Low-Res Textures Forced - Vanilla & Custom Textures.

[Layia28]

Hi everyone,

Recently I've run in the oddest problem & no matter what I do, I can't seem to find a fix. For some reason, all the textures in my game are the lowest possible resolution and it's being forced by something. I didn't choose them to be low-resolution. I've always had them medium-high quality and haven't had a single problem regarding textures since I bought Skyrim close to 2 years ago.

 

Now, the textures look utterly horrible - they have never looked this bad. My texture quality is set to high in Skyrim's Launcher options. I haven't touched or changed a thing through Nvidia inspector. The proper ini tweaks to ensure that the higher resolution textures are used rather than the low-resolutions ones are in place. This problem isn't limited to the vanilla textures, it's effecting all the custom textures from various texture mods as well.

 

I did, recently, edit a couple of lines in the Skyrim.ini's in hopes of improving performance even though my game does run smoothly. I figured a couple extra fps couldn't hurt. Regardless, I edited too many ini lines at once so that particular save would crash immediately after loading. Now, in that save, for the brief minute before it crashed, the textures were normal. However, since this was a test playthrough I had no problem starting a new game so that I could play with the new ini tweaks. This is when the problems began. In the new game the textures looked horrible, despite them looking good on the previous test playthrough with the exact same ini tweaks.

 

I started trying various things to get them looking normal again. The few ini tweaks regarding textures that I changed I reverted back to what they'd previously been. No improvements. I reinstalled a couple of individual texture mods to see if the information had been corrupted. They still looked horrible. I thought that I may have optimized them too much. It was a long shot as I hadn't optimized them since before the textures looked good, but I installed the textures from the backup folder - non-optimized. No improvement. Finally, I did a complete uninstall and clean install of the game, thinking something may have been corrupted. I started a new game, played through the Helgen opening with no mods installed at all. Created a hard save after 24 hrs in game and installed a single texture mod that alters the ground floor so it was easy for me to see if it looked like it should. No such luck. It still looks like crap.

 

I can't find any solutions or help searching on goggle as the only threads that show up from people who have had this issue have AMD cards and their fixes are specifically suited for AMD cards and I have a Nvidia card.

 

I apologize for the wall of text, but I wanted to give as much detail as possible in hopes of someone knowing the solution. Any help or suggestions that you could offer, I would greatly appreciate.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Here are my specs:

 

Asus

Nvidia Geforce GTX 660m

2gb vram

8gb ram

Core i7

Windows 7

 

Update: Something I should add. I recently did a clean install of Windows 7 which caused my drivers to revert to the ones that were initially installed with the laptop when I'd bought it and I'd forgotten to update my Nvidia drivers after that doing that clean install. After checking tonight, I realized that my driver version was 269.01 [around there] which is quite old. Just in case it was somehow corrupted and could be the cause of this low textures issues, not to mention since I was getting smooth performance with the older driver, I imagine I'll get even smoother performance with the update, I updated it to 314.22. Even with the new, stable, driver installed the texture issue remains.

 

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about Skyrim's vanilla textures, saying that they don't look good or aren't high enough quality. I'm saying that the textures in my Skyrim have always been a rather high quality, even the vanilla ones, before I ever installed any textures or mods. My game has always looked beautiful. Now, for some reason, every single texture in the game changed - the ones that were 2048 and 1024 now look like they are 512 or even less. The custom ones, the vanilla ones all look terrible. The custom ones are clearly overwriting the vanilla ones as they should, but their high quality is being repressed by something.

 

I've tried and exhausted every method I can think of to make them look how they should again. Everything that I had changed the days before it changed, I changed back, even things that are in no way related to textures. I have done a clean install of Skyrim to get rid of anything that may have gotten corrupted during my test run. I have updated my drivers to a driver that is known to be stable and have improved performance for Skyrim. I have reverted the settings in Nvidia control to their default, even though the few settings that I changed in there, were not related to textures in any way. The options in the Skyrim Launcher are what they should be, with the texture quality set to high. The ini tweaks in Skyrim ini and Skyrim Prefs that are related to textures and are supposed to tell the game to choose and use the higher texture option if it exists, are in place. I have even reverted things back to their default that I haven't touched for months, long before this issue occurred, in a desperate attempt to fix this. Nothing has worked. I'm at my wits end. I'm aware that Skyrim isn't solely about pretty graphics, but the way the game looks is unbearable, especially considering how stunning it has looked in the past.

 

I apologize for the repetition about the various things I have tried, but I just want to, again, provide as much detail as possible, and be sure that I'm being perfectly clear about exactly what my issue is. I have family and friends coming over for the holidays who appreciate games like Skyrim and are looking forward to seeing it on the tv in the family room, but with the way it looks now, that won't be happening - that is the reason why I'd appreciate a solution as soon as possible so my family and I can enjoy it together when they arrive.

 

So please, if anyone has any ideas or solutions or suggestions or anything I'd be extremely grateful. I'll even bake you holiday cookies, chocolate chip or sugar cookies, your choice. Just please help me out.

Edited December 17, 2013 by Layia28

[jacksus]

I am sorry for your game and, unfortunately for me, I have the same problems. They occurred a week or two ago. And I've done all the same stuff as you did.

Actually I am writing this to thank you for your long message. Because you really did save me a lot of time, throughly describing your problem (it is a hard task for my bad english).

You mentioned something about AMD cards and I have one. Can you appoint me some links or something that may help?


Thanks again, hope our solutions are closer than we think)