Lines on the Snow

[Mayfly53]

Hey everyone,

 

I was just wondering if anyone else has encountered this visual problem I'm having, and how to fix it.

 

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/4702/screenshot53908.png

 

It's not just on snow either. Often I get it on hills and sometimes on footpaths.

 

Is it something to do with aliasing or anisotropic filtering?

 

Any advice on how to get rid of it would be great.

 

P.S. I can't really afford to bring AA or AF higher than 2x due to framerate.

[GrindedStone]

Step down your screen resolution on the desktop an game. Then bump up the post processing an detail. This display is a 4:3 1600x1200 native. I ran games in native for a few years, but now I use 1280 x 1024 because I can use more post processing and detail. The animation & physics speed while in complex scenes being smoother is what sold it.

 

You can set these scaled resolutions up to even look better than native. I kept running it afterwards as a way to prolong the hardware until I just can't stand it anymore. Later on when you are upgrading or building get you a 2Gb - 3Gb card which seems to deal more with screen resolution size. I guess you could stick with a 1Gb card an use a smaller more mainstream display an save some mooneyz.

 

Then in FO3/FNV in Vista/Win7 players reported performance increases from running the game in windowed mode. To that end a fake full screen mod was made that gets rid of the pesky borders of windowed mode, hence fake full screen. Though I don't know if such a mod exists for Skyrim. Also use Skyrim Configurator to tweek it.

[Mayfly53]

Hi, thank you for the reply, but I'm not sure I understand.

My desktop (and in game) resolution is 1366 x 768, its native and highest resolution.

The detail quality for all options (except shadow) is at max.

I am using a laptop, so upgrade options are limited.

I stepped up the AA and AF actually, with only a 2 frame drop in FPS, but that didn't improve the lines.

I have a NVIDIA Geforce GT 330M Series card, with 1 GB CUDA and 2171 MB TurboCache. While this may seem underpowered, it runs almost all games very well, surprisingly so.

 

Now, I don't understand what you mean by "step down", are you suggesting I use a lower resolution than 1366 x 768. If so, how much lower?

There is a false windowed mod for Skyrim, however it does not run correctly on my computer. It crashes most of the time, and when it doesn't, it only displays the top left quarter of the screen.

 

Also, it should be noted that the lines disappear when I am close to them, but remain at far distances. Could it simply be a shader issue?

 

I shall investigate this Skyrim Configurator and see what it can do.

 

Thanks again.

 

(For moderators: This really isn't a solved problem, so please leave the thread open for now in case somebody else can help me! Thank you!)

[GrindedStone]

Shadows don't make that much of a difference, well compared to other games. I would say start with what it auto detects. Then move your draw distance sliders back a bit. Then look into a custom resolution. I said step down because it should only list what is supported on your system. This one lists 1600x1200 1600x900 then 1280x1024. I skipped the second one because it wasn't a full scale down an would make things look wacky. I've also seen some game launchers that don't offer some of these custom resolutions so I've had to manually set them in a config file or configurator.

 

From there it would be all about what you find out by using the configurator to fine tune it. However since you are using Nvidia tech you should have a Nvidia control panel. It tends to favor letting the 3D application decide for AA an AF, but you can set the overall quality of the texture filtering (which is AF) A high performance 8X AF will beat any quality of 4X or 2X. The default for these games seems to be 4X AA an 8X AF, You'll probably notice artifacts on settings below that. Dots on hair, dots on grass, an funkyness.

[Mayfly53]

I hope I'm not about to sound rude here, but... that's all really obvious. I mean, one would expect a higher value for those settings to improve the quality! And lowering my draw distance really isn't going to fix a problem on the land 5 yards in front of me.

Also, stepping down the resolution to the next appropriate 16:9 setting actually made it worse, as well as lowering framerate. The game seems to prefer my native resolution and that's okay with me.

Skyrim's autodetect is quite useless, as it chooses randomly between low and medium, but in fact my card handles ultra really well, provided I turn triple buffering on in the Control Panel, and lower AA and AF by a few steps, which I don't mind. Having the edge of a roof looking microscopically square is just fine with me. That, and a few choice tweaks of card and of ini, has the game running between 45-55 fps all the time. The only problem my game has are these silly lines.

Anyway, I discovered a solution on my own.

 

In SkyrimPrefs.ini I changed the values of

 

iBlurDeferredShadowMask from 1 to 32, and

fShadowBiasScale to 0.5000 1.5000

 

I've dropped about 1fps, but the lines seem to have stopped appearing. Not sure which particular value worked, but it has.

 

Thanks for trying to help though.

 

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/30/screenshot1632.png

Edited April 4, 2012 by Mayfly53

[jaime74]

I am sure that the solution to this is simply setting the fShadowBiasScale to a value of 1.0 or higher.

At least this is what solved it for me. See also this thread.