When “Sharpen Image” is 6 or more, flickering appears in dark (black, dark gray) areas of the game scene.
It is in the scene of the open world of the game, in the user interface (inventory, skills, paragon, etc.) the effect does not appear.
The higher the “Sharpen Image” is, the stronger the effect appears. The effect is clearly visible at “Sharpen Image” 100 and Monitor Brightness 100 (but the effect is also visible at Monitor Brightness 15).
The effect appears differently, depending on the game frame rate (“Max Foreground FPS” 60-165 fps) and monitor mode (60, 120, 144, 165 Hertz):
- as a strobing effect of the whole screen on dark areas;
- as flickering of certain or random parts in dark areas on the screen vertically, from the left to the right side of the screen without breaks.
- as a cyclically or randomly moving continuous bar, up or down the screen.
When “Sharpen Image” is set to 0, there is no flickering effect.
In other games, this effect is not observed.
I made a video for demonstration and visual understanding of what effect we are talking about and in what situations and scenes it appears:
Summary
*** I do not have professional video equipment for shooting, so I shot the video as I could.
1 D4 flickering 165FPS 165Hz
2 D4 flickering 165FPS 165Hz
youtu.be/HmccqSisaEY
My settings (if necessary):
Summary
Monitor: LG 32GN650-B is a monitor with “Flicker Free” technology and has no visible flicker. It supports operating modes 165, 144, 120, 60 Hertz (in the game the effect is observed in all modes).
Video adapter: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080
Video adapter driver: 536.40-desktop-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch-whql
Operating system: Windows 10
G-Sync / FreeSync: off
Graphics settings for the game:
GRAPHICS->SCREEN
Sharpen Image: 6-100 - *** the higher the value, the more pronounced the effect is
Display: Windowed (Fullscreen) / Windowed - *** Appears in all modes
HDR: off
Vertical Sync: off
Peripheral Lighting: off
Color Blind Filter: off
GRAPHICS->PERFORMANCE
Resolution Percentage: 100% (default)
NVIDIA DLSS: off - *** is also observed when any mode of this setting is enabled
Frame Generation: off
Max Foreground FPS: 60-165 - *** it can manifest itself differently at different values
NVIDIA Reflex Low latency: off
GRAPHICS->QUALITY
Texture Quality: High
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Shadow Quality: High
Dynamic Shadows: on
Soft Shadows: on
Shader Quality: High
SSAO Quality: Medium
Fog Quality: High
Clutter Quality: Highest
Fur Quality Level: High
Water Simulation Quality: High
Anti-Aliasing Quality: High
Geometric Complexity: High
Terrain Geometry Detail: High
Physics Quality: High
Particles Quality: High
Reflection Quality: High
Screen Space Reflections: on
Distortion: on
Low FX: off