Skybox is suddenly blurry - but only for one windows account

[Maestro22]

Hello all,

I'm requesting any ideas to narrow down a nasty behaviour which is almost making me stop playing this game...

In short: Since a few days, the skybox appears in extremely low res. This appears in all space scenes and also in the main menu screen.

There have been posts on this topic already which I have read, unfortunately the proposed solutions didn't work for me. Therefore the full story:

KSP version 1.0.2, Win 7, 64bit, intel i5-3570K, 8GB RAM, AMD 5770 Graphics card.

During months the above combination worked fine, i.e. the behaviour mentioned did not appear.

What I tried out:

- Clean install of KSP. Issue persists (Yes, I'm normally using KAC, MJ and KER, but it obviously doesn't relate to these mods, therefore I'm posting into this forum)

- Setting Texture quality in AMD Catalyst Suite to different values, including "Quality". Issue persists.

- Installing newest AMD Driver. Issue persists

- Complete uninstall and reinstall of AMD Driver. Issue persists.

- Loading an old persistent.sfs. Issue persists.

- Playing around with graphics settings, restarting KSP several times. Issue persists.

- Added Astronomers Visual Pack into a clean install. Issue persists. Clouds, but blurry.

What surprised me:

- Starting the instance of KSP from another Windows account. Issue is gone.

- Starting the instance of KSP from another Windows installation (Win 8.1). Issue is gone.

- And of course, on other PC's the effect is also not there.

Therefore, I have to assume that the "normal" windows account that I'm normally using suddenly has something (process or setting or Kraken) that is telling KSP to reduce the GPU resources.

Does anybody have an idea where to get any further hints? Any logfiles or somewhere to look at with process explorer? I'm living with the Win 8.1 workaround but as an engineer I'd like to understand the cause of the issue.

Thank you in advance

[sal_vager]

Hello Maestro22, please upload your KSP_Data\output_log.txt and dxdiag log from the affected account and from an unaffected account to dropbox.com or a similar fileshare site, differences that might explain this might be written to those logs.

[Maestro22]

Hello sal_vager,

that sounds like a good plan. I compared those files and found one tiny difference in the dxdiag lines 56, 58 and 59 - descibing the Monitor model I'm using. For some weird reason it identifies it correctly as admin, but not as a normal user. The problem: I can't verify whether this is a new effect or not. But it points at least slightly in the direction.

Here's the link to the files.

I'm happy for any further ideas.

[sal_vager]

I think that a non-admin is just unable to query those lines, it shouldn't matter too much what the display is.

Also, I don't know how you will find the cause of this issue, it may be a setting in your user profile but finding it may be difficult, the only thing I can think of would be to compare the regsitry between the current profile and another.

You could follow this guide to "fix" a corrupted profile (essentially by making a new one and copying files over), allowing you to play KSP with full textures and allowing you to do some sluthing in the registy at your leisure.

[Maestro22]

I found it! It was a long way with many relogins, but in the end I could narrow it down to one line of XML making the difference... For anybody having a similar problem here's my experience:

The graphics card profile of my Radeon HD5770 is stored in a file Profiles.xml in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE. Within this file there is one line making the difference:

Good: <Property name="TextureLod" value="HiQuality" />

Bad: <Property name="TextureLod" value="HiPerformance" />

The trick is, that in the AMD Catalyst Control Center I see no option to influence this value. As I wrote before, I installed the latest AMD drivers (currently 15.7.1), but also in the previous version (14.something) that option was not visible. And yes, I have advanced settings enabled.

In the end, the original post that I read while investigating tis issue pointed in the correct direction, but AMD's Control Center is simply hiding that essential option.

Thank you sal_vager for pointing me in the right direction!

[sal_vager]

Well done Maestro22, I didn't know that option was hidden, I even have it on Linux with the Nvidia driver, it's called "Image Quality" for me

Marking as solved!