ok, right off the bat I can tell you the only thing i did differently. I upgraded the driver for my Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440. Never gave it a second thought. Last night, like I do every night, I fired up mercs.

something seemed 'odd'... I go and join a server and I could notice a very subtle 'flashing' or 'flickering' almost unnoticeable... then I joined the game HORRIBLE it was as if the framerate had every other frame removed. It USED to be very smooth and playable... I can't even FOCUS it is so bad. I have checked all settings and everything seems ok. I have mercs set at 800 x 600, thats fine.

OTHER apps look fine (web, movies via WMP, ) it seems limited to Mercs.

I have run DXDIAG and everything checks out, I ran all tests, etc

ANY IDEAS?

I'll be more then happy to converse via instant message or TeamSpeak to help solve this..

but until I (or we) get this fixed, I cant play. It's just that bad

worse comes to worse...use the rollback function to go back to your previous drivers..

already tried that... no help.

so i TOTALLY removed the vid drivers and reinstalled them from scratch, no help.

this is why I am boggled.

I am going to defrag... who knows it's a longshot

Shiva,

I recently updated my Nvidia drivers through windowsupdate and it messed up everything. Rolling back helped in my case. In your case, try the drivers that came in the CD with the GF4 card. Then upgrade to detonators 41.xx.

I would then check if any of the variables for the card was changed (right-click on deskptop, properties, settings, advanced). Check whether the anysotropic filtering or antialiasing are set too high for your machine. Try changing the VSYNC setting, too.

Now, you mention flickering... did you try it with other games? Is there any chance that there are hardware problems? Check if the cord from the monitor to the card is correctly attached. Then, plug in another monitor and see how it works.

What version of DirectX?

9, but thats not the issue.. (see next post)

Hazzie actually got me thinking about tweaking things.

The anisotropic filtering and antialiasing settings were set to 'application controlled', so i turned them both off and VOILA now it is fine.

VSync is set to auto. should I turn it to ON or OFF?


so now I have to ask...

1) how important is antialiasing

2) how important is anisotropic filtering

3) WHAT THE &%^* is anisotropic filtering?

But MOST importantly, it seems to be FIXED!

Bartender - Send a drink over to hazmat!

Turn VSYNC off for performance, on for visual quality. VSYNC forces your videocard to wait for your monitor's refresh rate before drawing a new frame. So, no matter how badass your videocard is, if your monitor is set to 60Hz you'll never get more than 60fps out of your videocard. Turning VSYNC off removes this behavior, but it can cause the image on your screen to "tear" as the monitor gets stuck drawing half of one frame towards the top and half of the previous frame towards the bottom. Generally this isn't very noticeable, unless you're doing something like playing an FPS and making snap 180 turns all the time.

1.) Not important when it comes at a high performance cost, which it still does on virtually all videocards. In layman's terms, it's one of a few different techniques that's used to smooth out the "jaggies" that polygons make when they're drawn at an angle.

2) Not particularly important.

3) Anisotropic filtering is a way of smoothing and blending textures that are nearer or further away from your viewpoint. Anisotropic filtering will look better than trilinear or bilinear filtering, but generally uses more texture memory. Expermiment with this; some vidcards and games get it "for free," while others incur a performance penalty. A lot of the time, however, you have to be staring at a wall or a static screenshot to really see a difference.

Thanks, Wad.

I feel like I actually LEARNED something.

*YAY*

see you all on the server later!

also *YAY*

Hmmm Beer
*drools*


Thanks Shiva!

Arg!!! Same crap just started happening to me