shimmering issues - need helpFollow

Sounds like an antialiasing issue. What settings do you have in your game? What AMD card are you using?

Given a recent graphical thread, though with some different issues/parts, the solution there seemed to lie in disabling any possible 3D settings your card may have active. Otherwise, I can only really suggest going through individual settings in-game and see if one or a collection of them mitigates the issue. It's possible your rig may not really be able to run with everything on max as much as you'd like it to.

So, the shadow issues persist even on lowered in-game settings? Last resort I can think of would be to fish up a retro-driver for your card, maybe one dated a little after ARR's launch to see if that fixes it. A darker diagnosis might be an issue with the card itself, but given no mention of other game issues, hard to say. My last card failed, early signs only manifesting when playing Rift, but nothing else. Hopefully that's not the case for you, or at best, got a warranty if so.

If you're confident in messing with your tower's innards, perhaps pull it out sometime and give it a good air cleaning. If it's a card with a case affixed over it, perhaps try removing it if you're further confident. Of the particular card I mentioned, before I went to replace it I figured I'd try replacing the thermal paste on its heat sink. When I peeled the cover off, some of the chips/nodes had like a protective padding (were like 8 of them) and one had literally burnt through. As a result, I suspect that was the trouble area of my card and knowing how where I am is terrible about power outages and surges, I can only assume that dealt the blow with time doing the rest.

Have you possibly run any tools to monitor internal temps? Speedfan or MSI Afterburner are options, and probably some other ones that further monitor hardware. It doesn't immediately sound like overheating is the issue, but it could be a symptom. Especially try to get readings before and after a cleaning, too. I'd probably be concerned if you card starts running over 60c. While most are generally "okay" up to 80c or so, I'd say it chips away at the lifespan more swiftly.

Sadly, I've only ever owned Nvidia cards so I can't go much deeper into software utilities. Hopefully you figure it out or the DX11 stuff does the trick.

gpu temp is about 74° max when playing. will check on the gc later even though i don't think it's the core of the issue as it's really only ffxiv that is giving me trouble and i've even heard of ps4 players experiencing the shimmering. but yeah, worth a try :)
i've also heard that this was a pretty common issue with skyrim but it could be fixed by tweaking shadows in the .ini which unfortunately is also not an option here.

74 seems kinda hot. What does it generally idle at with just sitting in a browser? I'd guess somewhere between 45-50 depending on room temps. Cat's not-so-shining endorsement also has me worrying you're looking more at a hardware issue here.

Only other possible idea I can think of after reading the thread, however, is maybe you're experiencing an FPS issue. Look up your monitor to find out its max refresh rate, possibly 60, and make sure you have vertical sync (vsynch) enabled, possibly with your card's app handler instead of in-game settings. I'd also consider manually capping your FPS within the game itself, starting at your monitor's rate then shaving off 5 or so per try just to see if the problem wanes. Without seeing actual video of this in action, I can only really speculate that shadows aren't rendering 100% of the time per frame, which is resulting in your eyes noticing the flicker. If you have another monitor around, that'd also be a nice way to check.

Shimmering issue is a monitor issue sometimes especially a problem with lcd monitors. Most new monitors should not have a issue.

Edited, Feb 17th 2015 9:12am by Nashred

Shimmering, like this? http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?forum=152&mid=142196523155768092
What CPU are you using? If you have a cpu that has Intel graphics, could that be a source?