Strange LOTRO graphic glitch solved by FRAPS!

For as long as I can remember I have had this strange and frustrating graphics issue. In Lord of the Rings Online when I would tilt my camera to look at the ground in a birds-eye view I would notice that the terrain would seem like it was wavey with these shimmers or blurry lines moving opposite the direction my character would run.  It looked as if the terrain/ground was trying to catch up to my character. I would only get this problem when my character was moving. I tried every graphics and advanced graphics setting that the game had and I just could not solve this issue. For a few months I had completely given up on trying to change this mere aesthetic flaw; the problem had zero impact on game performance.

Yesterday I decided to take this problem to a message board and ask if anyone else was having this problem. According to everyone who replied to the topic this problem was purely on my end. I recieved the usual advice of “Turn on Vsync, update your drivers, check refresh rate, mess with settings, etc” and nothing worked. I updated my drivers this morning to the 6/29/07 set for Nvidia (A much needed update for me) and the problem was still there. Frustrated as ever I decided to finally FRAPS what I was seeing and submit it to some customer support.

Upon turning Fraps on I noticed that miraculously I was no longer seeing the lines! “Could FRAPS have magical powers?”, I thought to myself. Giving it a good review in my head I discovered a link. FRAPS was lowering the FPS I was getting in-game from 60 to 30. I donned on me that I had, back in beta, cranked the engine speed and FPS up under the “Troubleshooting” tab in-game. I turned down the settings to 30fps limit and there it was – a perfect solution.

If any of you out there are experiencing a similar problem I highly recommend checking that Troubleshooting tab for options similar to mine. Best of luck and thank you FRAPS!