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]

Try to reduce all of the values by about the same percentage, maybe you'll find a combination which works for you.

Infinite loading is a known issue. No way around it though. I can tell you, that I never had this problem on a vanilla skyrim setup with my tweaked ini. A modded skyrim is a lot more susceptible to a whole bunch more of issues, not only long loading.

[z929669]

FYI regarding the "fNearDistance" z-fighing fix (this IS mentioned in the Guide, however, it would be best to make the warning more prominent, as this could easily be missed):

 

This causes texture clipping at certain angles when close to objects like walls. I began seeing this when trying out my new darker dungeons settings and basically running into walls and crypts in Bleak Falls Barrow. At oblique angles against certain wall/cave textures, I was getting this very annoying, game breaking clipping.

 

This reminded me of this issue in Deadly Reflex (Oblivion combat mod), which fixed by setting fNearDistance=0.0000. Sure enough, that also solved my issue in this case, so while the fNearDistance=25.0000 z-fighting fix ?might? help with that issue, it will cause the (IMO much worse) clipping issue.

---

EDIT: In my case, I had to set fNearDistance=18.000 to effectively eliminate this clipping; however, I am not convinced that the issue is 100% resolved at this value (maybe Bethesda already found the sweet spot to be 15.000??).

[Farlo]

What a weird decision...  Which is better: phasing through walls or vibrating mountains? 

 

With this change do you think the tweaks are ready to be added to the guide?

[z929669]

What a weird decision...  Which is better: phasing through walls or vibrating mountains? 

 

With this change do you think the tweaks are ready to be added to the guide?

I am not convinced yet about any of these tweaks. This one in particular still needs to be tested. The others may 'reduce' z-fighting by increasing the amount of rendered fog, effectively preventing the offending distant textures from being visible.

 

Following is an example (you cannot see the z-fighting in still images, but trust me when I say that it is very bad here). The first image had prominent z-fighting on most of the distant mountains just to left of center. After applying all recommended tweaks, z-fighting was reduced to only a couple of very tiny little patches of the same area. Note that the fog is likely hiding the rest ;)

[stoppingby4now]

FYI regarding the "fNearDistance" z-fighing fix (this IS mentioned in the Guide, however, it would be best to make the warning more prominent, as this could easily be missed):

 

This causes texture clipping at certain angles when close to objects like walls. I began seeing this when trying out my new darker dungeons settings and basically running into walls and crypts in Bleak Falls Barrow. At oblique angles against certain wall/cave textures, I was getting this very annoying, game breaking clipping.

 

This reminded me of this issue in Deadly Reflex (Oblivion combat mod), which fixed by setting fNearDistance=0.0000. Sure enough, that also solved my issue in this case, so while the fNearDistance=25.0000 z-fighting fix ?might? help with that issue, it will cause the (IMO much worse) clipping issue.

---

EDIT: In my case, I had to set fNearDistance=18.000 to effectively eliminate this clipping; however, I am not convinced that the issue is 100% resolved at this value (maybe Bethesda already found the sweet spot to be 15.000??).

This was discussed in this thread early on, and a video that Gopher did a while back also brought this up and he played around with this setting (though I can't remember what value he settled on).

 

The settings that torminater came up with are pretty much the best I've seen for significantly reducing z-fighting.

 

This is just one of those things that users are going to have to decide for themselves which is more annoying. I personally have learned to play in a way to avoid clipping most of the time and can accept the occasional clipping as I find z-fighting to be far more distracting. But, I also spent the majority of my time outdoors.

 

It would be good to add to the discussion on fNearDistance and add some images to the guide to demonstrate the issue particularly with different values.

[torminater]

Sounds interesting. If it's been tested enough I might add it to the guide, although it actually doesn't concern z-fighting-tweaks ...

[z929669]

Sounds interesting. If it's been tested enough I might add it to the guide although it actually doesn't concern z-fighting-tweaks ...

