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...

[Hackfield]

Well I don't know if this belongs to here, but, I'm experiencing some weird texture fighting/flickering/distortion in some terrain textures, in one specifically. I did try some landscapes mods, but I've uninstalled all of them, the only ones that remains are the ones it didn't gave me problems before (terrain bump, ruffled feather, no stretching, realistic water two and dyndolod) but the problem persist. And I've noticed this doesn't happen when I turn off the ENB, so my suspect is either some ENB configuration or maybe a bad parallax mesh/texture that remains in my data folder, but I've checked and I couldn't find anything. It is always this same texture, but I don't have this texture in my data folder, the only landscapes textures are the normal maps of terrain bump.

 

Here are some examples:

 

Normal vanilla texture

https://i61.tinypic.com/ir1ibp.jpg

 

Distortion

https://oi58.tinypic.com/xdi6pj.jpg

https://oi60.tinypic.com/2zz3qtc.jpg

https://oi59.tinypic.com/2mjwcy.jpg

 

 

Did anyone got this problem? Or anyone know what can be the cause of it?

 

Thank you in advance

Edited October 27, 2015 by Hackfield

[Matt714]

I've read at some places that Windows 7 could be the culprit, with XP/Vista users not experiencing z-fighting at all.

[torminater]

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.

Hey ToggleAI, as far as I can remember I had close to no z-fighting in the early patch versions of the game. Some stabilizing/performance tweak Bethesda included in their patches might have come with a reduction of z-buffer capacity for certain systems that actually caused z-fighting to become worse. Or it could be engine-defined.

Of course, the nicer your game looks, the more negative impact z-fighting will have on the picture.

I settled with 4.0 for the original fix, because it was stable, had the best benefit per cost ratio and didn't seem too far from vanilla game settings.

Using a lot higher settings didn't make z-fighting better for me, it was the happy medium that made it a tiny bit nicer.

 

 

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) 

 

1) https://vid.me/7PUn

2) https://vid.me/tNGi

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

Hey Matt714, that what you see there might actually be z-fighting or mesh clipping. A mesh fix is usually needed to

remove that form of z-fighting. Have a look whether some overhauls include mesh fixes. Usually the unofficial patches or similar projects include them. If you know how to use nifscope etc. you might be able to do the tweak on your own. Just increase the z-buffer-discrepancy between the clipping planes and you should be fine.

fNearDistance tweaks always come at a cost of clipping. For this specific issue (if it's just those two examples and not everywhere in the game), mesh fixes are the preferrable solution.

 

 

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.

 

Hey Exalerion,

that is very interesting. You use a very high SplitDistanceMult-value. You probably have a powerful machine, that you don't notice a performance drop on your modded game using it. Are you sure, that there is no z-fighting for you if you use vanilla Skyrim ultra generated settings?

 

Well I don't know if this belongs to here, but, I'm experiencing some weird texture fighting/flickering/distortion in some terrain textures, in one specifically. I did try some landscapes mods, but I've uninstalled all of them, the only ones that remains are the ones it didn't gave me problems before (terrain bump, ruffled feather, no stretching, realistic water two and dyndolod) but the problem persist. And I've noticed this doesn't happen when I turn off the ENB, so my suspect is either some ENB configuration or maybe a bad parallax mesh/texture that remains in my data folder, but I've checked and I couldn't find anything. It is always this same texture, but I don't have this texture in my data folder, the only landscapes textures are the normal maps of terrain bump.

 

Here are some examples:

 

Normal vanilla texture

https://i61.tinypic.com/ir1ibp.jpg

 

Distortion

https://oi58.tinypic.com/xdi6pj.jpg

https://oi60.tinypic.com/2zz3qtc.jpg

https://oi59.tinypic.com/2mjwcy.jpg

 

 

Did anyone got this problem? Or anyone know what can be the cause of it?

 

Thank you in advance

Hey Hackfield,

this looks like you either are using a parallax normal without parallax or it is some clipping of planes due to bad meshes. For the latter check my response to Matt714 at the beginning of my post.

 

I've read at some places that Windows 7 could be the culprit, with XP/Vista users not experiencing z-fighting at all.

Hey Matt714,

interesting, have you checked on it, whether that is actually the case? I don't own neither XP nor Vista, so I can't check for myself.

[Mebantiza]

I came up with this

 

 

[TerrainManager]

fTreeLoadDistance = 75000

fBlockMaximumDistance = 95000.0000 **

fBlockLevel1Distance = 140000.0000

fBlockLevel0Distance = 75000.0000

fSplitDistanceMult = 5.0

bShowLODInEditor = 0

 

** Fblockmaxdistance seems to solely govern the z-fighting problem. At lower values, z-flghts went away, but LOD and detail suffered greatly in the 50-75k range.

@75k- No z-fighting but poor LOD detail

@100K slight z-fighting occurs, but tolerable. Good LOD detail. Some distant mountaintops low-res. Most high rez.

