Slow Terrain Flicker with DX9

[CleverFool]

Good day everyone,

I have a unique problem that appears when I play Cv V with Direct X9; the terrain loads okay, but it looks all hazy for a moment or two when I go across great distance of the map. It typically takes a second or so for the detail to appear. For example a flat grassland looks like a green hex (green as in the colour of grass, not vibrant or anything). It's not game breaking or anything, but it is distracting. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make this "flicker" go away?

What is odd is that this problem does not occur with DX 10/11. Though I find the time between turns is a bit long to warrant me playing on the higher settings.

Thank you in advance for the help. I'll see if I can get a screen cap of it, though it happens so fast that may be problematic.

 

[exorbit]

Wow ... have you heard about texture streaming? It does this only on dx 9 because it is supposed to run on older machines , so by lowering the texture in parts of the map where you don't look the game will run smoother . IT IS NOT A PROBLEM , 99% of games have this ,some are more easily to detect like civ 5 on dx9. If you want this to disappera play in dx10/11. Cheers !
Btw , if you want the time between turns to be shorter , go in strategic view just before the end of the turn . hope it helps.

 

[player1 fanatic]

Here is the reason why it happens in DX9, and not in DX10/11 mode:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...h-Interview-What-DirectX-11-is-good-for/News/

2) DirectX 11 offers Direct Compute 5 for GGPU calculations. In what way does it allow you to optimize, simplify or speed up the rendering process in your game (e.g. post effects)?

Civilization V uses the Direct Compute Features for a new proprietary variable bit-rate texture compression. Users will notice that on high end DX11 native hardware, the leaders will appear almost instantly, regardless of how many civilizations are present. There will also be no paging-in on the textures in the background as they are loaded since the 2gigabytes of leader textures compress to less then 150mbs altogether. This type of compression was, until recently, considered impossible or impractical, but we believe this is just the tip of the iceberg for what can be done with Direct Compute.

One big difference in the DX11 version is the terrain. On DX11, we are able to have a much more detailed terrain, since we are able to get a 4x compression on the textures. This allows us to keep most of the terrain cached. The DX9 players will notice some paging while they go to new parts of the map however; this is generally a non-issue on the DX11 version. We were also able to have specularity on the terrain, so players will notice marshes and snow that reflect the sun. The DX11 version also has a more detailed fog of war (on the higher settings), which uses weather simulation dynamics for a more realistic cloud movement.

P.S.
By the way, shader compute feature of DX11 doesn't actually require DX11 hardware. Any DX10 card would bwenefit from it.

 

[CleverFool]

Alright, thanks for advice guys. I figured it was something along those lines, but just wanted to see if there was some other solution. Might be time to upgrade me ol' graphics card... Well its not old for most things, but for this game...