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...

[Farlo]

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.

I added them to the guide using a value of 18, go ahead and change it as you see fit.  Not sure if it should be on the main page itself, but it does show up in the Guides category either way. 

[z929669]

Updated the wiki guide and the main page accordingly

[torminater]

Honored, Gentlemen ;-)

You might want to mention that these ini-tweaks are not to be taken thoughtlessly. There are issues like endless loading (I've never had 'em, but I don't play with uber textures and loads of world space editing mods like Open Cities, Warzones and such), which can happen on some systems with specific configs.

On Vanilla Skyrim there are no problems with the fix at all. Also endless loading does not occur all the time, but if, then usually when going from interior to exterior.

[bitdman]

Should it be noted also that these changes made to the INI files will need to be redone if and when anyone does a "verify cache" through steam. I have overlooked these changes myself several times.

Maybe a foot note or somthing,just a reminder.

[Farlo]

Should it be noted also that these changes made to the INI files will need to be redone if and when anyone does a "verify cache" through steam. I have overlooked these changes myself several times.

Maybe a foot note or somthing,just a reminder.

There are a few tweaks that get reset if you edit anything in the Launcher as well (although I have no idea why you'd need to ever use it after the first boot up).  I'll add a note to the guide mentioning this.

[Nirodha]

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way, verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

[TechAngel85]

 

 

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

Quick and easy solution!

[bitdman]

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

Do you need to uncheck the read only box to play the game?

[TechAngel85]

 

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

Do you need to uncheck the read only box to play the game?

 

No, as the game would still be able to "read" the files. Just not change them.

[Farlo]

 

 

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

Do you need to uncheck the read only box to play the game?

 

No, as the game would still be able to "read" the files. Just not change them.

 

Will add this to the guide!  Totally forgot about this.

[z929669]

 

 

 

I usually lock my custom ini's by setting the file as read-only. This way verify cache or launcher won't undo my hard work.

Do you need to uncheck the read only box to play the game?

 

No, as the game would still be able to "read" the files. Just not change them.

 

Will add this to the guide!  Totally forgot about this.

 

Ditto (duh). I went right to my INIs and marked RO right after reading this

[Nirodha]

Woohoo! I contributed something useful!

I should mention that by doing this every time you open the launcher it will try to detect your video hardware and automatically set your quality level. Of course it can't, but it really wants to. Just click OK and continue on. I rarely use the launcher because I use the SKSE loader.

[rpsgc]

Woohoo! I contributed something useful!

I should mention that by doing this every time you open the launcher it will try to detect your video hardware and automatically set your quality level. Of course it can't, but it really wants to. Just click OK and continue on. I rarely use the launcher because I use the SKSE loader.

I have mine to read-only and that doesn't happen. Maybe you set them to read-only before running the launcher for the first time?

[dezikiel]

I installed the lastest NVIDIA Driver from their webpage, and seems my z-fighting has disappeared, now theres just a little distortion some places that are far far away, but its much better than the z-fightning :)

[torminater]

Which driver version exactly?

Could you please provide your system specifications and ini settings?

Thank you.