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]

So here's my video-footage

 

[video=youtube]

[Bealdwine]

@torm

Went back to ugrids 5 with your suggested tweaks and yes, this does appear to have almost as good an effect - no z-fighting where I was testing (outside Whiterun stables & at the top of the stairs inside). Well done and thanks for your hard work :D I'll use these settings on my next install and do more extensive testing then.

[z929669]

Can we get the perceived solutions copied over to an appropriate thread on the INI Tweaks forum ? If this is NVIDIA-specific, that should probably also be noted.

 

Thanks!

[Bealdwine]

Can we get the perceived solutions copied over to an appropriate thread on the INI Tweaks forum ? If this is NVIDIA-specific that should probably also be noted.Thanks!

Will do boss ;) I have some material about tweaking ini settings for shadows I may place in there as well.

 

Torminater uses nVidia cards and so do I - could I ask if anyone with ATI card(s) could run a quick check on these ini settings please. I'm assuming the z-fighting issue is experienced with Radeon cards/drivers as well?

[z929669]

I assumed so too, but was uncertain. I have ATI, so I can check.

... will this work on a totally vanilla game? I am keeping a clean install as I finish my current round of benchmarking ;)

---

PS: I take great pride in being the boss of nobody :P

[Bealdwine]

Lol, I thought pride was a sin? ;)

Obviously it will only work, if at all, if you already notice z-fighting on the distant/mid-distance mountains in vanilla... I honestly can't remember as it's so long since I had a vanilla setup :P

[z929669]

Sin? what the hell is that?

 

OK, I will look to confirm z-fighting in my next load up. I am fairly certain that I have seen it in the past, but try hard to push such displeasing thoughts and events from memory.

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EDIT: z-fighting confirmed on my system (ATI 6950 2Xfire CCC 12.3)

[stoppingby4now]

So here's my video-footage

 

Ok, so your video is showing exactly what I'm seeing as well. Still some z-fighting on the distant mountains, but significantly better than before.

[stoppingby4now]

I assumed so too, but was uncertain. I have ATI, so I can check.

... will this work on a totally vanilla game? I am keeping a clean install as I finish my current round of benchmarking ;)

---

PS: I take great pride in being the boss of nobody :P

 

z-fighting is not specific to video cards. The odd thing is that some folks do not see it, but the number of people that do experience it far outweighs those that don't.

 

The link that torm listed has great information concerning the technicalities of why it occurs.

[z929669]

The link that torm listed has great information concerning the technicalities of why it occurs.

 

Sounds like good info for the hardware and/or/ troubleshooting guides ...

[frihyland]

I don't have a computer good enough to run it but I would guess that dof post processing would virtually eliminate z fighting based on the wiki article information.

[stoppingby4now]

I don't have a computer good enough to run it but I would guess that dof post processing would virtually eliminate z fighting based on the wiki article information.

 

Very good point. I haven't tried any of the dynamic dof mods yet, but want to. May test that tomorrow.

[z929669]

DOF is one of my very favorite effects. Very realistic, but for the fact that in reality, you only experience the blur in your periphery ... Makes it look more cinematic though.

[torminater]

DOF? Sth like Dynavision? I'll try that out, too!

[Bealdwine]

I'm not a great fan of DoF as most often the effect is made too strong to be 'naturalistic', but that's just personal taste - more to the point is the performance hit.

 

An example can be seen in Enb preset - Vanilla Look For Independent Bokeh DOF Only by MarMScA which attempts to allow the use of a Bokeh type DoF without the other ENB effects. If you check the screenshots and note the FPS counter the hit is quite significant.