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]

Thx Bealdwine! I've seen a couple of Code lines (or sth like that) which go on for ever and ever. Can you fix that?

[Bealdwine]

Ooops, I'll take a look :) [EDIT] Done... although there must be a better way than simply splitting paragraphs down to shorter lines?

I'm studying zMans DDSopt guide to pick up bits of wiki code, as I'm much more used to BBS stuff :P I notice they've tagged you as a Wiki Editor now torm so presumably you have permissions (if not the time) to support and maintain this for yourself as well :)

[torminater]

Time might be the major issue here as I've got too much things revolving around my head to actually know what I'm doing atm...

[z929669]

No worries. We've got it covered. Thanks for creating the guide

 

I moved the page Beald created (thanks mate!) to the "Guide" namespace that Farlo set up and also added it to the "Guides" category that I set up. Link is now on the main page with the other guides. Also added header tags that I am hoping all agree is an acceptable standard (there is that word again emanating from my fingertips!). I left two redirects behind for those of you that click the preceding link... yes, I named it wrong the first time, so now we have a trail

 

Lastly, I shortened up a few of the longer page titles to reduce the overall size of the TOC box. In the wiki, reverting is very easy, so no worries about losing anything in case someone thinks I F%@$ed up!

[Bealdwine]

Thanks zMan, and I approve of the couple of tweaks you added :)

 

I originally created the page as it was, due to there already being a heading under Troubleshooting for z-fighting but I think it richly deserves the upgrade to a Guide in its own right. Well done torminater.

[stoppingby4now]

Really great writeup with very useful information. I'll be examining closer when I retry various settings. +1

[stoppingby4now]

I tried the preset that you linked to torm for the Bokeh DOF preset, and I really like it. It's very fast and smooth in the transitions, and I'm getting no noticeable performance hit. One thing I'm going to have to look into is I'm getting a very faint overlay on the screen in certain places which is annoying and not sure what is causing it. It also works remarkably well in 3rd person view which I primarily use.

 

As to z-fighting, it doesn't really help it, aside from if you are right up against a tree causing the background to be very blurry. But if I can find out how to fix the transparent image that is showing up, I think this is going to be my new DOF.

 

One interesting thing I came across when playing with Dynavision is that it seems it's not very friendly with higher ugrids settings (at least that's my first impression). I need to do more testing to know if that really is the cause, but invariably after playing the game to test it, if I quit and relaunch, sometimes the game would throw an error and fail to launch. Removing Dynavision fixed it.

[Vond]

stoppingby4now: If by transparent image you mean the one that shows up when you "hug" an object such as a tree etc, it's due to the fNearDistance=25.0000 setting

[stoppingby4now]

@Vond

I'm getting it out in the open world, and wasn't near any trees at the time. I had come up to an embankment that was rather high that I jumped up onto which may fit in that scenario. I also notice that the image changes as I run around.

 

I checked my configs and I don't have fNearDistance in either of them. Is there a particular value that needs to be set to? I also assume this is related directly to ENB as I've never experienced this before.

[torminater]

hmm. maybe some sort of vsync incompatibility? i'm going to run some tests hopefully today.

also those image duplications could be caused by some rests of enb-functions which are somehow not disabled correctly. maybe in the comment section of the mod there are some hints how to resolve this glitch.

[Vond]

Btw, any success in eliminating texture shimmering? The z-fighting is gone for me completely with the settings torm posted earlier, but I still sometimes notice annoying texture shimmering. :)

[torminater]

it's on the bottom of my list as i said earlier. as soon as i get my work on the other things done I'll work on it!

by the way I fixed the grass shadowing problem. i just have to find some other tweaks with less negative side effects.

[Vond]

it's on the bottom of my list as i said earlier. as soon as i get my work on the other things done I'll work on it!

by the way I fixed the grass shadowing problem. i just have to find some other tweaks with less negative side effects.

 

 

Hmm, I only had issues with grass-shadowing using ENB, and it's fixed in ENB 0.109 that was released 2 days ago.

[stoppingby4now]

I get no texture shimmering. I've been doing current testing with 4x AA set in Skyrim Launcher, and in nVidia Inspector, Enhance the application settings and set 4xMSAA and 4xSGSSAA. I've also tested with combined 2x1 SSAA + 4xMSAA for improved IQ with less of a performance hit than higher strict SSAA.

 

Concerning my ghosting problem, I came across a thread that equates it to a problem with the new grass shadows introduced with 1.5. Upon further testing, that is primarily when I see the image, and it changes to nearly match the most recent view of the landscape.

[Vond]

I get no texture shimmering. I've been doing current testing with 4x AA set in Skyrim Launcher, and in nVidia Inspector, Enhance the application settings and set 4xMSAA and 4xSGSSAA. I've also tested with combined 2x1 SSAA + 4xMSAA for improved IQ with less of a performance hit than higher strict SSAA.

 

Concerning my ghosting problem, I came across a thread that equates it to a problem with the new grass shadows introduced with 1.5. Upon further testing, that is primarily when I see the image, and it changes to nearly match the most recent view of the landscape.

 

 

Mind showing an image of your inspector settings? Mostly curious as to what you set your LOD bias to with those settings, especially the 1x2 SS + 4x MS setting (shouldn't need to use any LOD bias setting if the only SSAA is TRSSAA afaik)