Things suddenly appearing/rendering in games.

[Nerdygamer1]

Hey, I've had this issue for the longest time now, but it's never been to such a severe degree that it's at right now. Sometimes things will render before my very eyes when I'm playing a game. For instance, sometimes in L4D2, I'll turn around and the game will quickly render the zombie corpses before my eyes (live zombies seem to either stay rendered or render MUCH faster: fast enough that I don't notice that they're not there). It's a minor graphical "bug". It doesn't detract much from the experience and I understand why it has to be done (the game doesn't bother rendering things you're not looking at to save on computing power or whatever).

However, very recently on two occasions I've been having this issue to a greater extent. Once was when I was playing a game of L4D2 versus with my friends. There was a tank up, and the tank had been up. I rounded a corner and saw nothing for a brief milisecond, so my muscles relaxed. Of course, that's when the tank appeared and kicked my ♥♥♥. Again, the tank had been up; it's not like he just spawned in front of me.

The second incident was in a game of TF2 when I walked up the on the left side of gravelpit's ramp (when viewed from Red's spawn). As my head emerged from below the ramp, I could see that the coast was clear and that nobody was in front of me. Then three snipers appeared out of nowhere (literally) and turned me into a fine tomato paste.

I have no idea why this has started doing this now. The L4D2 incident was probably within the last week and the TF2 incident was within the past day or two. I'd say I have a fairly capable computer and haven't messed around with many graphical options recently (installed MSI afterburner probably a month ago (but that should HELP with graphics, right?) and jacked TF2 video options to max, but then dropped AA down to 4X). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Kargor]

Aren't these all multiplayer games, by any chance? It might just be that your client didn't know what was actually ON the map before entering it, so it only showed the area (because that's from local data anyway). When it received the monster information from the server it updated the area, which made them appear "out of nowhere".

On other occasions, if updates get delayed for a longer time, monsters tend to teleport around or literally "fast flash" through the area, depending on how the game updates the positions.

[Nerdygamer1]

Yes, both instances occured in multiplayer games.

[Marble]

Texture pop-in can be caused by slow HDD's. Are you using a laptop HDD or doing any background tasks that might be HDD-intensive?

[Nerdygamer1]

Nope, I have a desktop computer. As for background tasks, I don't think so, either... Steam's up in the background when I game (but that's the way I've done it for about 100% of the time over the past four years, so I don't think that's my issue). Sometimes I'll have Word open if I'm recording data (TF2 drop table). And occasionally I'll have TF2outpost open in the steam overlay when I'm playing TF2, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have it open that time.

Edit: Shoot, I've even had my computer run entire backups in the middle of a game and I didn't even notice an impact on preformance.