Guild Wars 2

This is the first time I’ve seen it. Never had it happen today but everywhere I go in Dry Top now while the sandstorm is going I see these weird outlines in the background. What’s causing it? Some graphical setting? I haven’t changed anything.

That particular picture, isn’t it showing the outlines of that small village on the other side of the quicksand stream?

Unless you’re talking about something else.

That is clearly Prosperity. I like the effect. At least in the screenshot, it looks like an old Chinese painting.

If you’re seeing it everywhere you’re probably just seeing through the sandstorm to see structures such as cliffs and trees.

You could check by taking a screenshot somewhere during and then after a sandstorm and comparing the two to see if structure’s outlines match up.

Yea it is the cliffs, structures and trees. It looked normal again after restarting my game. Still curious why it looked radically different as you can see in this screenshot.

Level of Detail setting + exact distance to not render certain things because of LoD + dust storm = that special effect.

It is the Ambient Occlusion setting in your NVidia control panel.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Environment-Shadow-detail-problem/4430251

It was likely that it was enabled and you tried disabling it to try to fix the problem.
However, changes to this setting require a game restart to take effect. This would be why you noticed the problem going away upon your restarting your game and not back when you disabled the setting.