE though. That would be a step back for you though. If you want to try the dirty install I can give you detailed instructions on how to do it. The only question I have is do have a real Windows ME install CD or a System Recovery CD from your computer manufacturer? If you have a real install CD than this is a very easy thing to do. If you only have the recovery CD it is still possible that it can be done. Microsoft in their great wisdom chose to have ME during the install process copy all the installation files to the hard drive in a some what hidden folder.
Let me know where you want to go from here.

Don. Edwards

[sundog]

Hi Don,

Installing windows is no problem for me, I've done dirty and clean installs on win95, armed with a stack of driver disks. I've even done it without windows CD (long time ago) using DOS, changing to the windows/options/cabs directory and running the setup.exe.

The system I have now has a recovery CD with a few options. One of which is equal to a dirty install but I usually find almost all the progs need reinstalling, but not only that, it breaks the security updates. So when it becomes neccessary, I'll be doing a "clean" install.


The render path problem I can live with for a while, until I (or someone else) can root out the cause.

The context menu problem is my main focus now. I can work around it by copying existing documents and deleting the content, but if you know the required registry entries (if it is a reg problem), a little help there would be much appreciated.


Thanks



sundog

[sundog]

I finally found the cure for the context menu problem with google.

It appears it IS something to do with the nvidia drivers, I didn't find any particular details aside from it can happen after installing drivers as early as 61.xx.

I'm not rure if it's WinME specific problem, but if anyone finds they have lost the "New" in the right-mouse context menu, here's the (WinME) fix.


Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Directory \ Background \ shellex \ ContextMenuHandlers \ New \

and modify "Default" with the following-


{D969A300-E7FF-11d0-A93B-00A0C90F2719}



I spent ages with my head in the WinME and Win95 registries trying to solve this.
With all those Hex strings everywhere I would never have found the problem.



Just the anisotropic filter with the 4th render path problem to solve now. I think that may cure itself when I do a fresh install of WinME. Maybe I'll look into XP as Don suggested, or perhaps Linux.... hmm.




sundog

[danielj]

But what??s the difference,visually,in Celestia,between with and without anisotropic filtering?

[sundog]

But what??s the difference,visually,in Celestia,between with and without anisotropic filtering?

Daniel,

The effect of anisotropic filtering is really most noticable with high resolution textures, such as 16 or 32k VTs. Even more so with high contrasting detail (such as shadows on a light coloured terrain). Low resolution textures don't get much benifit from the filter.

With high res textures, when you're close to the surface of a planet and look to the horizon, details in the texture are squashed and end up smaller than the pixels of your screen. (remember pixels? Fridger showed you a good example). This means your screen doesn't have enough pixels to display all the elements of the texture.

With only 'some' of the elements of the texture being displayed, as the texture moves on screen, the choice of 'which' elements to display is constantly changing. When this happens you get a rippling effect in the fine detail area. What the anisotropic filter does is, it takes an average colour of the elements not shown and adds it to the elements that are. This smooths the detial and gets rid of the ripple.

The effect of the filter is "similar" to antialiasing, as it reduces the contrast from one screen pixel to the next, smoothing and softening the image.

If your card supports the filter and you use high res textures, then test it out.
Turn off the anisotropic filtering, go to about 2 or 3 hundred km above a high res texture and look near the horizon. Make sure you "follow" the planet and not "sync orbit". Speed time up to 10x and you should see the rippling. How much ripple depends on the contrast and detail of the texture.

Try it again 'with' the filter, you should see it's much smoother.

Does that help at all?



sundog

[Giorgio]

It does help me I had the same problem in trying to identify what anisotropic filter did, compared to antialias, and if it worked at all in Celestia, since I have an ATI card.

[danielj]

What planet/moon should I use to see this rippling effect?I tried in Moon 16k VT,Earth 32k VT,Mars M46 VT,Rhea 4k,Enceladus 2k,Titan 4k and couldn??t see any DIFFERENCE.Anyway,i don??t know what rippling is.Maybe some pictures could explain better

[t00fri]

...
Anyway,i don??t know what rippling is.Maybe some pictures could explain better

Daniel,

perhaps instead of always requesting "complete service" from people, why don't you have a look first at Merriam-Webster Online as most of us (poor foreigners) do, when lacking some explanation for an English word:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm

After entering "rippling" you may read:

1 a : to become lightly ruffled or covered with small waves b : to flow in small waves c : to fall in soft undulating folds <the scarf rippled to the floor>
2 : to flow with a light rise and fall of sound or inflection <laughter rippled over the audience>
3 : to move with an undulating motion or so as to cause ripples <the canoe rippled through the water>
4 : to have or produce a ripple effect : SPREAD <the news rippled outwards>
transitive senses

1 : to stir up small waves on
2 : to impart a wavy motion or appearance to <rippling his arm muscles>
3 : to utter or play with a slight rise and fall of sound
- rip?·pler /-p(&-)l&r/ noun

Bye Fridger

[danielj]

I couldn??t see any rippling.To me,the anisotropic filtering is a kind of reinforcement of the antialiasing effect.I couldn??t see any clear difference putting the AF on or off.I tested in the orbited bodies mentioned before(Earth,Moon,Mars,Enceladus,Rhea,Titan and even Saturn).Is there any planet or moon that this "rippling" is more easily seen?

...
Anyway,i don??t know what rippling is.Maybe some pictures could explain better

Daniel,

perhaps instead of always requesting "complete service" from people, why don't you have a look first at Merriam-Webster Online as most of us (poor foreigners) do, when lacking some explanation for an English word:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm

After entering "rippling" you may read:

1 a : to become lightly ruffled or covered with small waves b : to flow in small waves c : to fall in soft undulating folds <the scarf rippled to the floor>
2 : to flow with a light rise and fall of sound or inflection <laughter rippled over the audience>
3 : to move with an undulating motion or so as to cause ripples <the canoe rippled through the water>
4 : to have or produce a ripple effect : SPREAD <the news rippled outwards>
transitive senses

1 : to stir up small waves on
2 : to impart a wavy motion or appearance to <rippling his arm muscles>
3 : to utter or play with a slight rise and fall of sound
- rip?·pler /-p(&-)l&r/ noun

Bye Fridger

[sundog]

I couldn??t see any rippling. ... I couldn??t see any clear difference putting the AF on or off.

If that's true then you don't need to worry about the AF. Leave it turned off for better performance.

I made my own 32k Mars Normal-Map (m46 topo) and my own 32k Earth Normal-Map (SRTM30). I have exaggerated the relief in both maps to bring out the small details. This is where I notice the difference most.

Again, if you don't see any rippling, then don't worry about the AF.



sundog