Hi guys,
There is more then one thread on this topic and instead of trying to post my solution on all of them I thought it just might make more sense to start a new one.
I spent over four hours with nHancer comparing all the different SLI profiles that come with the latest drivers from Nvidia. As many of you are aware you have to turn shadows off because of the horrible flickering that was introduced in patch 1.05 - it seems this only affects SLI and Crossfire users (unfortunately, this fix only applies to people that are using multiple video cards from Nvidia).
First off, you're gonna need to download the program nHancer. You can get it from
http://nhancer.com.
A few months ago people that were running SLI started having "flickering icons" when they opened their inventory screen. I was able to solve this by turning off bit 19 in the Age of Conan SLI profile. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of also causing SLI rendering to tank when a person opened up the inventory screen (ie. you'd be at 85 FPS - no problem - and then you open up the inventory screen and you dropped to 30 FPS). But, for me, I'd rather have lower FPS then an epileptic seizure every time I opened my inventory.
Well, now with the new patch, I was getting horrible flickering shadows AND flashing icons in my inventory screen from time to time. I thought turning off bit 19 would solve the problem - but it only did for the inventory screen - shadows were still borked. For the record, the default Age of Conan SLI profile that comes with the latest Nvidia drivers has bit 19, 22 and 25 turned on and all others turned off.
So, turning off bit 19 solved the flashing inventory icons but didn't solve the flickering shadows. It also caused a third issue with FPS tanking when the inventory screen was open. So, this time I turned off bit 22 and left 19 and 25 on. Same problem - flickering shadows and flashing icons. Then I turned off bit 25 and left 19 and 22 on.
SUCCESS! The flickering shadows were gone but there were some performance issues - so I turned on the SLI Indicator Bar and sure enough, the bars weren't fully extended from the top to bottom (which means SLI rendering isn't working at maximum efficiency/capacity).
Well, I have no freakin' idea what each of those bits do - they are undocumented and I've searched all over the internet for some sort of hint on what each one does - even the guy who wrote nHancer has no idea what they do. We only know how Nvidia has "tweaked" each profile based on information they got from the developers of the game (just a guess).
So I did something that no one who has a life would ever think about doing - I actually went through every profile and wrote down all the bits that were turned on with profiles that had the "19" bit set on. I started seeing a pattern - especially with a few older games versus newer games (as it pertains to bit 19). I found a lot of game profiles that were using 19, 22, and 25 just like AOC - but they were all fairly old. So I started comparing all the profiles that were using 19 and 22 but had bit 25 turned off. Almost all of them had another companion bit turned on which suggested to me that if turning bit 19 and 22 on doesn't solve our problem then whatever team writes Nvidia's drivers has others bits meant to work around some idiosyncrasy.
All the profiles that used bit 19 and 22 but DIDN'T use bit 25 - well - I wrote them down.
18, 19, 22
13, 15, 19, 22
13, 15, 18, 19, 22
etc.
So, I tried all of them until I had the performance back that I used to have way back when I first started playing this game.
So, what are the magic numbers?
Load up nHancer, choose the Age of Conan SLI profile, go to the SLI config tab for the profile and enable bits 13, 19, 22 - and make sure you disable bit 25. There should only be checkmarks for 13, 19, 22.
Load up Age of Conan and you'll notice three things:
1) the flickering shadow problem is gone (thanks to turning off bit 25).
2) the inventory screen will no longer make your SLI rendering tank (thanks to bit 13)
3) you will no longer have flashing inventory icons (thanks to leaving bit 19 turned on)
I haven't had Age of Conan run this smooth for quite a while. With a game like Age of Conan where they are constantly releasing patches and updates to the code it would sure be nice if someone was working with Nvidia (and ATI - look at all the messed up Crossfire users) to keep multi-GPU driver profiles up to date. I did notice recently that bit 19 was added to the profile - but that was only 3 or 4 driver revisions ago. Before that it was bit 22 and 25 - so obviously there is some communication going on - but it would be nice in the future if people like me could just play the game and leave nVidia and Funcom to the driver tweaking... nVidia has documentation - none of us do - what took me four hours would take them 5 minutes. I choose bit 13 because it solved the problem - but that doesn't mean it was the best solution. Maybe it will end up causing an issue in some other zone - but hopefully this will be a step in the right direction to getting it corrected where it matters most - NVIDIA DRIVER UPDATES :-)
Anyways, sorry for the long post - I hope I never have to do this again for as long as I live.
Regards,
- Marco
Age of Conan Forums
Technical: Nvidia SLI shadow flickering - SOLVED
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Nvidia SLI shadow flickering - SOLVED
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