Jump to content
  • 0

Black Circles, z-fighting and texture shimmering

torminater

Asked by torminater,

 Share

Question

torminater Emperor

torminater

Posted
Posted

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. :wallbash:
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...

  • Answers 351
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters For This Question

Popular Days

Top Posters For This Question

Popular Days

Popular Posts

ToggleAI
ToggleAI

torminator, have you given up on this?   I've been going crazy doing some testing with ini values all week with not much luck. I can reduce the z-fighting some, but not a whole lot.   Anyways, with th

Mebantiza
Mebantiza

I came up with this     [TerrainManager]fTreeLoadDistance = 75000 fBlockMaximumDistance = 95000.0000 **fBlockLevel1Distance = 140000.0000fBlockLevel0Distance = 75000.0000fSplitDistanceMult = 5.0bShowL

351 answers to this question

Recommended Posts

  • 0
sevencardz Watcher

sevencardz

Posted
Posted

:Shakes the thread to wake it up:

Hey guys,

First off, thanks to everyone who has worked on this and for leading me to the fBlockMaximumDistance solution.  Here's what I settled on in SkyrimPrefs.ini:

[TerrainManager]
fBlockMaximumDistance=70000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=70000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance=35000.0000
fTreeLoadDistance=70000.0000

It does give my distant mountains poorer quality, but it also eliminates 90% or more of the Z-Fighting.  Most everything else is set to Ultra and I get no clipping, no performance loss, and no graphical issues.  There are still certain small areas in the distance that suffer from Z-Fighting, but they are now small enough and rare enough that I don't notice them unless I'm really looking for them.  fSplitDistanceMult and fNearDistance were not changed.  My specs:

Windows 7 PRO 64-bit
AMD FX-8350
Gigabyte GTX 660 2GB (soon to be replaced with a 970 once everyone stops buying them all up...)
NVidia Driver 344.11 and all previous versions for the past year or so
Ambient Occlusion = OFF
Anisotropic Filtering = 16x
Supersample Transparency Antialiasing (SSTRAA) = 2x(supersample)
Texture Filtering = High Quality
Vertical Synchronization = ON

And more from SkyrimPrefs.ini:

[Display]
bFXAAEnabled=0
iMultiSample=4
iMaxAnisotropy=0

I use MSAA 4X to balance quality and performance just as STEP recommends.  I have Ambient Occlusion turned off because it creates little blotchy shadows and shadow flickering in odd places.  SSTRAA 2X to significantly reduce the texture shimmering on plants/grass/pointy things (4x started eating my FPS).  Anisotropic Filtering is shut off in SkyrimPrefs.ini so it can all be done directly through the GPU at 16x because it makes water look awesome (especially using the Pure Waters mod).

 

And last but not least, we now have Fences of Skyrim to fix the nasty aliasing on fences - halleluja.  Now I can worry less about Skyrim giving me an epileptic seizure.

  • 0
torminater Emperor

torminater

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Hey sevencardz glad you found your preferred settings . This thread is never dead or necro, so don't think that it's odd to post here after a while. As you also found out its still not possible to get rid of all the z-fighting without losing too much quality. There might still be hope, when new tools that create better matching lods appear on the net. There are such developments although we don't know how much it will improve upon the flickering issues.

Thanks for your input!

  • 0
Tricky Watcher

Tricky

Posted
Posted (edited)

Hi, I was looking for a little help on the subject of fighting the z. I've applied Step 1 of the wiki page with the suggested fix, but not beyond the 'warning, only for very good rigs' point. My game now hangs on loading or creating a new game. I have Skyrim installed on an SSD 've waited for five minutes. I could tell from ENB 'white noise' effects on the loading screen that the game didn't crash, it just got stuck loading something indefinitely.

 

My specs are:

 

Intel Core i7-4820K, 3.7 Ghz

8 GB of CL9 RAM

200 GB Samsung SSD
Gainward Geforce 770, 2 GB VRAM, driver version 347.25

Asus GSync screen with variable refresh rate.

 

 

My overal modlist is large, but not stupendous. I use some mods that increase LOD distand lands and LOD distant object detail and additional LOD distant objects. Is there anything that can be done?

Edited by Tricky
  • 0
torminater Emperor

torminater

Posted
  • Author
Posted

You should use the skyrim memory fix in SKSE with 512 MB. There is a rather extensive thread on these boards about this. Sheson is the author of the fix.

Also there are distant mountain fog textures with some enbs like vividian that help cover the z-fighting very well. The higher ugridstoload should only be used with Stable uGridsToLoad (search nexus for that). It will allow you to test higher ugrids without butchering your saves.

Using higher ugrids is not reserved anymore for top end rigs nowadays. The game is three years old, the fix is old as well. However I feel the majority of modders like to keep their ugrids standard because of save game corruption and stability issues which arise when using a lot of mods that all need to work a lot harder if more game space is forced to load.

