A Tweak/Fix for your Shimmering Textures.

[Nearox]

I've been trying to combat shimmering textures for the past weeks.

 

After having tried literally dozens of things (even downsampling etc.) I finally found a solution that reduced a substantial part of the texture shimmering, at least on roads, rocks, dirt, bidges and basically all types of ground textures.

 

Here's the thing: The Texture LOD for Skyrim has a bit too much of a negative value. This is (I got this from sources on the internet) largely a result of bad programming by game makers. When the Texture LOD is too negative, they are sharper in the distance but it can result in a shimmering or even flickering effect. The negative effects also affect textures in close range, e.g. the road in frony of you. Conversely, when the texture LOD is too positive, textures in the distance look too blurred (though it is certainly not the same as the usual blur). 

 

Texture LOD is dependent on Anisotropic Filtering, and I found that when I turned AF off, the shimmering effect was gone! (on roads, rocks etc. not on bushes/trees: for that you need transaprencyAA / adaptive AA/SSAA). The shimmering used to be terrible during movement but not anymore. However we of course want to play with AF x16 on, as this increases texturew quality in the distance a lot. 

 

How to fix this? For AMD see below. For NVIDIA, I have no idea but I'm sure either your control panel or third party software can access this variable.

 

- Install RadeonPro

- Make profile for TESV.exe

- Make sure AF is enabled and set to 16x in both Skyrim and in RadeonPro

- In Tab Advanced --> check 'Texture LOD'. Move the slider to about 2.0 for testing purposes.

- Login Skyrim to see if problem persists

- Move the slider now to MINUS -2.0. 

- Login Skyrim to observe the difference

- Now tweak the slider to your liking. I put mine at 0.8. At the optimal value there are no longer any shimmering ground type textures while moving. I personally could not notice a quality difference between the default (0.0) and (0.8).

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Not sure if I put this in the right forum. Should it be in Support/Troubleshooting? Can you move it if that is the case? Sorry.

[Aiyen]

Its fine for in here! And good work!

[Nearox]

Well anything I can do back to the community here, you've all been so helpful!

[TechAngel85]

For nVidia users there are two available LOD settings. One is for DirectX and the other for OpenGL. This is located under the Texture Filtering section in nVidia Inspector and can be adjusted in the same manner.

[thunderclam]

This sounds promising but, uh, changing anything in radeonpro seems to turn all the textures in Skyrim into N64 level blobs of color and crap. Do I need to turn stuff off in CCC first or something?

 

So many options in radeonpro...

[thunderclam]

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I messed something up with my vcard. I've installed the latest Beta (13.10) in an effort to fix it or overwrite any unwitting change but it hasn't helped. I have minor screen tearing/rippling when using browser and also in Skyrim. Something's wrong with my vsync or framerate or something but all my settings check out so I keep hitting brick walls.

 

I really wish I could get some benefit out of all the tooling you've done, Nearox, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards (no pun intended) no matter how hard I try or how many guides I read.

[Garfink]

With Shimmering, do you mean z-fighting? (probably shouldn't ask, as I don't have a problem with it since I don't know about it..... :) )  I've had grass "shimmer", like they are partially transparent and I fixed that by keeping the shadow on grass ON.

 

(I have learn to live with z-fighting as fixes in the ini files that mess with block distances (for me anyway) makes my game less stable (not a scientific fact though as I haven't tested this theory enough) It's probably something I would try to fix once I got my game super stable and have been playing for 50+ hours with no (or at most 1 or 2) crashes.)

[Nearox]

Thunderclam (and others): Read this thread for shimmering with a HD6950

 

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/521462-shimmering-foilage-vegetation-when-moving/

 

I'm afraid there isn't a 100% working solution, apart from brute forcing it. With SSAA x4, as also mentioned in the link comments, shimmering should be like 70-80% gone.

 

The trick is to get your VRAM usage and GPU load without SSAA as low as possible so that you have power left for 4x SSAA.

 

See https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=3319&pid=49491#pid49491 for Garfink and my own findings. Using Garfink's recommendation to DDSOpt (almost) all resolutions to 1k and .5k normals, my VRAM usage peaks at 1.5gb, after having installed all SR texture mods. My game also runs at 58-60fps in 90% of areas and at 52-55 fps in heave areas (with lots of foilage). This means when using a FPS limiter to e.g. 40fps, the GPU load will be greatly reduced leaving enough power left for 4xSSAA.