Actually, it fits though, if this setting indeed does affect z-fighting. The discussion would be around the trade-off and how to minimize clipping.

[z929669]

OK. I can confirm that my own independent analysis has confirmed that torminater's 'fixes' indeed have a visible positive impact.

 

Sorry that I doubted in the face of all of the previous confirmation on this thread ... I just don't really believe much unless I do the experiment myself :P (probably why I am a scientist/researcher):

 

Following is

[native Skyrim INIs on Ultra] > [Applied all recommended SkyrimPrefs.ini tweaks] > [added the fNearDistance Skyrim.ini tweak]

 

 

[video=youtube]http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=L_yoaAw8PHg

 

[video=youtube]http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dDdCiJTpst4

 

[video=youtube]http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=s4d7TO9mF1Q

 

All that said, I have found that for my own personal needs, fNearDistance=20.0000 is a good compromise for minimizing both close-clipping and z-fighting.

 

Also, I think that these tweaks should be added to the next release of the STEP Installation Guide --following are the only diffs with default:

 

SkyrimPrefs.ini

[TerrainManager]
fBlockMaximumDistance=500000
fBlockLevel1Distance=140000
fBlockLevel0Distance=75000
fSplitDistanceMult=4.0

[MAIN]
fSkyCellRefFadeDistance=500000.0000

Skyrim.ini

[Display]
fNearDistance=20.0000 (or 25.0000) with attention to clipping issue

[stoppingby4now]

You must not have watched the video that Gopher made.

 

[video=youtube]

 

He ended up settling on a value of 18.

[Farlo]

[TerrainManager]
fBlockMaximumDistance=500000
fBlockLevel1Distance=140000
fBlockLevel0Distance=75000
fSplitDistanceMult=4.0

[MAIN]
fSkyCellRefFadeDistance=500000.0000

Skyrim.ini

[Display]
fNearDistance=20.0000 (or 25.0000) with attention to clipping issue

I'll go ahead and add those using fNearDistance=18 (go ahead and change it when tested more).

You must not have watched the video that Gopher made.

 

 

[video=youtube]https-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Rtj4bfSVQ

 

 

He ended up settling on a value of 18.

Oh my god he used our website!   I just wish we had our awesome skin then for everyone to see.

[stoppingby4now]

Part 1 of that series he did was thanks to torminater reaching out to Gopher.

[Farlo]

Part 1 of that series he did was thanks to torminater reaching out to Gopher.

Go torminator!  Shouldn't this be in the Guides section of the forum anyways, what's it doing in Support?

[stoppingby4now]

Part 1 of that series he did was thanks to torminater reaching out to Gopher.

Go torminator!  Shouldn't this be in the Guides section of the forum anyways, what's it doing in Support?

The guide was a result of this dicussion. There certainly should be a thread setup to match with the guide on the Wiki, but for the most part, I think this thread still deserves it's current place as a means of continued discussions of potential fixes. And not entirely sure how it would affect search engine results if it were moved.

[torminater]

It doesn't hurt, if it's being kept here. As long as Beth doesn't provide a real fix for some really unnerving issues like z-fighting, SLI-incompatibilities and others my guide will be WIP, and will allways be adapted to the current state of the art intelligence on the matter.

 

For this matter: Currently my z-fighting is still really bad, even if I apply my fix and I am 10000%ly sure it was NOT that bad before, otherwise I wouldn't have published my results here. At this point of time I unfortunately don't have the time to figure it out, though.

[z929669]

You must not have watched the video that Gopher made.

 

 

[video=youtube]https-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0Rtj4bfSVQ

 

 

He ended up settling on a value of 18.

Yep, that was the value I initially settled on for basically reducing clipping to zero; however, I also noticed that the z-fighting showed little to no improvement with this value, thus the compromise at 20.

 

Also, I do think that since torminater's z-fighting fix has been well vetted (no thanks to me for the past couple of months), it should be added to the STEP Guide and included among our "other guides" section on the wiki MP.