Ultra Shadow Option

[XCaliber]

I have Nvidia 1070 Ti and perform Ultra shadows often when i am near the end of a build for lighting effects. My brand new 1070Ti began showing Artifacts after a few Ultra Shadowing... and began lagging my game play. I RMA'd it and when i got the replacement, guess what... Same exact thing began showing... I am just making sure that the game did or did not ruin my expensive video card.

[Demented]

I don't think there is anything wrong with your card.
I had very similar issue with my card (which is close to the same as yours)
For some reason (I think) Nvidia and Maniaplanet are trying to both process graphics - causing conflicts. I found by setting my Nvidia controls to "Override" and ignore Maniaplanet settings it worked fine. (In fact quite awesomely). I still haven't heard an explanation why this is or even if I am correct, but have suggested this "fix" to others and it seemed to work for them too.
If you don't find a solution I will try and find the step by step instruction for doing this (I posted previously).

[Demented]

I found that solution I mentioned in the previous post.
Still don't know why it's an issue but this did work for a few other people with lag issues.
This improved my framerates by about four fold:

I'll try to help but I'm not the best person to explain this. I've never fully understood the best way to configure things.
(I would love to see a list sometime of different graphics settings and their advantages and "weight" on performance.)
This is what I did but I'm not sure I'd recommend doing this unless you know how to undo it if it doesn't help and to be honest I don't really even know why this worked better for me than letting the launcher control things.

Please take note of your settings before trying this.
This tells Nvidia to ignore the settings of a specified program:

Open Nvidia Control Panel;
Under "3D Settings";
Select; "Adjust Image settings with preview",
Tick the "Use the advanced 3D image settings" instead of "let the 3D application decide",

Under "3D Settings";
Select "Manage 3D settings";
Select the tab "Program settings";
Under "1. Select a program to customize";
click the "Add" button and find the "ManiaPlanetLauncher.exe";
Don't forget to click "apply" when you are done.

There is probably a better way to set things up and if someone wants to jump in with better solutions I would be happy to hear them. I don't claim to be very knowledgeable in this sort of thing.

I would be curious to hear if this solves your issue and even more curious to hear why (if anyone knows).

[TMarc]

Often this kind of driver issues happens when there was an update of the video card driver (either manually or from Windows update).
The new driver has often some new features or different internal settings, which now conflict to those which Maniaplanet had saved previously in the configuration and in the generated video card specific files.
It can also be that a programming API was superseeded by a new function and that the eventual compatibility switch is not working as properly as intended.
The GTX 1070 is not the very newest card, but still quite recent, hence it also gets frequent driver updates.

Here comes my traditional recommendation to delete the configuration file (Default.SystemConfig.Gbx) so it gets created again, using the updated driver properties.
In most cases the trouble is gone.
In rare cases the video driver is not working well with Maniaplanet, then a revert to an older version (after a clean uninstall) is recommended.
Of course, it depends on the games you want to play most at this time, perhaps you would drop Maniaplanet for some time
You know yourself how often Maniaplanet is getting updates.

Sometimes there can be conflicts between driver setting and game setting which neither the driver manufacturer nor the game designer did check before, because there can be so many cards and constellations of settings and games that nobody can really do that.
Here we gamers are the testers, unfortunately.