Hi, I am having some problems with most of games regarding texture anisotropic filtering, I think, or it may be a problem related to LOD bias. Here are my specs:

Q6600@3.0Ghz
4gb OCZ ram@667mhz
ATI HD 5850
X-Fi XtremeGamer

And here are a few screens:

http://img830.imageshack.us/i/60983274.jpg/

http://img600.imageshack.us/i/89465727.jpg/

http://img28.imageshack.us/i/88805878.jpg/

http://img194.imageshack.us/i/39755176.jpg/

I seem to see "shadows" or areas of low resolution textures (I have marked the "boundaries" where high resolution and low resolution textures meet with red curves) sweep the landscape as I move or jump high into the air. The effect is very noticeable when the game is in motion, and is very distracting. As I mentioned before, I see this effect on other games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Doom 3, Stalker, etc but it is not very noticeable on those games. I am running Morrowind with MGE. I have tried the following:

- Forced AF thorugh ATI cantalyst center and MGE
- Disabled MGE
- Playing with MGE LOD bias settings
- Changing the scaling and mipmap filter settings in MGE
- Update/downgrade ATI drivers
- Different settings combination in the ATI Catalyst Center
- Pulling my hair out in frustration
- Standing upside down while launching the game

Yet nothing helps... Any ideas?

well if you see it in other games it doesnt seem to be related to morrowind does it, so MGE is not the place to look. Im not aware of how much ways of AF the 5850 is capable of, but there sure are may. Try them all. Disable CatAI and any kind of AA first, then check High quality AF. This doesnt look like an AF problem, rather like memory overheating problem so check temperature and all too. Overclocked maybe? Ati coolers, at least on my card, have a habit to run on low speeds, so its silent, force them to full speed (Atitool can do it, if its not possible from Catatyst)

Well, I did some experimenting and it seems the problem shows itself only when AF is enabled (x2,x4,x8,x16), and varies in intensity in proportion to mipmap level. I tried disabling the CatAI but no go, and playing around with the AA settings didn't help either. Temps are not that high (<55 for CPU under load and <50 for GPU). Increasing fan speed didn't do anything either. How do I check if my memory is overheating?

The easiest way is to downclock it a bit. Or try Furmark and see if there are errors. But if it shows only with AF in every game it can be also just some general windows weirdness, and there is no choice but to apply voodoo, reinstall reconnect etc, and hope it works somehow. Can be everything. Wrong forum for this type of question, might have more luck on a ati tech site www.rage3d.com or something.

I thought this was the "Morrowind Hardware and Software Issues" board... I was hoping somebody would recognize this problem. Oh well, I will try my luck at the ATI tech site. Do post if you have any other suggestions.

AMD/ATI has had some recent problems with their AF implementation. I'm not going to link to the endless cursed fan boi Blood War but the filtering tended to form bands near the eye point. There is a http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst111aHotfix.aspx released three weeks ago for that, and 11.2 is available too.

Thanks for letting me know, I will try it out as soon as I get home tonight.

Installing the new driver did not help... Any ideas?