All Textures Downgraded - No Idea Why, Can't Fix

[thedodus]

Problem is pretty much exactly that. I had to do a load of research to even realize that it was a texture problem - all I knew was that all of a sudden everything in Skyrim looked like absolute garbage and I had no idea why.

 

It is almost exactly as described what happened to XBox360 owners that installed their game to the HDD or whatever, except I'm on a PC and no one is talking about it on the PC. Everything is blurry, no detail, Lydia's arms look about as compelling as a number 2 pencil and if I look down at the rocky paths, tears start rolling down my face.

 

Previous to this happening I had just hooked up a brand new HP 25" display and started running my desktop off of that with no problems. The game was still working fine. THEN, because I started to get itchy to run Skyrim with playable at 1920x1080 (I'm on a late 2011 MacbookPro running Bootcamp, at 1440x900 High and a shitload of mods I get about ~25 FPS, which is just fine for me, but no way I could pull off 1080p), I uninstalled my catalyst drivers, reinstalled, played around with a bunch of overclocking programs and finally settled on MSI afterburner...at some point in this chain performance went up and textures went way way down. At one of these points Skyrim did another one of the "Skyrim will now detect your graphics card" things, I'm thinking that may have corrupted something Nothing I've done has solved the problem. I tried going back to the laptop screen. I tried setting everything to Ultra, making sure everything's cool in Skyrimprefs.ini, etc. I'm completely out of ideas, it's like something glitched and I can't get good textures back. I've tried to retrace my steps in case I set something wrong along the way, but yeah, out of ideas. I'm hoping one of you guys might have some idea what I did or what I can do, because this sucks. I'm even thinking about dropped $1000 on building a gaming PC just so I can finish enjoying Skyrim. Which is nuts, but man, I love this game.

[maboru]

You may have corrupted your video drivers. Try doing a clean sweep and reinstalling them or even try rolling back your drivers if that doesn't work.

[thedodus]

That makes a lot of sense--I'm a bit lost in Windows, how would I go about doing that?

[thedodus]

First of all, Maboru, thank you for taking the time to respond :)

 

Uninstalled Apple video drivers and then, with Driver Cleaner, the ATI drivers. Tried to reinstall just the Catalyst drivers, but said my computer didn't have proper graphics adapter. So reinstalled Apple drivers, at least got back to a native resolution on the display, which is now recognized, but still can't reinstall the Catalyst drivers. At this point video drivers may or may not be the problem, but at any rate, Skyrim still looks like s***. Do you or anyone else have any more suggestions? This blows.

[thedodus]

UPDATE: PROBLEM SOLVED.

 

I'm just posting this in case anyone in a similar situation comes across it.

 

1.) Here's how I solved the AMD driver problem. I downloaded my driver of choice (11.11b seemed to run the best, so I went back to that). I did not download the AMD driver control center or autodetect utility--they weren't working. I just downloaded the driver, unpacked it, let it install an AMD folder on my C:/ drive, and then manually browsed to that folder in Device Manager and made it install the driver. Worked like a charm.

 

2.) Then I got on Steam and verified my game cache, and defragmented the cache--both of these options are found when you browse to your game, right click and go to Properties. I suspect this was what solved the texture issue, but the driver thing seems to be a pretty big problem for everyone in Bootcamp for various other reasons.

 

Happy gaming everybody.