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]

ok, try it without land shadows in your skyrimprefsini. if this solves it... you got it ;-)

[torminater]

EDIT: just being stupid. of course there's no sli bug without sli... -.-'''

^

hey guys, just found something weird...

the SLI-water bug doesn't exist everywhere where there is water. So far I only could duplicate it (endless times though) near riverwood. Does anybody know anything about this limitation?

I made a reinstall of the latest WHQLdrivers of NVidia because the driver install of a beta-driver got totall screwed. maybe that solved it? in my nvidia CP it says that SLI is deactivated. maybe there is some left over from the beta driver that keeps the SLI locked? I'll update this post asap.

So, what's quite interesting is, if SLI is activated (of course) and my FPS is higher than 60 the SLI water artifacts aren't problematic at all. Just if I get down to 40 as I was whilst recording the effect worsened a lot.

[stoppingby4now]

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)

Here are three screenshots of settings I've mainly used. In regards to LOD bias, I stopped adjusting it. A lot of documentation out there gives a formula for what to set it to, but I've found a few resources that claim it's primarily needed when you use custom bits (which I'm not using), and as far as I can tell, I believe them to be correct as I notice no difference when adjusting it.

 

One thing to note, is that for the best quality, it is imperative to set the AA and AF setting in the Skyrim Options to match what you set in the control panel or nVidia Inspector, and to set the Antialiasing - Mode to Enhance the application setting. I'm also using a GTX580, so YMWV in terms of performance.

 

Best performance, but very fine transparent details such as wood slats, bars in windows, an particularly grass, still have a wavy feel to them when moving in relation to them (which FXAA does a great job of clearing up, but introduces heavy texture shimmer):

 

Next step up in great IQ without hitting performance too bad. Very noticeable improvement to fine transparent textures and great reduction in waviness:

 

Best IQ with greater hit to performance. Nearly 0 waviness, and unnoticeable unless you are specifically looking for it.

 

There are some cases where it may seem like there is texture shimmering, but it's directly related to shadows (and more importantly how bad they are). Particularly on very light vegetation and without any shadow striping fix. But if you compare it to using FXAA turned on in Skyrim Options, it's obvious it's not the same thing.

[stoppingby4now]

As a follow-up, I've been running around the country side with 2x2 SSAA and the IQ is still really good. It appears I can tell when textures are being loaded at certain points as my FPS will drop down to around 48 for a few seconds, but then it will jump back up to mid 50's all the way up to 60. Most noticeable when the terrain changes in a significant way and when getting closer to clumps of trees. Current ugrids set to default of 5 for testing.

[Vond]

Thanks for sharing, I'll do some more testing with different AA settings. I'm using ENB for SSAO/DoF and bloom etc, so that lowers performance quite a bit. Been trying out a 2x AA + 2 SSAA + SMAA mix currently which seems to work decently, more testing always helps!

[frihyland]

there's a new enb version 109beta out thats optimized for nvidia cards, might wanna try it out

[Vond]

Yeah, I use 109 already and it improved performance quite a bit which ofc meant I could up the settings some. :) Currently working on finding a stable OC for my gpu as it has great onboard fans (DCUII). Great for being onboard fans that is. Should help out aswell.

[z929669]

Most of us here are wiki-editor auth, so I suggest that we update torm's guide with all new info revealed here,. Screens and empirical data always welcome ;)

[torminater]

A new video on Skyrim Bugs!

 

[Vond]

@stoppingby4now: Wow, was playing around with your settings some. Tried the highest quality setting for starters just to see how hard the hit would be, and indeed my fps was pretty darn low with that + ENB with SSAO/DoF running. Then I noticed your AF changes, implemented those and had a MASSIVE fps gain over the High Qual settings I used there before. Much, much more than I would gain.. Always thought the hit from AF was pretty darn minor.

[Vond]

Oh and one more thing...with 1x2 SSA + 2 AA, or 4x4 SSAA, do you set ingame AA to 4 or 8? Not quite sure how that would need to be done to get it correctly.

[MadWizard25]

Torminator, you are the man :) Your ini tweaks have drastically reduced my z-fighting on distant mountains! Thanks so much, both for the tweaks and the hard work you put into figuring out the fix! Cheers again :D

[stoppingby4now]

@stoppingby4now: Wow, was playing around with your settings some. Tried the highest quality setting for starters just to see how hard the hit would be, and indeed my fps was pretty darn low with that + ENB with SSAO/DoF running. Then I noticed your AF changes, implemented those and had a MASSIVE fps gain over the High Qual settings I used there before. Much, much more than I would gain.. Always thought the hit from AF was pretty darn minor.

 

Do you mean Ambient Occlusion?

Oh and one more thing...with 1x2 SSA + 2 AA, or 4x4 SSAA, do you set ingame AA to 4 or 8? Not quite sure how that would need to be done to get it correctly.

 

In all of my settings, ingame AA is always set to 4x.

[Vond]

 

@stoppingby4now: Wow, was playing around with your settings some. Tried the highest quality setting for starters just to see how hard the hit would be, and indeed my fps was pretty darn low with that + ENB with SSAO/DoF running. Then I noticed your AF changes, implemented those and had a MASSIVE fps gain over the High Qual settings I used there before. Much, much more than I would gain.. Always thought the hit from AF was pretty darn minor.

 

Do you mean Ambient Occlusion?

 

Oh and one more thing...with 1x2 SSA + 2 AA, or 4x4 SSAA, do you set ingame AA to 4 or 8? Not quite sure how that would need to be done to get it correctly.

 

In all of my settings, ingame AA is always set to 4x.

 

No, I meant AF. :) You had yours at 16x and Quality, with Anisotropic sample optimization on. I always had that off (default) and the quality setting at High Quality. I didn't really notice a difference when changing to your settings, but I gained a lot of FPS.

 

 

 

And thanks, had mine set at 4x aswell but just wanted to make sure.

[stoppingby4now]

 

 

@stoppingby4now: Wow was playing around with your settings some. Tried the highest quality setting for starters just to see how hard the hit would be, and indeed my fps was pretty darn low with that + ENB with SSAO/DoF running. Then I noticed your AF changes, implemented those and had a MASSIVE fps gain over the High Qual settings I used there before. Much, much more than I would gain.. Always thought the hit from AF was pretty darn minor.

Do you mean Ambient Occlusion?

Oh and one more thing...with 1x2 SSA + 2 AA or 4x4 SSAA, do you set ingame AA to 4 or 8? Not quite sure how that would need to be done to get it correctly.

In all of my settings, ingame AA is always set to 4x.

 

No, I meant AF. :) You had yours at 16x and Quality, with Anisotropic sample optimization on. I always had that off (default) and the quality setting at High Quality. I didn't really notice a difference when changing to your settings, but I gained a lot of FPS.And thanks, had mine set at 4x aswell but just wanted to make sure.

 

Gotcha. That tends to be true for a lot of things where performance loss just isn't worth it as the visual quality is minimal.