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...

[Bealdwine]

@torminater

I've started a thread in the ini tweaks section and intend adding your findings and solutions into the first post in that thread - if you would like to write a clear summary of your work and PM it to me I'll edit and include it in there :) If not you'll have to trust that I can understand what you have done and achieved, you get the credit either way, lol.

Do you mind if I use your vid link as well as it is both a good visual explanation of what z-fighting IS and a proof of the value of your work?

[torminater]

Well, atm I'm busy with work for university. So if you guys can wait another 3-4 days I'll have everything written together!

[Bealdwine]

Well, atm I'm busy with work for university. So if you guys can wait another 3-4 days I'll have everything written together!

 

RL comes first torm :) Best of luck with the Uni stuff and we'll see you when you're done (TheCompiler had the same problem and this was one of the delays to the latest version, so you're in good company).

[torminater]

Well, holy s*** that's a FPS-drop xD

20 FPS? hmm. well. I dropped by at least 25 FPS in extreme game situations by applying ugrids 9 and my own little tweaks if I'm in wide open spaces. So another 20 FPS would set me down to 25-30 FPS. And that's with a clean vanilla-install at Ultra-Settings. No. F-ing. Way. I'll have to check out variations of that set-up. And I need STEP 2.1 to actually look into the performance part.

It would be weird if STEP suggests tweaks that make a normal STEP-config unplayable, now wouldn't it? ;-)

[stoppingby4now]

I haven't tried it, but I would suspect that using Dynavision for DOF along with RL wouldn't give near as much a performance hit. You can also adjust the amount of DOF that gets applied with Dynavision. Would be curious to hear if anyone has tried that particular setup.

[torminater]

Well atm I only got my little laptop to work with. Since I did all the testing so far on my other computer that testing will have to wait until at least tuesday. I'll look at the whiterun walls flicker issue closer once I got some more time. ugrids is rather drastical. There might be a performance version of that somewhere out in the ini-universes.

If I find anything like that, I'll info you guys as soon as I get stable results.

[z929669]

DOF is certainly not for everyone due to the performance hit (like some forms of SSAO), but I like a subtle DOF effect.

 

Note also that Xfire/SLI significantly mitigate all FPS hits, so folks with those kinds of setups are best suited to applying such enhancements. I would guess that all FPS hits will be cut in nearly half with 2x Xfire/SLI.

[torminater]

So I finished the draft of my z-fighting guide and sent it to Bealdwine for further inspection. If somebody else wants to see it, too, just send me a message!

[stoppingby4now]

As added information concerning DOF, I tried Dynavision (without any lighting mods), and adjusted for slightly weaker DOF effect. The good news is that I did not experience any FPS loss whatsoever. But for me, it didn't hide the z-fighting in the distant mountains. Forgot to check wall-ends, so will probably do that soon.

[torminater]

Hmm... what about if you increase the DOF or use this mod?

atm i'm not able to check it myself (working in a lab) but I'll try it out just for the heck of it.

[stoppingby4now]

I'll try increasing the DOF tonight and see what happens. I hadn't come across that mod with only Bokeh DOF, but will give that a try as well. Was hoping the lighter application would help as I'm with zMan, I don't like it too strong.

[torminater]

OK, so yesterday I had a very brief look at my laptop considering z-fighting. It is quite strong there, too, but my problem over there is, that I can't run Skyrim on Ultra smoothly. I have between 19 and 27 FPS. That doesn't really give me the option to expand the distant LOD by a whole lot. I'll try some other things, but first of all I need to get above 40 FPS... without skyboost probably in vain...

What also disturbs me by a whole lot, is that all the draw distance settings I found could not help about this one problem. Go to Azura's shrine and look north. If you move fast from the left to the right you see the water near the horizon separating into blocks that have different colors. Neither WATER High/Med Res nor standard HD-Pack solved the issue. Maybe it's just my laptop. I'll have to do some more testing (maybe the HD-DLC has to be fixed even more?) and try to recreate the same phenomen on my other computer. Update is probably gonna be in 12 hours or sth like that!

[Bealdwine]

So I finished the draft of my z-fighting guide and sent it to Bealdwine for further inspection. If somebody else wants to see it, too, just send me a message!

 

Checked it through. It's a really nice piece of work torm :) so in the end I decided to just use it 'as is' LINK

 

@s4n - If you want to check it out as well you may have some suggestions for changes or additions.

 

@zMan - I've not had a great deal to do with the wiki as such, but torm's work may well deserve a place there? I can send you the original post for you to place it if you agree.

[frihyland]

Feel free to do it yourself Bealdwine, the wiki editing guide is linked in the citizenship guide and do a search for highslide in the wiki to see some examples of how to use graphics.

[Bealdwine]

Done... as best I could :P https://wiki.step-project.com/Z-Fighting:_the_flickering_of_LOD_textures_due_to_overlapping_planes#How_to_Reduce_Z-fighting_in_Skyrim_Significantly

A couple of very small edits torm, hope you like the result. Linked, but couldn't embed, your proof of concept video - not much point trying to show a still shot ;)