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]

Yep I found a lot of really good infos on plenty of the settings and what I found out is that a couple of those deactivated by default are focused on good performance rather than max visual quality. I think we could also integrate those findings into a nVidia-CP/Inspector guide. Most people are looking for the meaning of those settings but can't find the right websites for good infos about it so they can try some good and working settings.

 

EDIT: Well, I did another series of tests. Now I stood on the very top of the throat of the world, the piece of rock in skyrim using console commands (tlc) and did 5 videos.

What I did before was deactivating vsync (in skyrimprefs.ini and Nvidia Inspector) and activating triplebuffering (not in NVidia Inspector but using D3DOverrider because that's the only way to make triplebuffering work). So my framerate is no longer limited by my 75 Hz refreshrate.

First of all. No noticeable performance drop. FPS at about 135 all the time. Whilst recording down to 60 because of FRAPS limitation. I guess because almost no close distance objects had to be rendered.

 

Video 1: Oh. My. God. If you have ever looked DOWN from there you will have noticed how horrible the shorelines and coasts are flashing or z-fighting. what happened too, was that z-fighting was obvious on every single mountain range in Skyrim.

Video 2: Applied my fixes. Still there is a lot of z-fighting, especially in further distances (since mesh-LOD-Fade-Distance is at 1,000,000.0000 or sth like that 500,000 isn't enough to hide those mountains. Closer mountains do look a lot better, especially with the clouds. BUT the shoreline is just as bad.

Video 3: DOUBLED my terrain manager and skycell values but no better results than in video 2 where achieved.

Video 4: Took one major graphic tweak ini config (skyrimprefs and skyrim.ini) and applied my tweaks: no better results than in video 2.

Video 5: Took another major graphic tweak (prefs and skyrim.ini) and applied my tweaks: no better results than in video 2.

 

So, what I wanted to say is, that the other z-fighting objects cannot be solved by my tweak alone and will need some extra tweaks. I think my tweak gets limited by other values, but I don't really know which so far.

[stoppingby4now]

Do you have the videos on youtube?

[torminater]

no. unfortunately not... my internet connection here is far too slow. I'll make a video now and upload it tomorrow!

well I'll just let it upload over night. no need to wait for dawn to break that I can start on step 2.1 immediately anyway :D

got some trouble with wrye right now but i'll take a closer look at the guide on the wiki and gonna give some "noob" feedback if needed ;-)

[stoppingby4now]

Sounds good. And great way to make use of that internet connection while you're sleeping. :)

[torminater]

So

!

Hope you can "enjoy" it...

[MadWizard25]

I tested out Line Gamma and Gamma Correction using Nvidia Inspector, GTX 560 Ti 2GB and latest 301 beta drivers to see if they had any impact on z-fighting with and without torminaters tweaks. I could observe no reduction in z-fighting when tested w/o the tweaks, and also no negative impact when tweaks were applied. As far as i can tell the only impact of the two gamma tweaks is virtually nothing, no fps hit. This may have been my imagination as well, but the gamma tweaks may have made snow more luminous.

 

This was done a few days ago before the STEP update, so once i can, I will recheck after the update, although i doubt it will be any different.

[torminater]

Tanks for the input! I'll start dl step2.1 mods as soon as nexus is back up and i'll try to get videos of my STEP2.1 fix improvement on youtube asap

 

it's back up! oh wonderous miracle how come? ;-)

[torminater]

Ahh... too bad. Well, just like I thought:

 

My Z-fighting tweaks don't work well if at all with STEP 2.1...

It'll take a looooong time to figure out what exactly causes this...

Making some educated guesses: I think the mods that edit the mountain ranges make z-fighting a whole lot worse...

 

So, after some specified research I found out, that those mods (list not finished) worsen z-fighting:

 

Enhanced Distant Terrain

HQLOD-Meshes

4096K Mountains from Skyrim Realistic Overhaul

(to be continued)

 

There are some more as z-fighting had been worse whilst havin installed all mods. I'll add more to this list as I find them.

[MadWizard25]

Got around to playing skyrim for a bit. I can confirm that the z-fighting has increased with the new 2.1.1 STEP setup. However, its still nearly not as bad as it was without your ini tweaks :) In addition, i still think that these tweaks are a godsend if you a running vanilla skyrim with bad z-fighting!

[torminater]

I'm not too sure, but I think that RCRN makes the z-fighting "look worse". With vanilla lighting z-fighting is in the same areas, but less intense. With RCRN (only Pure Version tested so far) the flicker hid by clouds looks worse. I'll test RLwC because I didn't have any problems with that one so far! Also I think that the EHD, HQLOD and 4096k mountains (which is not needed anyways, I think) can be implemented, as they add to graphics, and they alone don't make z-fighting unbearibly stronger!

 

Edit: the lighting effects of RCRN Pure especially at dawn and dusk make the z-fighting more obvious than vanilla lighting or RLwC for me at least. Also I deactivated the FXAA of RCRN before testing.

[majin662]

Id be shocked if anything ethatron did. (Hqlod) made something worse. Hes been around for ever and is the creator of many of the tools in use today. That said it can happen no doubt id just be shocked. I do know he also created some lod textures to go with each of the main landscape packs. Perhaps try that for whatever mod you use for mountains. If you can isolate his texs to which is for the mountains only since step mixes and matches the best of different landscape packs.

 

More to follow. Gathering a lot of good sources of info on this subject to post later

[torminater]

so, what i can definitely say is that ethatron doesn't give a damn about z-fighting, at least not about resolving it. he might be the only one capable of not only decreasing z-fighting but diminishing z-fighting alltogether. he had been already contacted and is told to have said, that he doesn't have any z-fighting, so he doesn't see the necessity to fix it...

[majin662]

really? wow, I did not know that. So you've approached him already about this issue and that was his response?

[stoppingby4now]

@torminater

That's interesting, because I'm experiencing something completely different (RCRN classic no FXAA). I'm not seeing z-fighting any more pronounced with it, but there is a point where it clears up much faster and practically goes away for me. I'm now only experiencing it on very very far distant objects (it's also more pronounced in 3rd person than it is in 1st person view). A case in point is if heading West from Whiterun and looking at the mountains in the distance. I would always get z-fighting, lessening as I got closer, well beyond the western watch tower. Now, it's virtually gone before I even reach the western watch tower. I haven't gone up to the throat of the world to test yet.

[torminater]

IMPORTANT NOTE: I had a typo in my fix here before Gophers Video on

Z-fighting. The value fBlockLevel1Distance was set to 1400000.0000. This

actually should be 140000.0000 so divided by 10. Apparently it works

both ways, but if you consider it being too big of a FPS-hit with the

1,400,000.0000 try out using fBlockLevel1Distance=140000.0000 instead.

Sorry for that.