OpenGL white pixel flashes

[GeoStreber]

Hello,
Just bought the game ^^.

I notice that when I'm in OpenGL mode, I sometimes get
single pixels flash white for only one frame. This behaviour doesn't happen with
the software renderer, and it's very prominent in dark areas.

I'm running a 144Hz G-Sync monitor, an RTX 2070 Super (KFA2 OC) and a Ryzen 3900x on Windows 10 1909.
Is it possible that those are VRAM artifacts, and that my graphics card's VRAM is defective?

Thanks in advance.

[gabeblackbeard]

Originally posted by GeoStreber:

Hello,
Just bought the game ^^.

I notice that when I'm in OpenGL mode, I sometimes get
single pixels flash white for only one frame. This behaviour doesn't happen with
the software renderer, and it's very prominent in dark areas.

I'm running a 144Hz G-Sync monitor, an RTX 2070 Super (KFA2 OC) and a Ryzen 3900x on Windows 10 1909.
Is it possible that those are VRAM artifacts, and that my graphics card's VRAM is defective?

Thanks in advance.

Hey. Sorry for necroing your post, but I figured to reply just in case you've spent all this time without knowing the answer, but mainly for other people who might wonder the same thing in the future.

I'm also having the white (sometimes orange-ish?) pixels in dark areas when running under OpenGL, most easily seen in one of the tunnels in the first level. Here's a screenshot, for reference.

https://i.imgur.com/eZhBWrD.png

The screenshot makes them seem very sporadic, but at least in the tunnel, they're not; moving the camera around makes one pixel appear here and there, while making the previous ones disappear. They also take a little bit of playtime to start showing up. After loading a save, these pixels are not present; only after running around for a few seconds do they start appearing.

After encountering the issue and wondering if it's my GPU. I then ran the game on a completely different machine with a Radeon onboard card (my main PC has a dedicated Geforce), and precisely the same thing occurs.

So no, it's not a GPU issue, it's the game.

Weird that I never paid attention to this back in September 2019 when I first beat the game, but replaying it now I spotted it right away. But since your post was from two months after that, then that most likely means it was already happening back then.

Anyway, like you said, playing under software renderer solves it, at the cost of some graphical detail like smooth shading. Would be nice if the developers could shed some light on this subject though. But at least it's not hardware related!

[Crypto Carlos]

I think what you are seeing is tiny seams in the sector geometry that might be due to the difference in precision between the software and hardware renderers. I've seen this kind of thing in other games, though it's particularly pronounced here - it was VERY noticeable starting in the outdoor level with flickering pixels all over the place.

[Thomas the Gank Engine]

I get the same issue, most of the time it's barely noticable unless you're looking for it as it's just the odd pixel. But every now and again there's a sudden burst of them all over the screen for a single frame, typically occurs in specific locations too.

I also never had the issue on my first playthrough, it's only in the last year or so I've noticed the issue.

[gabeblackbeard]

Originally posted by Macho Madness:

I think what you are seeing is tiny seams in the sector geometry that might be due to the difference in precision between the software and hardware renderers. I've seen this kind of thing in other games, though it's particularly pronounced here - it was VERY noticeable starting in the outdoor level with flickering pixels all over the place.

I too thought it had something to do with seams, though I wonder why it seems to become somewhat worse as a bit of time passes after I load a game.

Originally posted by Thomas the Gank Engine:

I get the same issue, most of the time it's barely noticeable unless you're looking for it as it's just the odd pixel. But every now and again there's a sudden burst of them all over the screen for a single frame, typically occurs in specific locations too.

I also never had the issue on my first playthrough, it's only in the last year or so I've noticed the issue.

Like I mentioned in my post, I was also under the impression I never had this problem the first time I played the game back when it came out but was able to spot it right away when I played this year. I couldn't be sure if it was a case of "now that you've seen it, you can't unsee it". But going by your experience, I guess it really was an issue introduced in a later update?

If it was, then it should be fixable. Hopefully the devs are willing to do it; the game is not dead after all, with the expansion coming out and what not.

[Nano]

Oh hey, I thought this was just me and thinking it was my GPU as I, just like one of the previous post stated, didn't notice them when I first played the game back in 2020/2021 but nowadays I see them.