All of a sudden: poor smoke resolution on home screen, general graphics trouble

[kcinlober]

I have been playing skyrim with STEP 2.2.9.2 Core + Extended + Requiem + vividian ENB packs for a few months. I got everything working very well with only the occasional CTD and no recurring problems. I hadn't played in a few weeks and started it up again last night and had some weird graphics issues. 

 

FIrst, the smoke on the home screen had a really poor resolution. See this screenshot, for example. 

 

 

Secondly, when loading a save game the overall colors were off, as if the contrast and saturation were messed up.

 

 

Third, I noticed--when outside in Riften--that some of the stone textures in the walls were extremely poor. Not everything in the walls was like this, in other words, the mossy and green parts of the wall texture seemed fine, but the stone bits were just blobs.

 

 

I have a MSI GTX 970 and a intel core i5 4460 with an Asus H97M-E motherboard.

 

I double checked and the skyrim and skyrimprefs ini files were as recommended by STEP. I had updated my graphics driver recently and restored it to a previous one to check. The trouble was the same.

 

I can't think of anything other than an update to Windows and an update to my graphics driver that could have changed things. As I said, reinstalling a previous graphics driver that worked resorted in the same problem. What else could I do to figure out the issue?

Edited March 17, 2016 by kcinlober

[kcinlober]

Ok, so I found out that the problem is with the steam overlay. Once I turned that off, the odd colors and weird home screen smoke returned to normal.

 

I still am not sure about the Riften wall, but its the only graphics oddity for wall textures that I have found so maybe it was there before and I didn't notice.

 

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

[DoubleYou]

Make sure that you have some form of Anisotropic Filtering on and that iTexMipMapSkip under Display in SkyrimPrefs.ini is set to 0.

[Neovalen]

Make sure your not using SMAA if you are, Nvidia broke it.

[TechAngel85]

They must have broken it in a recent driver update. I noticed this too and was curious what was causing it. That really sucks!

[Darth_mathias]

They must have broken it in a recent driver update. I noticed this too and was curious what was causing it. That really sucks!

yes Nvidia Broke SMAA with the latest driver update i discovered this when i changed to Vivid weathers and choose the SMAA option.

[TechAngel85]

So the best solution right now is to roll back the driver until Nvidia fixes it. Boris stated that the latest drivers causes some hardware corruption (whatever that means). So I'm going to roll back a driver version for now.

[kcinlober]

Thanks everyone, ill check the SMAA and anisotropy settings when I get home. I did reinstall an older driver from February (i think) and had the same issue, but I also did two updates in between launching Skyrim and had skipped some before that.

[kcinlober]

So the best solution right now is to roll back the driver until Nvidia fixes it. Boris stated that the latest drivers causes some hardware corruption (whatever that means). So I'm going to roll back a driver version for now.

When was your previous driver released? I went back a few versions to Jan 27th and the problem persists.

[TechAngel85]

I was theorizing. I haven't been able to test it yet. Real life, work, etc.

[hishutup]

If you have any sort of ENB the smoke being messed up is normal.

There are ways to remove it.

[TechAngel85]

I reverted back to version 362.00 and the smoke seems to have returned to normal. Just an FYI.

 

Make sure you do a custom install so the display drivers are actually updated because the Express install may see that you have a newer driver and skip it.

[kcinlober]

If you have any sort of ENB the smoke being messed up is normal.

There are ways to remove it.

Well, the smoke was never like this before (I use vividian ENB). In any case, the weirdness isn't restricted to that, see my edited original post for another example.

 

I reverted back to version 362.00 and the smoke seems to have returned to normal. Just an FYI.

 

Make sure you do a custom install so the display drivers are actually updated because the Express install may see that you have a newer driver and skip it.

Ya, i did that this morning and same problem. Oh well, I'll mess around with it again to see what exactly is causing the problem. I've noticed lots of stuttering and lower framerates as well.

[TechAngel85]

Yeah, I have Steam overlay turned off, always.

[Stazbumpa]

I got this issue, rolled back the driver, still the same problem.  So I uninstalled the drivers completely and did a fresh install of 362.  Still had the same issue, noticed that PhysX was running a newer version so got rid of that and did another install of 362 and that cured it.

 

Until I took a screen shot, then it came back.

As mentioned up thread, disabling the Steam overlay has fixed it properly although now I can't take a screenie.  One thing maybe worth mentioning, though, is that with both the latest nVidia drivers and my current older drivers, if I alt-tab out and back into Skyrim it fixes the whiteout colour and smoke problem. Nvidia broke SMAA but you can fix it with alt-tab it would appear.

[elenhil]

This has nothing to do with Nvidia drivers. I have had the same issue with an AMD card. Disabling the Steam overlay solved it.