Video VRAM and a common rendering problem.

Unity Engine
1

(Topic originally was: “What is this common texture issue?”)

I’ve seen this time and time again over the years, but I failed to remember what it had to do with and/or how to resolve it. It’s not texture tearing or stretching; I can’t see it being related to rendering, but what do I know…

Would someone quickly explain this to me?

(I’ll change the topic description to reflect the name of the problem once I know exactly what it is…)

249858--8988--$texture_stretching_885.jpg

2

It’s hard to make out from that screenshot, but it looks like failing VRAM to me, where vertices are being set to an incorrect value. That can also manifest as discolored spots in textures if the affected VRAM happens to be used for textures rather than meshes.

–Eric

3

I’ve been through this before a few times as well. Some of the problems / solutions I found:

  • Out-dated video card drivers.
  • Over-heated video card.
  • Reboot your machine.
  • Reimport the assets.
  • Rebuild the scene.
4

I should post a better example thing. But basically it’s like the grass mesh (sometimes the tree mesh, sometimes its the ferns, sometimes at the same time) is stretched across the terrain. You can see it facing toward it, but when you turn around, it’s gone. If you go toward the source from a different angle it’s not there, and sometimes it is. Weirdness like that.

This is all stock assets from the Standard Asset package. Assuming this is a VRAM problem, what should I be looking at to fix this? Is this a personal problem (meaning my own computer), or is this something I should be worried about when running it on other user systems?

Thanks for the feedback so far!

5

@ Mike

Hey thanks. I’ll try those solutions. It sounds like this would be a local issue then and not so much the development environment (I thought maybe I smoothed the terrain incorrectly or something…)

6

Totally a flaky VRAM issue. Get a new graphics card. :slight_smile: (But seriously, that’s what you have to do.)

–Eric

7

hi,

i encountered the same problem with my 20.000² terrain (4096² map).
it popped up only on some older machines and laptops with shared vram and/or poor hardware/drivers. so far only in the webplayer, but i tested it only on a few with WIN-executable.

greets siggi.

8

I’m actually surprised.

I’m sporting a Radeon X800 XT (256MB) PCI/E which I thought would cover this. However, the entire system is quite old… 2004 Alienware, P4 3.40GHz w/ HT and 2GB of RAM.

I just went and vacuumed all the dust from the heat sink and video card fan… I’ll see if that helps in the interim. If I keep having this problem, finding a new PCIE Video Card will be my next objective.

Thanks for the education guys!! :slight_smile:

9

I have a 256MB X800 too (except mine’s AGP), and actually it has a few bad bytes in VRAM, which have been like that for years…they seem to be permanently stuck on 0. It’s like 3 bytes out of 256MB, so I’m not really concerned since it very rarely shows up. Looks like yours has a more severe problem though.

–Eric