  • 0
Dark_wizzie Citizen

Dark_wizzie

Posted
Posted

I don't have Z-Fighting and it's never really been an issue for me as long as I've had my computer with either graphics card.

 

1: OS
2: Exact Video card model
3: Driver version
4: Video card control panel settings
5: In-game settings
6: ini tweaks
7: mods
8: dxdiag
 
1: Windows 7 64bit
2: Old card: 7970ghz from Sapphire 3gb Vapor X. New card: GTX980 4gb MSI.
3: Old card: Whatever the newest driver was... The Omega drivers I was using at the time. On new card, 347.52 (basically the newest version).
4: I really don't think any tweak I made fixed it, I just sorta never had it to begin with. Current settings are from Inspector and are as follows:
Ambient Occlusion compatibility - Skyrim, Enabled, High Quality
AA - Treat Enhance as Override, Enhance, x4 MSAA, x2 SSAA for transparency
[skyrim Launcher AA set to x2]
AS - User-defined, x16. All optimizations off. Clamp negative lod bias, High Quality.
 
5: Everything maxed.
6: AA off in ini. Trees receive shadows.
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=10[/size]
fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000[/size]
fShadowDistance=3000.0000[/size]
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=2048[/size]
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048[/size]
iShadowSplitCount=3[/size]
fShadowLODStartFade=200.0000[/size]
iShadowMode=3[/size]
bTreesReceiveShadows=1[/size]
bDrawLandShadows=0[/size]
bShadowMaskZPrepass=1[/size]
iShadowMapResolution=2048[/size]
fShadowBiasScale=0.3500[/size]
iShadowMaskQuarter=4[/size]
iShadowFilter=4[/size]

 

Link to ini file: https://www.filedropper.com/skyrim_1

 

7:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

8:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

  • 0
LiamY Watcher

LiamY

Posted
Posted

Hey Guys!

 

Im really struggling with this issue.

 

I have tried a variety of fixes and tweaks but none seem to make any difference.

 

I would be really appreciative if someone could help me out here, its ruining the game for me.

 

My specs are as follows:

 

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970

8GB Ram

Intel Core I5-4690 @ 3.5 GHz

Windows 8.1

  • 0
torminater Emperor

torminater

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Yup, the only other thing you can try is altering the tweaks upwards and downwards to see, whether the z-fighting can be improved any more on your system. Mind the fNearDistance tweak though, as it will likely cause worse clipping if your FOV is set higher as normal. See Gopher's videos TechAngel linked to for details.

  • 0
ToggleAI Watcher

ToggleAI

Posted
Posted (edited)

torminator, have you given up on this?

 

I've been going crazy doing some testing with ini values all week with not much luck. I can reduce the z-fighting some, but not a whole lot.

 

Anyways, with the original fix, why did you settle on 4.0 for the fSplitMultDistance tweak? If you happen to remember, I'm curious. I've taken it up much higher than that (12.0) in testing and never noticed a performance issue or any real difference, but that was testing the value alone without tweaking any other settings.

 

I had z-fighting before, but recently it's become a monster. The fight still continues.

 

Edit: disregard

Just tested fSplitMultDistance=12.0 with fNearDistance=18.0... fps starts dropping even on a purely vanilla game.

Edited by ToggleAI
  • +1 1
  • 0
Matt714 Citizen

Matt714

Posted
Posted (edited)

I'm having a similar issue, but in Fallout 3. Is it also z-fighting? It didn't happen on my 660GTX (I now have a GTX 980 - SLI disabled because FO3 doesn't play nice with it) 

 

 

Managed to make it disappear totally with "fNearDistance=15"

 

However that makes the first person weapon clip, no matter what fov chosen.  pinch.gif

 

"fNearDistance=12" does make it disappear to some extent, but not completely.  

 

 

Edited by Matt714
  • 0
Exalerion Watcher

Exalerion

Posted
Posted (edited)

Skyrim.ini

[Display]

fNearDistance=25.0000

 

SkyrimPrefs.ini
[TerrainManager]
fTreeLoadDistance=150000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=1000000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=280000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance=140000.0000
fSplitDistanceMult=10.0000
 
For me these settings solve the Z-Fighting issue pretty much, it's still not noiseless but none of Skyrim's distant terrain will ever be noiseless..
fNearDistance does most of the work though. When I lower it the Z-Fighting gets more noticeable again. I just cranked the TerrainManager settings up even more for better looking mountains.
But also the number and size of your texturemods causes more Z-Fighting. When playing Vanilla Skyrim, I don't see any Z-Fighting.
Edited by Exalerion

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to question listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Guidelines, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Use.

  I accept