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...

[jmad75]

I have a GeForce GTX 560M and use the lower resolution texture mods. My main issue is the texture shimmering which is glaringly noticeable outside at night. Any suggestions?

[frihyland]

Turn off AA, that is the cause of shimmering.

[majin662]

I have a GeForce GTX 560M and use the lower resolution texture mods. My main issue is the texture shimmering which is glaringly noticeable outside at night. Any suggestions?

go into nvidia inspector (if you don't have it download it, very useful) and find the skyrim profile. set negative lod bias to CLAMP. Also if you are using an ENB setup try turning down specular power at night

[stoppingby4now]

I have a GeForce GTX 560M and use the lower resolution texture mods. My main issue is the texture shimmering which is glaringly noticeable outside at night. Any suggestions?

Could you give a more concise example of what you are referring to with texture shimmering? There are three main items that people will sometimes refer to as texture shimmering.

 

The first is z-fighting, which is most noticeable on distant objects such as the mountains, but it is not texture shimmering. It's a side effect of two planes existing in the same space where each scene render can end up with one plane winning over the other at any given moment. Torminater's INI settings will help that a lot.

 

The second is a texture shimmering effect occurring on the edges of objects themselves, which is directly related to pure AA. It's really just a matter of the AA of the object not blending well with the surrounding background. Turning off AA will reduce the affect (but not completely eliminate it) at the cost of not having edges smoothed. This is typically only noticeable on very small objects such as grass, bars in windows, wood slats seen from a distance, etc.

 

Lastly is pure texture shimmering, which is directly related to, and occurs on, the textures themselves. Pure AA does not effect texture shimmering in this regard, but full screen rendering engines like FXAA does (SMAA greatly reduces the effect last I checked). It can also occur from post process injectors which modify the full screen view post process. This is typically only noticeable on textures with very fine detail (especially on smaller objects) where each pass on a scene renders slightly differently from it's previous view as the object or the viewer moves. This is largely due to these methods not having any kind of fidelity in their samples to ensure a consistent render, and results in pixels being slightly out of place between renders, causing them to appear to "dance".

 

If you are experiencing any of the above at night, they should be visible during the day as well.

[jmad75]

It was mostly noticeable at night or on the load screens where the surface of an object that was reflecting light, shimmered/sparkled. AA in the gamelauncher was already off but I had it at X2 in nVidia Inspector. I turned it off there and I've seen great improvement.

 

As for negative lod bias, I don't have Clamp as an option.

[JudgmentJay]

If you have the VRAM/GPU power for it, setting Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling in nVidia Inspector to 4x Sparse Grid Supersampling greatly reduces the shimmer you're talking about. Then you can turn regular AA back on and have the best of both worlds.

[torminater]

It was mostly noticeable at night or on the load screens where the surface of an object that was reflecting light, shimmered/sparkled. AA in the gamelauncher was already off but I had it at X2 in nVidia Inspector. I turned it off there and I've seen great improvement.

 

As for negative lod bias, I don't have Clamp as an option.

well that's weird. are you sure you're using up-to-date drivers and the newest NVidia inspector?

 

So far everything worth noting was already mentioned. Good job guys! ;)

[stoppingby4now]

It was mostly noticeable at night or on the load screens where the surface of an object that was reflecting light, shimmered/sparkled. AA in the gamelauncher was already off but I had it at X2 in nVidia Inspector. I turned it off there and I've seen great improvement.

 

As for negative lod bias, I don't have Clamp as an option.

That is called Specular Aliasing. It will be seen regardless if AA is turned on or off because AA only affects the edges of objects. FXAA will clear it on the cheap side (though will introduce texture shimmering), or SGSSAA as JudgementJay described (with a performance loss).

[bitdman]

This may not make sense but try changing the contrast or brightness of your monitor and if you have Imaginator, play around with contrast,brightness,and sunlight settings. I think I remember this solving issues like this for me.

[torminater]

Hey guys has anybody of you interest in writing up a entry on the wiki about texture shimmering? There are certainly a lot of people around here who know what they're talking about.

[Farlo]

Hey guys has anybody of you interest in writing up a entry on the wiki about texture shimmering? There are certainly a lot of people around here who know what they're talking about.

That'd be great to have.  I don't know how the non-Editors want to help draft it, but once you have a basic premise down, go ahead and add a tab for it on the Troubleshooting article (use a Level 1 header to designate a new tab).

[torminater]

I'm really really bad with the wiki. :D I might just write up some text so you or sb else can convert it to wiki-format ;-)

[Farlo]

I'm really really bad with the wiki. :D I might just write up some text so you or sb else can convert it to wiki-format ;-)

Sure thing, although the best way to learn is to practice :P  Go ahead and post the text, I'll wikify it with comments and hopefully you can continue to modify it from there.

[bitdman]

Once there's something there to start with then the rest of us can add to it. Can I have editor rights so I can get my .02 cents in. Please?

[torminater]

Well be free to post any resource with useful information about texture shimmering in skyrim in this thread, also a general description of what texture shimmering actually is, would be needed...

So I'll start writing that guide and you guys can chip in whenever you like, but not until tomorrow :D