Graphical weirdness

[TheCalliton]

Hey all, steam finally decided to grace me with usage of skyrim (got it to work for the first time today) and the damn graphics arent visable through the kaleidoscope of earthy and bright colours flashing across the screen, with a few glimpses of people. audio works, movement works, everything works except for the visuals. couldnt even see the races on the race select menu. :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash: :wallbash:

i am rather pissed about all this because i was first lied to about the game needed steam, then it took 5 hours to update a game that hadnt even been out for one day, I had to delay said updating until now because of my parents and their nazi network policy, and now the damn thing wont even work! RAH!

 

help me?

[Solastor]

I have the same problem and have not been able to find any fixes for it yet. Sorry mate.

[Susurruss]

I had bad visual glitches when I first got Skyrim to the point where I couldn't play the game. I have an NVIDIA, so I went to the control panel--> NVIDIA, made a profile for TESV.exe and changed a bunch of settings. After a bit of experimentation (I had no idea what I was doing but the 'Default' button sure looked pretty!), I got the bad visuals to go away. Until my baby processor overheats!

[TheCalliton]

I had bad visual glitches when I first got Skyrim to the point where I couldn't play the game. I have an NVIDIA, so I went to the control panel--> NVIDIA, made a profile for TESV.exe and changed a bunch of settings. After a bit of experimentation (I had no idea what I was doing but the 'Default' button sure looked pretty!), I got the bad visuals to go away. Until my baby processor overheats!

any chance you can outline that more?

[Solastor]

Bumping for greater Justice

[Susurruss]

Sorry, last time I tried to post I suddenly couldn't access the forums. I have an nVidia GeForce GT520M (I think it's the weakest GeForce made!). If you have a GeForce, I recommend you go to GeForce's Skyrim Tweaks. Make sure you download nVidia Inspector and the beta drivers (links are on that page). Just a note: my 520M is not supported by the new beta drivers. I got a new driver for my card though. I also did a trick I saw in another post, where I disabled and then enabled my graphics card. Don't know if that made any difference. Not being able to use the beta drivers means I can't make use of Ambient Occlusion. You might be able to.

 

My nVidia settings for TESV.exe are:

 

 

Ambient Occlusion - not supported

Anisotropic filtering - application controlled

Antialiasing - Gamma Correction - Off

Antialiasing - mode - Enhance

Antialiasing - setting 2x

Antialiasing - transparency - multisample

CUDA - GPUs - All

Max pre-rendered frames - 7

multi-display etc - single display

Power management mode - prefer max performance

Texture filtering - anisotropic sample - On

Texture filtering - negative LOD bias - Clamp

Texture filtering - quality - Quality setting

Texture filtering - trilinear optimization - On

Threaded optimization - On

Triple buffering - On

Vertical sync - Force on

 

 

I hope this helps. I didn't use nVidia Inspector like they say on the website above because I didn't have the option to select for Skyrim. I'm guessing that's because my card was not supported by the new drivers.

 

BTW, from the Main Skyrim menu, I selected high quality then hit the advanced button and selected for medium textures. I set the Ansiotropic filtering to 2. That saved me a few FPS, and I don't notice unless I go inspecting something minutely. (Ever since the patch, whenever I start up Skyrim, it detects and resets my video settings. Dunno what's going on!)

 

I also set all my view distances to max, except for lights and specularity, which are both set at zero.

 

I am sure I could tweak it a little more, but considering I went from 4-15 FPS to consistent mid-twenties outdoors/cities and 30-60(!) underground, i am VERY happy with these settings and I don't want to fool with anything!! I just spent a marathon 22 hours straight playing Skyrim with NO crashes and only the occasional graphical error (I get tiny glowing parts on some textures). If it wasn't for the rippling heat flame effect, I would probably have a higher average (in dungeons where I can take the torches, my FPS averages 40+, even in combat!)