Graphics corruption at certain tracks (?)

Kris Migut · Oct 14, 2013

First post, hello everyone

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I have been playing GSC 2013 quite intensively for the last week or so, and the sim is a blast! However, I have experienced some graphical issues with two (at least - I haven't tested all of them yet) of the tracks, namely the Cascavel and Brasilia circuits (the "square" layout of the latter, the longer one seems OK). The issues manifest themselves in the form of flickering textures and black stripes which appear randomly all over the track; they aren't visible instantaneously after the track gets loaded, but can be seen after I have done about 4-6 laps, which may suggest the overheating of the video card, but I can drive on other tracks for hours on end without a slightest issue whatsoever. Perhaps it's some sort of a texture-to-memory glitch - I don't know.

The contents of the sysinfo file:

DX: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.00.0904)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz @ 3,50 GHz
QPC: 3416064 tps
SRAM: 0 MB
OS: Windows Service Pack 1 Build 7601
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti
VRAM: 4044 MB
DRIVER: 9.18.0013.2049
GUID: D7B71E3E-5286-11CF-F27B-40A41CC2C435

and screenshots with the artifacts:

Justin Swan · Oct 14, 2013

Hi Zena @Reiza Studios Would probably be interested to see this as they are trying to iron out some wrinkles. I've tagged them into your post, so hopefully they'll pop along and have a look

Welcome to RD BTW

Kris Migut · Oct 14, 2013

Thank you

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The issue might be shadows-related somehow, when I raced at the Brasilia circuit in the late afternoon the main grandstand (or the garages, I don't remember the position of the sun) cast a long shadow across the whole width of the track and it was only there that I was driving through a whole mess of black stripes and triangles. Other parts of the track were OK.
Video car is running at default clocks, has never been oced.

Scott Webber · Oct 14, 2013

sounds either like overheating, a file is missing/corrupt.

so before anything else, let's rule some stuff out.

Have you updated your graphics drivers (or rolled back?) that may help

have you tried lowering your settings (just to experiment to see if it re-occurs

in the installation folder go to "GSC Config" , is DX9 enabled & do you run VSync on or off?

if all else fails, try and re-install it.

Alex Sawczuk · Oct 14, 2013

Definitely looks like a graphics card fault to me. Are you monitoring the graphics card temperatures?

Kris Migut · Oct 14, 2013

@ Scott Webber - no, I have had the same drivers for at least two months. I run the sim at the highest settings, with auto fps turned off, V-sync off and DX9 enabled. The temperatures appear to be all right - while driving, the GPU and CPU temps never exceeded 73C and 61C respectively.

if all else fails, try and re-install it.

And this one seems to have helped

. I have just completed a 30-minute race at Cascavel and had no issues at all. Thanks for the suggestion, the easiest solutions are sometimes hard to hit upon

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I also disabled the "+fullproc" entry in the command line, but I don't know whether or not this has had any effect. Should the problem persist, I will let you know.

RichardHessels · Oct 16, 2013

Those graphics issues look like graphics card memory corruption.
Keep the +fullproc in the shortcut, it will make the sim run on all cores of your CPU.
Giving better/smoother framerates in the most demanding parts of the race.
Should have nothing to do with the screen rendering.

Kris Migut · Oct 17, 2013

Strangely enough, that's exactly what it does, my hunch was right

. I enabled the +fullproc command, did two laps around a track and the graphics corruption came out again, flickering textures and random shadows. Disabled it and everything is back as it should be. So it was not a bad install in the first place.

I don't think it has anything to do with the CPU temperature, I constanly have it measured by Core Temp and neither core has exceeded 57C today, so that's a perfectly acceptable threshold. Perheps GSC2013 is very OC-sensitive? Obviously, with a Core i3 overclocking is a joke and I did not squeeze more that 200 Mhz out of it, but perhaps the very fact that the system bus runs at 106 Mhz has something to do with it?

Anyway, the culprit's been caught

. It does give me a signficant performance boost however, (about 30%, that's a rough estimate) so I may decide to run my CPU at default clocks and see if this corruption will reappear. On the other hand, I still get more than enough FPS as it is now.

Alex Sawczuk · Oct 18, 2013

Because of the wierd way ISI shadows work, they are done on the CPU, perhaps you shouldn't over clock your CPU so much as it seems to cause these issues here, maybe there are other problems elsewhere

Kris Migut · Oct 19, 2013

Overclocking is not at fault here; as it turns out, at default CPU clocks the issue still persists. Perhaps it's due to the two-core, four-thread nature of my Core i3. So +fullproc is not for me, unfortunately

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Kris Migut · Nov 29, 2013

It appears that no one but me has been plagued with this issue, but I think I have accidentally found a makeshift solution, perhaps someone will find it useful. Whenever this corruption starts to appear I minimize the sim to the taskbar, open the proprieties of the GSC's shortcut, delete the +fullproc command, apply the change and maximize the sim. Now everything looks OK plus I still get the performance boost. Magic

Fernando Zart · Jun 14, 2014

Hi. I have this same kind of shadow corruptions now and then, and they appear even if I don't use +fullproc. I have a 3570K overclocked to 4.3Ghz, and by minimizing/restoring the game I (most of the time) can cure the problem.
May try a tip that I've read on another thread (can't remember where), which is to increase the Overlay Height= line in your .PLR file. The original value is 0.04000, and the tip is to increase it slightly, like 0.04005.

ML2166 · Jun 14, 2014

You know.....this is probably unrelated, but I suffered from exactly the same thing on a track conversion as shown in the above piccy.

What I found was that it was a couple of cams causing the issue. I just went in and deleted the offending cams and just added my own, plus some extra ones whilst I was at it. Problem went away.

Unrelated of that I'm sure of, but just thought I would pass on the little bit I found out.

hex · Jul 29, 2014

I have same issues over and over again. Tried couple of tips found on other forums like disabling Shadow Cache in the .plr file. Changing FSAA in the config or disabling replay recording - strangely ALL of those tips worked for a while, but then everything kept back to the flickering, and that is annoying as f... I must say that disabling replays from being recorded helped the most, because I got flickering after 2 days of testing! With the previous tips there were no issues for some hour or two.

Intel Core i5-4440 @ 3.10GHz
8GB RAM
GeForce GTX 750
W8.1 x64

Hoogs · Jul 5, 2015

I'm having the same problems with flickering shadows after a couple laps. These problems only began after the most recent update of 1.35. THIS is NOT a hardware issue or an overheating issue I can guarantee this.

LotsaBS · Jul 6, 2015

Please correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't +fullproc added to the GSE.exe by default back around version 1.15?

Limão · Jul 8, 2015

Guys,

I was having the same issue - it's really annoying. Not sure if you already solved it, but try turning the "Special Effects" off in the graphics menu. For me, it worked.

Let me know if it works!