Black Circles, z-fighting and texture shimmering

[torminater]

NEW UPDATE:

I have tried the Skyrim Special Edition, and there seems to be no more z-fighting for me. As if that is linked to the fixes towards the shadow processing or has something to do with the new 64bit engine, I cannot say for sure. If you have further insight, please share below.

 

OLD post:

I am still working on my fix, as it does not solve all of the z-fighting and there is a performance drop of about 0-8 FPS. Further testing is therefore welcomed!
For the original little fix head over here !

For the guide (WIP) against z-fighting head over here !


Hey folks,
at the moment I'm fiddeling around with nvidia inspector, skyrim ini and prefs to get rid of black circles on mid-distant terrain, reduce z-fighting as much as possible and eliminate texture shimmering if possible.
I don't remember if z-fighting has been such a big problem for me before the last drivers update, but now it really gets on my case. It's only visible on very distant mountain sides but in a large area. The good thing is, if it's cloudy I don't notice it as much. The bad thing is, if it's sunny all of the great graphics cannot overshine the flashing mountains in the Background.
Texture shimmering is annoying but it's on the very end of my 2dolist.
What annoys me know the most is this black circles glitch. I just can't find the setting that causes me all that trouble.
It is very prominent and extremely disturbing. Reading through this forum I stumbled upon a lot of threads that were highly interesting and revealed that there are a whole lot of bright minds around.
I guess if STEP tries to make Skyrim an unforgettable experience, then it should include some details about very common bugs and glitches as those three I'm referring to. If anyone of you guys knows any tricks considering them I would be too glad to try them out!
I have had problems with artifacts probably caused by too much graphic mods and ini tweaks (no ugrids changes whatsoever...)
My rig is the following:
Crucial m4 SSD 128GB, 2.5"
Samsung EcoGreen F4 1500GB
Intel Core i7-2600K, 4x 3.40GHz
Kingston ValueRAM DIMM Kit 8GB
2 x Gainward GeForce GTX 570 Phantom, 1.25GB GDDR5 SLI
ASRock P67 Extreme4
Corsair Professional Series Gold AX750 750W
All drivers are absolutely up2date. By all means I should be able to run Skyrim without problems. So far that doesn't work out...
EDIT: Those Black Circles seem only to pop up in the lower half of the screen o_O but somewhat diagonal... maybe cuz of the Sun angle?
I found out how to remove them:
fShadowBiasScale=0.1500 revert to fShadowBiasScale=0.2500 in SkyrimPrefs.ini
There are still black stripes on some rocks and mountainsides. they disappear from the center the closer you come...

[z929669]

... risen from the ashes after 4+ months ... woa

 

Good to know though. I use Radeon, so it would be good to know that a driver update could fix this.

[TechAngel85]

I've never experienced the z-fighting myself. I mostly contribute that to not increasing my FOV, but then again, I mainly play in 3rd person so FOV isn't as important for me.

[torminater]

I've never experienced the z-fighting myself. I mostly contribute that to not increasing my FOV but then again, I mainly play in 3rd person so FOV isn't as important for me.

Have you maxed your distant detail? If you didn't then that's the reason. I don't have any z-fighting unless I have Distant Detail set at Ultra.

[TechAngel85]

 

I've never experienced the z-fighting myself. I mostly contribute that to not increasing my FOV but then again, I mainly play in 3rd person so FOV isn't as important for me.

Have you maxed your distant detail? If you didn't then that's the reason. I don't have any z-fighting unless I have Distant Detail set at Ultra.

 

Yep. It's set to Ultra; however, my view distances aren't. From left to right: 12, 25, 12, 12, 7, 10.

[torminater]

Hmm, usually that shouldn't make a difference... I've got several videos on youtube about z-fighting, have you checked those same spots with a Skyrim Ultra Preset untweaked?

 

 

[video=youtube]

 

 

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orcXIA3gnBg

 

 

[video=youtube]

[TechAngel85]

Not untweaked, no. When I played through Skyrim before I discovered STEP, I played on high settings and never noticed any z-fighting.

[torminater]

high settings doesn't have Ultra distant detail, so of course you don't see z-fighting, since this is (for me and many others) closely tied to Distant detail Ultra settings.

[TechAngel85]

My tweaked settings now has it on ultra but that also includes the STEP tweak. Any confirmation on the driver update fixing the issue?

[torminater]

Couldn't you just try the Ultra preset alone, just for testing purposes? make a backup, delete the inis launch Skyrim via the steam launcher, apply ultra preset and launch the game. Load up a game, travel to whiterun and helgen and make out those spots (exiting helgen dungeon and during the cart ride you should see the distant mountain range flicker)

 

EDIT: The driver update didn't fix it for me at all.

[TechAngel85]

I'll try it when I can. At work right now. :)

[TechAngel85]

Okay, tested and confirmed the z-fighting. I'm using the latest drivers too so they didn't help.

[Necrokat]

hey, i have some z fighting, but i'm really here because some one told me the z tweaks might help w/ this texture pop-in that i hate. it's basically texture LODs that pop in too close to me when using default ugrids 5. the pop -in is usually around 200-400 yards out. it's basically discussed in this thread...

https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=668

 

do y'all think any of these z tweaks would help w/ that pop-in? or do you know of any? i normally use ugrids 7 or 9 just fine but when using mods that add spawns (Monster Mod, Skytest, ect), the game engine can't handle the additional AI and navmesh i hear.

my rig

i7 3770k

670 4gb

16gb ram

[torminater]

There are several different forms of popping:

Decal popping can only be fixed by changing the meshes to allow them to show the decals all the time instead of only at a couple foot distance.

LOD popping might be improvable by adding mipmaps (see DDSopt guide on our wiki). Other than that, yes my tweaks do make some changes to the LOD load distances, but I cannot say, whether that improves the popping or not.

The detail popping which loads the highest quality texture is I think caused by the engine itself, which doesn't allow too much RAM to be dedicated to loading all of those hires-textures earlier. I think this is implemented by Bethesda to make it (most likely) impossible to reach the hardcoded 3 GB RAM limit with vanilla Skyrim. If somebody can prove me wrong, please do so.

[Necrokat]

thanks. actually there's an ini tweak that helps w/ decals instead of having to fix meshes...

https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/32426

 

don't know anything about ddsopt but i seem to remember Texture Optimizer having a feature to add mipmaps. i might try that

[Kelmych]

DDSopt recomputes and replaces (or adds if needed) all the mipmaps. The mipmaps it provides are very often better than those created by the tools used by mod authors.