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...

[stoppingby4now]

I watched his vid, and he sounded quite surprised by 1.4 million. :)

[torminater]

who wouldn't xD

[BaronDavid]

add in your skyrim.ini under displayfNearDistance=25.0000And then go to your SkyrimPrefs.ini and do the TerrainManager and

skycellrefdistance tweaks I suggested. I think that'll do the trick,

too!

 

I just tried that on my ATI 6970. It made the flickering much less intrusive. So much less that i wouldnt notice without deliberately looking for it.I have no ENB or Post Processing. Just the whole S.T.E.P Guide mods, RLC and Dynavision. The performance is ok too, no noticeable stuttering and the likes.

 

1920x1080 High/Ultra

 

i7930 @2.8

6970 2GB

6GB

[torminater]

You're welcome :-) and thanks for the additional info, too!

[stoppingby4now]

I was playing around with various settings one at a time to see what their effect on Z-Fighting was. Have a few that are still applied, and I need to work out what those are, but I now have almost no Z-Fighting at all. It's down to probably less than 5% of the time I will see it. After doing some testing looking at the mountains west of Whiterun, I would get Z-Fighting nearly across the entire mountain range, and it was particularly bad on the peak with heavy cloud cover. Now, I see virtually no Z-Fighting. I am beginning to have to struggle to see any at all.

 

I believe the main thing that significantly improved this was setting fNearDistance=35.0000. When I started upping that value, that's when I started to see Z-Fighting greatly diminishing. I saw no real difference between 35 and 40.

 

One caveat is that I have very few mods installed ATM (SRO, AOF, RCRN, More Rain, Real Rain).

[torminater]

Ah well, my padawan, I have to tell you that the power of z-fighting-fighting can be achieved in two ways... the easy way, and the hard way.You have to choose your path, your destiny.

what I'm saying is that setting fNeardistance to anything bigger than 15 (standard value) will automatically increase "nearplaneclipping". This means, if your playing first person, and you move close to another object... it will disappear.

If your playing third person, everything around your character is perfectly fine, but, if you run down e.g. stairs you'll see your character through the stairs, since they disappear, or at least some of them.

What fNeardistance does, is steering the focus of the "highest precision buffer". the smaller the value, the better the close objects get separated, causing them to clip less. the higher the value, the better do distant objects get buffered, causing z-fighting to get less, but also cause near objects to "clip"(disappear, become transparent etc.). This is the same effect, if you disable collision via console (tcl) and run with your character towards the z-fighting. the z-fighting stops at some point, but the objects that where close to you as you started to run, cannot be seen anymore. (yes, this is a metaphor)

 

fNearDistance has been thoroughly tested by hlvr(-n) and he says that the best ratio of z-fighting/clipping is found at about 25.

[stoppingby4now]

I had started playing with that value specifically after reading a thread somewhere describing what you just did. I play primarily in 3rd person view, and with that value it's been quite amazing. As for the clipping, I experience the opposite. I see through myself, the stairs are still just fine. There are a few cases where when the camera moves it's easier to cause clipping, but so far it hasn't been a big deal for me. I will gladly pay that very small price in clipping in the quest to rid my world of Z-fighting.

[torminater]

It always depends how far you move your camera from your char whilst playing in 3rd person. the further away, the more clipping is in the background. the closer of course, the more the clipping moves towards your char...

i usually only move to 3rd person when i'm travelling to some location. everything else is in first person, and clipping there is a bigger problem, as you might notice when trying out.

Glad you found your "fix" :-)

[stoppingby4now]

You are correct. I play in 3rd person all the time, and very rarely move to 1st. Just tried it out, and had a very large amount of clipping on the landscape around me. Down right fugly. Still playing around though.

[torminater]

Just keep the infos coming! maybe you'll have luck and find something that helps a lot without too much sacrifice :)

[Nachtfrost]

Just a few thoughts.

The game Risen 2 - Dark Waters by PB/Deep Silver had very excruciating z-fighting on nVidia cards. After one or two weeks, there was a patch.

And then there was z-fighting no more.

And Piranha Bytes is a small fish compared to Bethesda.

[stoppingby4now]

Bethesda could absolutely fix this issue if they took the time to update their engine. It's a shame they aren't addressing this as it ruins scene quality.

[torminater]

It is far from impossible for Beth to fix it. It's just a matter of priority settings.

[torminater]

Can somebody confirm the whiterun walls z-fighting to be decreased when only upping the uExterior Cell Buffer and keeping the uGridsToLoad at 5?

Maybe it's just a placebo, but I thought it got a bit better.

[torminater]

Updated my guide:

ALSO: The fNearDistance-Clipping effect is getting GREATLY increased if

you use FOV(Field of View)-tweaks! Any FOV greater than 70 will increase

clipping. For standard FOV fNearDistance=25.0000 works ok, you get

clipping but in no problematic game ruining way, since you usually don't

want to run into things. Using a bigger FOV makes the clipping effect

far mor noticeable in game. The fix will still improve z-fighting-issues

even though you keep fNearDistance=15.0000 or delete the line

completely from your Skyrim.ini, just not as well.

 

NOTE THAT: Even when using neither FOV tweaks nor fNearDistance-Tweaks

there is clipping. For reference just watch a wooden bar of a roof as

close as possible. The clipping IS there. BUT: the higher the values of

these 2 parameters are set the worse the clipping gets. Even vanilla

Sykrim has clipping. Don't blame the fix, blame the people responsible.