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]

What I always wanted to do and what I'll do right know is that I'll uninstall skyrim completely and install skyrim using my disk and steam offline, so I can test z-fighting on version 1.1 as I was sure some months ago there was no z-flicker back then. Backups are being made right now and I'll report asap.

Well unfortunately this did not work out as well as I thought it would. The cd doesn't provide you with an exe file unfortunately. dammit.

[torminater]

Very interesting find:

My Skyrim Launcher does not detect my SLI setup if activated. The Rendererinfo.txt it generates says "SLI mode : no"

So what I did is change "no" to "yes" and set the file to read-only. I'll check if I still get water bugs now, etc.

So far I can't say there was any difference. Sadly the water bug still persists and HDR seems to be broken, too. Not sure, but maybe the performance is better? I'll try to make some test runs. Who knows? ;-)

[bitdman]

Do we know yet if ATI cards make any difference?

[bitdman]

Very interesting find:

My Skyrim Launcher does not detect my SLI setup if activated. The Rendererinfo.txt it generates says "SLI mode : no"

So what I did is change "no" to "yes" and set the file to read-only. I'll check if I still get water bugs now, etc.

So far I can't say there was any difference. Sadly the water bug still persists and HDR seems to be broken, too. Not sure, but maybe the performance is better? I'll try to make some test runs. Who knows? ;-)

If the game engine is old or created without considering the use of dual GPUs could that be why it doesn't detect them?

Also. Can "bridging" two cards be any different than a dual card built combined? I don't want to research this. It's too time consuming.

[torminater]

I have no info on ATI xfire setups. I don't know why it doesn't get that I use two gpu's.

If you don't want to research on it use google. Maybe it works :D

[Synixtrix]

....then head to the Main section and edit: fSkyRefCellFadeDistance=500000.0000......

 

Just a little heads up the above setting is fSkyCellRefFadeDistance not fSkyRefCellFadeDistance.

(I hope I am not wrong about the setting, but I could not find the entry(RefCell) you specified, but did find(CellRef),)

 

That being said, using the settings you posted seems to have fixed the majority of the z-fighting on my machine,

without a major performance drop either.

Many thanks.

 

My setup is

CPU = Core I5 2400 3.1 GHz (over clocked to 3.8 GHz) quad core.

RAM = 2x4GB 800MHz(dual channel, so 1600 MHz) RipSaw, GSkill.

Hard Drive = 1000GB Seagate 7200 rpm

GPU/Video Card = AMD Radeon HD 7850 Saphire OC

                        Core Clock 920 MHz

                        Memory Clock 1250 MHz

                        2 GB GDDR5 memory

 

So nothing really special there but it runs Skyrim @ 35 fps outside and 60 fps inside.

Mods installed are S.T.E.P. recommended only with about half textures at max.

I have AA set at 4x as 8x came with a massive performance hit with only a little visual improvement.

Everything else is Ultra, and Ultra + with your z-fighting fix.

If you want any other details about my system just ask.

 

Thanks again to you and the guys behind S.T.E.P., being an old D&D fan from the 80's, this game gives me my fantasy/dungeon crawling fix these days.

[torminater]

Thanks for the feedback! :) Changed the error in my post.

[digitalellis]

I had success using this guide to limit z-fighting on distant mountains. Thank you.

 

Has anyone found a solution to limit the texture shimmer seen on shiny objects. For example, the shiny metal bands that wrap around the standing stones give me terrible shimmer.

[frihyland]

Turn off MSAA and FXAA, use only SMAA. If you have a very good video card you can use SSAA (Supersampling) in addition or instead of SMAA.

[torminater]

Switch LOD Bias to 0 and Negative LOD Bias to Clamp in your Nvidia inspector.

Additionally follow fris recommendation. It may or may not remove all of the shimmer for you, but it will definitely improve it. For the rest of the shimmer... just think of it being extremely well polished or a little wet. Skyrim weather is pretty unpredictable after all. Maybe the sun came out 15 seconds ago and the standing stone endured a fullgrown thunderstorm just 10 seconds before ;-)

[digitalellis]

The SMAA fix made a big difference for me, thanks!

[Rian]

So I applied the fix as outlined in the Wiki, but now when I try to load a savegame I get stuck on the loading screen. Tips scroll past, but it never loads. I've definitely isolated it to the INI tweaks, as reverting them causes the game to work just fine. I'm running quite a powerful rig as well.

 

Any suggestions? Could the Z-fighting tweaks be interfering with a mod?

[JudgmentJay]

The z-fighting tweaks increase the amount of stuff the game engine has to load by a non-trivial amount. If you were near the limit of what the game engine can handle the tweaks can put you over the edge, causing infinite loading screens. I personally use these scaled back z-fighting tweak values:

 

[TerrainManager]

fTreeLoadDistance=100000.0000

fBlockMaximumDistance=350000.0000

fBlockLevel1Distance=70000.0000

fBlockLevel0Distance=35000.0000

fSplitDistanceMult=3.0000

bShowLODInEditor=0

 

It's possible that even that will be too much for your game to handle. Other big factors for infinite loading screens are higher uGrids settings, lots of high resolution texture mods, mods that add alot of NPCs (Civil Wars, Immersive Patrols, Interesting NPCs, etc), mods that increase the number of distant objects you can see (Skyrim Distance Overhaul, Skyrim Distant Detail), and the Open Cities mod.

[Rian]

Interesting. I reduce it to your settings, Judgement, and it now loads but immediately hangs on the first frame of the scene and then crashes to black after about a minute. I'm running a 7870, with 9gb of RAM, so it should be able to handle everything I throw at it.

[JudgmentJay]

Your PC might be able to, but Skyrim can't. The engine is weak and fragile and if you overload it with too much information it will cause problems.