Anyone else having this issue?

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,696
2,580
A couple of days ago, someone remarked that the dev texture was looking... jaggedier than usual. They said something about "antialiasing", but it looks more like there's something wrong with the filtering or mipmapping or both. I noticed it too. In the past couple of days I've been experimenting as best I can with settings and trying the game on another computer. Here's what I could discern:

  • Something has definitely changed in the last week or so. Here's one of the official screenshots of MLJ's 72-hour map, and one I took of the same spot for comparison:

    cp_mlj_72_3_a10000.jpg


    ihbo.jpg

  • It's not specific to something on this computer; the other one does it too after the latest game update. The only major similarity is that they both have ATI cards. Neither has had a driver update recently.
  • I have no idea if it was last week's update that caused this or not because, naturally, there's no way to roll anything back. The other computer can't log in to Steam offline, and Linux hasn't been able to launch it at all for months, so I have no way of accessing an outdated copy.
  • I've experimented with changing my filtering settings, antialiasing, texture quality level... nothing seems to do anything.
  • I made a map full of dev textures and loaded it into Half-Life 2 in the hopes that whatever changed didn't affect that engine build. Insanely, it's doing this too now, and I have no way to know how long it's been that way.

I'd like to try to get to the bottom of this. If anyone else's dev textures look like this now, please weigh in. Actually, I'd like everybody to check and let me know how it is for you if you can tell, and what kind of video card you have. Mine are a Radeon HD 4850 and... some other ATI card that's newer than that but slightly less powerful. I'll check later.
 

Ice Crystal

L2: Junior Member
Feb 28, 2013
78
91
See what other textures with fine details look like, and look into your supersampling settings. AA and especially supersampling can be optimized by only applying it geometric edges, so faces with textures loaded at higher quality could actually look worse. That's kinda what it looks like to me. I have yet to see it with GeForce 334.67 Beta or previous drivers so it might be an AMD thing.
 
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Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,696
2,580
My card doesn't even support forms of AA other than MSAA. Which I did try disabling, but it didn't change how textures looked.

Yes I have this as well. All other textures look fine, only the dev textures look jagged.
I noticed it on the Egypt bricks too, when we played on Sandstone. They're really the only other official texture with that hard of an edge to them.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
AMD card here, same issue, haven't noticed it before but that could just be biased after reading this. Very weird.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,696
2,580
Well, that's good enough for me. You can track and respond to the official bug report here. I'd appreciate if everyone who said they have the bug post there with your system info. The video card, driver, and OS should be enough. Actually, if you're not experiencing the bug, you should take a screenshot of that map and post it there (custom high-quality JPEG from the TGA, not the one Steam Screenshots creates), along with your specs.

EDIT: Or post here, I guess, if you can't be bothered to sign up for GitHub, and I'll relay it.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,696
2,580
SIGNIFICANT UPDATE

Some clever son of a bitch on GitHub figured out that this only happens when the Steam overlay is enabled. That explains why it's affecting more than just TF2 and didn't seem to correspond with any game update; it was caused by the January 27 client update! ...Somehow.

:confused:

Well anyway, again, I request that you either post your specs in the issue report or here so I can relay them — along with, this time, whether disabling the overlay seemed to resolve it.
 

UKCS-Alias

Mann vs Machine... or... Mapper vs Meta?
aa
Sep 8, 2008
1,264
816
I already wondered why my intercept screens look worse than other maps used to in dev state. And for me it already started on jan 26 (my topic can verify that on those orange screenshots).