Pixellation on shadows and orange skin glow

[vram1974]

First off I just want to say that for the most part I have running Oblivion like a dream. I honestly think it looks better than Skyrim sometimes. In many respects this game continues to amazes me and with high resolution textures and lighting it's practically art.

 

I just have 2 niggling concerns (no biggie).

 

1. I get slight pixellation on shadowing, particularly on the skin of my character in moonlight or low light. i think this might have something to do with shadowing or anti-aliasing. Any tips to smooth out the pixels on the shadows? I removed the shadows on grass and it really made it look better.

 

2. Skyrim had this problem as well, until some modder invented a skin sample that removed orange glow in the sun/torches/ and around braziers etc. The skin gets extremely ugly in these conditions.

 

Other than that the game is eye candy. Any graphic optimization tweaks are appreciated.

 

I have an AMD Radeon 8760 if this helps at all.

[TheMastersSon]

First make sure it's not something simple, like having your brightness/gamma/etc cranked too high in your system's video settings. If that doesn't help, make sure you're running 3.0 shaders in Oblivion. Look at the last line of your RenderInfo.txt file (in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion) and if the Shader Package is anything other than 19 (which was the only 3.0 package shipped with the game), you're using 2.0 shaders. Most good tweak sites outline the procedure for copying/renaming package 19 to whatever is shown on this last line (it was 13 on my system, with an NV7950), which fools/forces Oblivion into using the 3.0 shaders.

 

Next, check the shader-related entries in your oblivion.ini file (the one in the above mentioned folder, not the one in Oblivion's program folder). Among other settings that matter are:

 

 

iActorShadowCountExt=

 

iActorShadowCountInt=

 

iActorShadowIntMax= (try 16, major difference on my system with virtually no FPS hit)

iActorShadowExtMax=

bAllowPartialPrecision=0 (this works much better on Nvidia cards than ATI, should be =0 for your Radeon)

iShadowMapResolution= (another one that makes a big difference. use any multiple of 8, try 512, 1024, 1536, 2048 etc, although your FPS hit will be more substantial with this one)

bAllow30Shaders=1

 

 

I'm probably missing other shader-related entries, so also read the online tweak guides.

Edited March 13, 2015 by TheMastersSon

[vram1974]

I have shader package 17. I did as you said and renamed 19 to 17 but ended up getting immediate CTD which is extremely unusual for my setup.

 

All in all I'm ok with the textures as they look. Here's a few examples:

 

Using 17 shader package with Anti-aliasing and Bloom:

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/ehX8enV.jpg

 

 

The orange glow issue:

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/ONCylIe.jpg

 

 

Using shader 19 package before the CTD standing in the same orange glow:

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/56ax9Ur.jpg

 

 

Original settings reinstalled:

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/kcsbU7b.jpg

 

[vram1974]

Uhoh I'm getting constant CTD on load games now, even after restoring all my backups. I don't understand what changed but the game crashes constantly all of a sudden.

 

EDIT - If I manually save and load it's fine. Just the quicksave and autosave get corrupted now for some reason. Ah well.

[TheMastersSon]

It sounds like you didn't copy the shader file correctly. You have to first rename the original/standard package (in your case 17, and be sure to rename the extension as well, e.g. sd! instead of sdp), then copy package 19 to 17, and finally rename the new file to 17's original name. If you've done all these steps and are still getting CTDs I'm not sure what might cause it... your video card might have problems with 3.0 shaders, and/or your related settings are incorrect in oblivion.ini. Restoring the shader packages back to their original names should certainly fix the CTDs, if that's the problem.

[vram1974]

Thanks the shaders are working great now. The CTDs are out of control now though, but I'm beginning to think it's due to Pluggy. They began appearing when loading save games after dying. Since removing Pluggy I've had no CTDs but I'm not holding my breath...

[TheMastersSon]

One other suggestion, if you're using HDR lighting instead of bloom. The glare and orange glow can be toned down by modifying these two sections in oblivion.ini (make a backup first):

 

BlurShaderHDR

 

BlurShaderHDRInterior

 

 

I found the values suggested by the excellent tweak guide at http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Oblivion_help_topics_and_tweaking to be perfect:

 

 

[blurShaderHDRInterior] Reduce blinding effect on objects and NPC's

fBrightScale = 2.2500 (Default)Change to:fBrightScale = 0.2500&fBrightRadius = 7.0000 (Default)Change to:fBrightScale = 3.5000

[blurShaderHDR] Reduce blinding effect on objects and NPC's

fBrightScale = 1.5000 (Default)Change to:fBrightScale = 0.5000&fBrightRadius = 4.0000 (Default)Change to:fBrightScale = 3.0000