Water Shader turns into a pixelated mess

[AnyOldName3]

Well stop using Windows 7, then. It's not supported. It might even actually fix the issue if it's something driver-related and the driver component responsible is different on 7 and 10.

[cpdumpmw]

Well stop using Windows 7, then. It's not supported. It might even actually fix the issue if it's something driver-related and the driver component responsible is different on 7 and 10.

Well since smokeyninja has the same issue with Windows 10, it's must not be OS related.

[AnyOldName3]

There's more to it than that. We don't think it's everyone using a modern AMD card on Windows, so other factors like specific driver versions or other software on the computer like overlays might come into play. If you're on an EOL OS, it's likely you're also not using the latest driver (it might not even install on 7 any more) so a reinstall of Windows might put you on a version without the issue.

[akortunov]

This bug is not Windows-specific.

[cpdumpmw]

There's more to it than that. We don't think it's everyone using a modern AMD card on Windows, so other factors like specific driver versions or other software on the computer like overlays might come into play. If you're on an EOL OS, it's likely you're also not using the latest driver (it might not even install on 7 any more) so a reinstall of Windows might put you on a version without the issue.

It's the same driver version both on Seven or 10, it's the latest WHQL driver. BTW I tested also on Windows 10 with openmw 0.45 and I have the same issue so it's clearly not OS related but probably GPU related.

To be complete about hardware, I have an AMD CPU (Phenom II X4) on a M4A89GTD PRO (AMD890GX chipset)

[vtastek]

I never saw this on different hardware/os combos. I should test it on 4xx/5xx series.

But I had weird results working on water shader, like same code working different on other hardware or even weirder, code that is not supposed to work, just work. Since opengl is more strict, I thought this kind of idiosyncrasies would happen less.

[AnyOldName3]

If you do something wrong with OpenGL on Nvidia hardware and didn't create a debug context, it sometimes tries to guess what you meant to do instead of following the spec and skipping the call and raising an error. There are also several things in OpenGL that are allowed to be implementation-defined, and others that are undefined. Sometimes things are left undefined because one vendor's parts had edge cases as they were designed only to meet the Direct3D spec, or because someone determined it would be more complicated to implement in hardware on future cards than was worthwhile.

If you keep to the strictly-defined subset of OpenGL and don't trigger error states, you won't hit many differences between vendors. Stray from the path, and there be dragons.

[psi29a]

So let's narrow it down to something we can reproduce. The assumption is that the pixelated mess only happens on AMD/ATI cards? So... Intel and Nvidia are okay? Has anyone checked with nvidia binary blobs vs. foss/nouveau?

Does it only happen on windows, or can it also be seen on MacOS or Linux?

So when people make reports about this, it would be best to know the full spec of their setup, including version of their video drivers.

This is important, because even 'official' driver release... considered most stable, will still contain bugs.

[Capostrophic]

Nouveau didn't seem to have this issue (the game seemed to look exactly the same as on a setup with Nvidia) but I can't check for sure atm.

2nd page of this thread shows raevol having this issue on FOSS AMD driver with Ubuntu.

[cpdumpmw]

I created a new issue on gitlab for this bug https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/issues/5351

If it can help, here is more detailled infos about my graphic card