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...

[torminater]

It's definitely worth adding to STEP or the Wiki.

Did anybody continue testing different values to decrease z-fighting?

Are there any volunteers who will try out the different settings of that one guide I mentioned earlier on this forum with me? I have pretty good rig, so it does work for me but hell that's a lot of z-fighting... HERE

I'll start implementing and testing those tweaks but there are too many for me alone to do it all on my own...

[torminater]

Any thoughts about this tool here?

 

https://donotargue.com/cfg-makers/skyrim/

[MadWizard25]

I wouldn't use DNA directly, as in downloading the generated inis and straight out replacing the old ones. DNA still makes some errors in values it outputs. Would b better to generate the inis and then compare with guides on ini values like the GeForce one, then pick and match.

 

I also suffer heavily from z-flicker, in any mountain that is the furthest away, or the last level of LOD. Been keeping an eye out the z-flicker thread on the Bethesda forums, but so far any tweaks recommended reduce the quality of long distance graphics too much. That being said i will try out your ini tweaks that you posted as well as the Skyrim Tweaks Complete today or tomorrow, will let you know if they help :)

[torminater]

Have you got any exact data as to which values get messed up by DNA?

I'ld like to try it out, but today I'm far too busy with other things...

If you got some link towards a forum that covers DNA in specific I'ld like to check that one out, too!

[stoppingby4now]

I've only used that online tool once, and I had used all of the max settings just for grins, and my game wouldn't load. Would get a CTD before the loading screen had even finished displaying. Haven't used it since being turned onto Skyrim Configurator.

[torminater]

I'm going to try it out right now jff ;-D

[MontyMM]

I installed the latest Nvidia beta, and for some reason my Z-fighting has markedly improved. Whether this is due to the driver (yes please!) or whether some settings have been altered by the installation, I'm not sure. I'll have a thorough look later.

 

I've had one strange anomaly with the new driver, though. Wandering around outside Whiterun, looking for Z-Fighters, my FPS counter suddenly started to drop like a bomb counting down to zero! It got down to 1 FPS and stayed there, still running quite happily as a slide show. What fresh hell is this?

[torminater]

I'm going to look into that, too!

 

OK, so far I got a completely new game started with all maxed out settings with DNA using skyrim and skyrimprefs from DNA ocourse.

I encountered several problems:

No.1: Shadows are freaking awful. guess that's the "real-time" rendering problem.

No.2: As I enter Helgen Keep all in-Game interaction is slowed down by over9000 percent. Gotta figure out, what the hell causes that. Maybe realt-time shadow-rendering? i don't get it.

No.3: Any old savegame won't load and result in an immediate CTD on loading screen.

No.4: Don't know why, but sometimes I get extreme stuttering whilst moving my 1stperson-view from left to right. But only IN HELGEN KEEP?!?!

No.5: Didn't get unbound by Ralof so far. kinda sucks... -.- so not a whole lot of testing possible! Maybe tomorrow I got some time to work on that.

 

General problem: WHERE THE HECK DO ALL THOSE VALUES COME FROM AND WHAT DO THEY DO? Everything I heard about tweaking from NVidia and other sources all the "other" ini-settings don't make any difference. But why can they be implemented, do they work at all or are they getting ignored, or do they need values in a special interval so they get used to render the game?

 

I'm currently loading down the beta-drivers. Maybe that does the fix for everybody and no more tweaking will be necessary for z-fighting? Who knows? ;-)

[stoppingby4now]

Going to install the beta drivers myself and see if I experience the same.

[frihyland]

I installed the latest Nvidia beta, and for some reason my Z-fighting has markedly improved. Whether this is due to the driver (yes please!) or whether some settings have been altered by the installation, I'm not sure. I'll have a thorough look later.

 

I've had one strange anomaly with the new driver, though. Wandering around outside Whiterun, looking for Z-Fighters, my FPS counter suddenly started to drop like a bomb counting down to zero! It got down to 1 FPS and stayed there, still running quite happily as a slide show. What fresh hell is this?

 

 

The new beta turns on AO on quality so yeah fps drop. Anywho nvidia claims the 20% performance gains are real (but only apply to 560, 570, 580 models) however the bugs that remain unfixed until the next official release seem even realer. Good news is that they are really working on some serious issues, good luck to them!

[MontyMM]

For clarity, I haven't noticed an overall FPS drop yet - just that one occasion where the game slowly dropped to 1 FPS and stayed there. I've never seen that anywhere before!

[frihyland]

For clarity, I haven't noticed an overall FPS drop yet - just that one occasion where the game slowly dropped to 1 FPS and stayed there. I've never seen that anywhere before!

 

 

Apparently its caused by a memory leak, it can be fixed by forcing a refresh. Alt-tabbing out and back in to the program should do the trick if it happens again.

[MontyMM]

I'll try that it happens again. Cheers.

 

Do you have any more details on it? Might be worth putting in the Troubleshooting text.

[torminater]

Got some feedback on the z-fighting issue! I still thinkit's better to keep fBlockMaximumDistance at 250000.0000, cuz it works out for me. Setting SkycellRefFadeDistance=300000.0000 should be integrated.

 

 

Torminater,

fSplitDistanceMult=2.5000 does help, but not completely. Using that in

combination with fBlockMaximumDistance=75000.0000 pretty well solves the

whole problem for me.

 

Problem is, then the mountains look like crap. They look like they're from a 2005 game or something.

 

But in the end, I'd rather have mountains look like crap than them

flickering like mad. It's still just not the "solution" that one is

hoping for though.

 

 

 

If you're using the fblockmaxiumumdistance settings (in other words like

having distant object detail on medium), then be sure to have

fSkyCellRefFadeDistance=300000.0000 to partly cover now triangle-looking

mountains.

 

 

I'm looking for the perfect tool to create a video of skyrim whilst I demonstrate the dark circles bug. Any suggestions?

[stoppingby4now]

Thanks for the update, I'll play around with those settings. As for creating a video, you could try Cam Studio, or get an eval of Fraps.