[thunderclam]

Not z-fighting. Just straight up bad anti-aliasing on transparent textures. So that would be stuff like edges of hair, fur, even decorative 3D parts of weapons, armor, and most architecture. It turns the visuals into a vibrating, shimmering mess. I've tried playing with AA settings plenty and can't seem to crack it except just reducing it some by returning to basically what my settings were before I started mucking around in the first place. I never used to have this problem with Skyrim and I do not believe it is mod (texture or otherwise) related. Could be a problem with the chain of executables from MO to SKSE to the launcher making my CCC settings fail to override. Playing with Radeonpro ALWAYS seems to be a bad time and I get some really funky effects. This is probably because I don't know what preparation I should be doing (like do I turn off CCC overrides and settings first? launcher? .ini? is Radeonpro's default settings the same as what the card is already doing anyway?).

 

Recently, I've been seeing some weird pixelization and screen tearing but a reboot fixed that for my desktop and browsers which means my monitor isn't borked. I need to test Skyrim a bit more for those issues which I somehow created when trying to neutralize a massive FPS drop issue I was getting in exteriors.

 

Nearox, as per that thread how do I turn off Ambient Occlusion?

[Garfink]

Odd, I have never had this issue, apart on a left side wall on the bridge into the front door of windhelm which I ignore, never had these issues you describe. But I am using a different graphics card. (Titan). I also use MO/SKSE, so I doubt it's that. Have you try messing with you shadows settings, could be that too, I had a similar problem with grass if I turn off grass shadows.

 

Oh, and some of the hairs from apachii hairs can flicker too I have founds, but not all.

 

As for AA I turn off all AA in my drivers and just use the AA that comes with ENB versions >0.214

 

 

Garfink Skyrim Junkie Anonymous.

[thunderclam]

I use MO and SKSE also. My old problems were down to NMM. Changing up has led to many newer problems. I associate them with changes in the game version and my GPU since I last tried to play Skyrim (Feb 2013). All I know is, I've tried so many "solutions" that I've just wound up creating more problems.

 

Grass shadows are on. I try not to play with shadow settings due to advice from STEP and other places.

 

I may try turning off AA and just using ENB AA but do I have to turn it off in CCC as well as the game launcher/.ini files?

 

That seems to trip me up a lot. Stuff doesn't work the way it's supposed to cuz instructions are never clear about that and I don't understand, maybe, what the baseline general policy is when messing with alternative sources for AA. Whether you turn this off to enable that is probably the general sort of thing "everybody knows" but is always missing from guides and such. Common sense? Maybe. I don't have it, then. :P

[Garfink]

I've never used NMM, I just install everything manually and track mods I am interested to see updates for and regularly use.

 

You have to turn off AA everywhere, in your ini and your drivers, (I think its okay to set your drivers to application controlled though, but I've mine disabled.), in any case if you do use ENBs then with driver AA on, the ENB isn't able to render some effects. These instructions comes with most ENBs installation instructions.

[thunderclam]

Well, once I've finished my current SR install I will try with just the regular ENB profile. I have experimented with Unreal Cinema and noticed that it fixed a whole bunch of the shimmering/shadow issues but introduced many extra visual features I didn't like, I poured a lot of time into figuring out how to configure it (awkward wording I know) but I ended up still pretty unhappy with it overall.

 

Do people use the ENBoost and binary (for fixes) without using an actual profile config from wherever? ENB is something I'm very new to still. I always used RCRN but I like CoT a bit better.

[Garfink]

You tried to edit Unreal ENB? Wow you are a braver man than me! I recommend just doing a simple search on the Nexus for "enb" and you will find lots of different ENBs to try out, they are relatively painless to install and try out and you are certain to find one that suits your taste. Unreal is a cinematic ENB is probably a little to much for many, I use Somber ENB which is even worst. Try out Ruvaak Dahmaan ENB, its still cinematic, but the colors are closer to vanilla and you can use it with CoT and it is very performance friendly. It's one of my favorites.

 

I think you will find that many people won't even play without an ENB, but if I didn't use an ENB, I would definitely still use ENBoost for the fixes.

[thunderclam]

Ruvaak Dahmaan seemed to have weird installation. I did check it out per your recommendation in a different thread.

 

I think ENB does help with a lot of issues. Unreal Cinema needed its Bloom checked (cuz it wrecked) and I had weird issues with strobing sun effects and so on. Tinkering produced a version of the preset that I liked but other issues led me to reinstall and abandon ENB for now. Until I understand it better.

 

Now with my TV/monitor displaying dots (not random ones, but in a pixel-like pattern across the screen), I'm about ready to tear out my hair.