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...

[LeetMiniWheat]

is this z-fighting? it even happens up-close. the bottom of certain tree textures rapidly switch between bright and dark.

 

 

Edit: if you click on one and then rapidly press left and right arrow back and forth, that's what I'm seeing in-game

 

Edit2: it's not related to tree shadows, cause I just tested that off. it seems as if the textures are rapidly switching from one to another, like even the branch/leaf shape is changing

[frihyland]

That's normal shadow movement although not very pretty (enb 113 fixes close shadows), z fighting is blatant flickering and flashing of distant textures. Lots of videos linked early in the thread.

[LeetMiniWheat]

it's not shadows at all, because it happens with shadows off. the textures just flash back and forth between two different types of branches and one is overlayed on top of the other

 

Edit: it's like two different textures are fighting each other

[frihyland]

I'd have to see a video, but z fighting is always distant. Maybe you discovered an entirely new bug :P

[LeetMiniWheat]

here i took pictures with tree shadows off. again just flip back and forth with arrow keys to see what it looks like in-game.

 

 

Edit: and it's not related to optimized textures either. maybe it's one of my tree-related mods, but I never noticed it until recently

[LeetMiniWheat]

nevermind I think I found the culprit. Lush Trees was conflicting with Vurt's even with the compatibility patch, what gives?

 

Edit: hmm, maybe it's not vurt's, it still flickers (but with different textures) with lush trees enabled and vurt's disabled

Edit2: this is odd, i disabled all other tree mods and only disabling lush trees makes it go away. sigh... :/

[torminater]

Sry but i have to correct some things here: z-fighting can Happen absolutely everywhere. This here is z-fighting but no tweak in your ini can fix that. You have to apply better z-buffer-values for the Tree-textures manually with the ck. Uskp has fixed several Close z-fighting issues from vanilla skyrim, if you only get this glitch with Mods contact the mod Autors if it happens on vanilla too contact uskp.

[LeetMiniWheat]

thanks for the info. still getting the z-fighting even on vanilla skyrim with lush trees, and USKP 1.5c doesn't fix it :/

 

I have no clue how to use the CK so I guess I need to disable Lush Trees :(

 

BTW can anyone else confirm this Lush Trees bug? straight out of helgen caves there's some trees in the area that have their bottom branches flickering back and forth between textures. though I know Lush Trees isn't part of S.T.E.P., it should be!

[torminater]

If its on Vanilla and uskp doesn't fix it, contact them or post the issue on their bug tracker.

[LeetMiniWheat]

well no, I meant it occurs with just Lush Trees alone on vanilla install

[torminater]

Then Write to the Mod Autor. Maybe He still Supports it.

[majin662]

looked around this thread and didn't see this posted or mentioned so figured I'd throw it out there for people who may not have seen this yet. looks time consuming but watching him "easily" get rid of z fighting made me smile. How extensive his "fix" is (how much z fighting you can fix with his "tweak") remains to be seen but the video is on the creation kits video tutorial page so I'm assuming its just a seek and destroy approach.

 

[frihyland]

Thanks majin, its becoming inevitable that we will get into mod editing here at some point and that's a fabulous tip.

[LeetMiniWheat]

Nice, maybe I can now finally fix the glitchy tree bottoms in Lush Trees.

[majin662]

finally got home this morning and started trying to learn the ck so I can start trial and error on this. Navigating the render windows sucks, but sure enough if you can track down the object you can adjust it to make it stop colliding and fighting. My only concern now is that even if we nail every z fighting object, will the lod's generated by them be free of it as well? Does that even make sense?