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SLI Ghost Image Bug - Might Only Affect Ubisoft Games

newtekie1

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I've been experiencing a pretty nasty bug with SLI enabled. It started with Watch_Dogs and now it is happening in FarCry 4 too. So far these are the only two games in which I've experienced the problem.

Basically, the bug is that there will all of a sudden, randomly, just be a ghost image overlaying the game. It almost looks as if all the shadows from one single frame are stuck and always displaying. The odd thing is that you can bring up the fullscreen menu of either game and the stuck shadow image isn't there, but when you exit the menu back into the game the shadow image is still there. The only way to fix the problem is to exit the game completely to the main menu.

At first I though the most obvious, that it was a shadow problem. I tried every shadow option in Watch_Dogs, including turning shadows completely off, and couldn't fix the problem. Eventually I just gave up and lived with the problem. Sometimes I could play for an hour straight and it would never happen, sometime it would happen after playing for 5 minutes. It was annoying, but not unbearable. Plus, I played through the Watch_Dogs main campaign on my A10-7850K rig with its integrated graphics and only was using my main rig to do the side stuff after I beat the game, so the problem didn't really bother me too much.

This week I installed FarCry 4 and, much to my horror, it has the same shadow image problem as Watch_Dogs! So I start googling and it turns out I'm not the only one. But this time I found some people suggesting it is an Ambient Occlusion issue, and others suggesting it is an AA issue. I start fiddling and found out it is really an issue with both!

I found that if I have AO set to anything other than HBAO the problem happens. Also, If I set AA to SMAA the problem happens. Now with FarCry, when you set the graphics to Ultra, it uses SSBC and SMAA, and the bug happens pretty consistently within 5 minutes of gameplay. If I switch AO to HBAO+ and leave AA set to SMAA, then the problem still happens, but usually not until after about 20-30 minutes of play. I can get the same 20-30 minutes of play if I set AO to SSBC and AA to TXAA2/4. However, if I set AO to HBAO+ and AA to TXAA2/4, then the problem seem to never happen. Or at least I've played for over an hour several times and not had it happen. The same fix seems to apply to Watch_Dogs as well. With Watch_Dogs, Ultra settings uses MHBAO by default, which again causes the problem. Argh...

Anyway, I hope if someone else is having similar issues, this post helps.

Edit: I grabbed a screenshot of the issue. It isn't as bad in this shot, mainly because it is kind of dark. It is a lot more obvious when it is brighter. You can really see the issue in the water, especially right at the end of the arrow. Those lines are ghost images of some grass I walked through on my way to the water edge.
 
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eidairaman1

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Ugh that blows. I hope its not the monitor
 

newtekie1

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Now here is the interesting thing. I've only experienced this with these two games. Both games are put out by Ubisoft and developed by Ubisoft Montreal. The two games do use different engines, but I'm guessing Ubisoft might have used the same methods to implement AO and AA, which causes the bug to show up in both games. Just my guess.

Ugh that blows. I hope its not the monitor
Oh yeah, should have mentioned I tested it on each of the 3 monitors connected to my main rig. It did it on all 3.
 

eidairaman1

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Either driver or game id report this to both honestly
 
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Hi

Just to confirm this is happening here testing GTX 780 GHz SLi ; seems like a combo of; New driver and or game patch required

atb

Law-II
 
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