@110K z-fighting begins to return in a noticeable way w/o really effecting LOD detail in any real way.

 

 

Then I added Ex's

[Display]

fNearDistance=25.0000

 

 

I pushed the distance out to 120k-flickering still present.

 

Fneardistance=20 Did not seem to have any noticeable effect suppressing z-fighting@ 100k Fblockmaxdistance. Nor did fneardistance=25 seem to have much effect either way.

 

 

The final 'fix, was Fblockmaxdistance=95000. This seems to be to be sweet spot. From skyborn altar(clear sunny day), I can see all the way to solitude with decent detail and the z-fighting largely disappears. At 100k, flickering begins to return in a noticeable way.   Distant mountain ranges will be low res@95000.000, but flickering(for me anyhow) dropped off dramatically at 95

I could possibly push it out in 1k increments to tune it even further.

 

 

Hope this is of some help to someone.

Edited February 5, 2016 by Mebantiza

[TechAngel85]

I bet DoubleYou would be interested in this information.

[DoubleYou]

I'll look into it.

[DoubleYou]

I tend to agree that 95000 is a good value for fBlockMaximumDistance after some testing. DynDoLOD makes it dead easy to test these settings. What this does is make it so that the distant mountain most prone to the flickering will not get that extra layer of detail that makes the z-fighting readily apparent. While a little bit of Z-fighting still appears if you look for it, it is largely gone.

 

Lowering it from 95000 doesn't really improve upon it, and increasing it allows more Z-fighting to come into view. Adjusting fSplitDistanceMult noticeably affects the Z-fighting, but there doesn't seem to be any sweet value for it, except that you shouldn't put it too high, or you will get some nasty stutter. Same can be said of all these settings. You can set all of them to 95000, but that seems to be prone to stutter.

 

These settings seem to be working ok for me:

 

 

 

[TerrainManager]
fBlockLevel0Distance=45000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=70000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=95000.0000
fSplitDistanceMult=1.5

 

 

I5-4690K @4.3GHZ

AMD R9 380X 4GB

16GB RAM

Samsung 850 EVO (500 GB)

[Mebantiza]

Further Testing Found these values to be viable as well.

 

fTreeLoadDistance = 75000

fBlockMaximumDistance = 97000.0000

fBlockLevel1Distance = 100000.0000

fBlockLevel0Distance = 75000.0000

fSplitDistanceMult = 2.5

 

Phinix ENB

ATI 7880 2GB

8GB DDR3-2400

Dyndolod-Medium

Edited February 9, 2016 by Mebantiza

[Aegison]

I tend to agree that 95000 is a good value for fBlockMaximumDistance after some testing. DynDoLOD makes it dead easy to test these settings. What this does is make it so that the distant mountain most prone to the flickering will not get that extra layer of detail that makes the z-fighting readily apparent. While a little bit of Z-fighting still appears if you look for it, it is largely gone.

 

Lowering it from 95000 doesn't really improve upon it, and increasing it allows more Z-fighting to come into view. Adjusting fSplitDistanceMult noticeably affects the Z-fighting, but there doesn't seem to be any sweet value for it, except that you shouldn't put it too high, or you will get some nasty stutter. Same can be said of all these settings. You can set all of them to 95000, but that seems to be prone to stutter.

 

These settings seem to be working ok for me:

 

 

 

[TerrainManager]
fBlockLevel0Distance=45000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=70000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=95000.0000
fSplitDistanceMult=1.5

 

 

I5-4690K @4.3GHZ

AMD R9 380X 4GB

16GB RAM

Samsung 850 EVO (500 GB)

 

I tried these settings and it helped my z-fighting a bit but then I started getting infinite load screens in cities.  I was unable to load into Riften but as soon as I reverted to Skyrim Project INI High settings I could load no problem.

[DoubleYou]

Do you not have the Sheson memory patch enabled? I've been using it for quite a while now without issue.

[Aegison]

Do you not have the Sheson memory patch enabled? I've been using it for quite a while now without issue.

I do. With the latest binaries. I never tried his new threads settings because if I only change the view distance settings I can load no problem.

[DoubleYou]

Sorry, but you sound like you're talking about ENBoost, which is not what I was referring to. I was talking about the CTD and ILS fix as described here: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/6726-common-ctds-freezes-ils-and-memory-issues/

[Aegison]

Sorry, but you sound like you're talking about ENBoost, which is not what I was referring to. I was talking about the CTD and ILS fix as described here: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/6726-common-ctds-freezes-ils-and-memory-issues/

My bad!  I mixed up the two.  I do have my skse set up as suggested in that post and have used memory log to test it.

[DoubleYou]

Do you get any ILS now with the settings? You can simply make fBlockMaximumDistance=95000 and leave the other settings the same and it would probably work.

[Aegison]

OK. Got it working with your initial settings and normal load times. It turns out I had some of the threaded options enabled in the new 305 enb. Those, together with your ini settings, caused my ILS. Thanks for your help!