GTX 680 casts a dark shadows that shimmers and flickers in the wind ..

[Tenlethar]

Hello Community,

 

Yesterday afternoon i got myself a GTX 680. It was a hard decision as i consider this beast to be beyond affordable. Why did i buy it, then? You bet! Skyrim, of course. You know the drill!

 

I'll cut through the long story and share my problem:

 

After having Skyrim generate fresh INIs i launched up and noticed the shimmering of shadows cast by trees and plants moving in the wind. The shimmering occurs only when i move around, no matter at what distance from the shadows. When i stand still, the shimmering/flickering stops. After comparing the view to how shadows of more static objects look, i realized that this problem seems to occur only with shadows of plants and i assume that it does because they are moving in the wind. This is the one part where i was unable to find any proper research material about. Everybody was posting about the blocky shadows and the flickering caused by the sun update time, but nobody seemed to have complained about how they look when they move around with the wind.

 

This whole thing set me on on a journey that i can only describe as a pain in the cojones. I was up until 7 AM trying every fix i found, researching, reading all the articles and slowly, slowly realizing that my issue is not shadow quality. It is not the resolution. It must be something else! And my GTX 480 AMP! did NOT have this issue.

 

As mentioned, i tried it all. All types of shadow resolutions, activating Shadow Z Prepass, shadow distances, LOD fade settings, blurring the shadows using the mask setting, bDrawLandShadows to 0. I of course tweaked the INI according to S.T.E.P. thus having sun update times altered.

 

I also spent many hours of tweaking my NVidia configuration through the NVidia Inspector. In the Elder Scrolls:Skyrim profile, i tried all kinds of settings, clamping the LOD Bias, setting a negative value, setting a positive one. But the issue would just not go away :unsure:

 

Until now i have been playing with a GTX 480 AMP!. Yes, it was not perfect - i had to play with VSync forced off and the FPS capped to 60. I had a LOT of texture shimmering. But it was playable, after quite some testing and tweaking. Shadows looked okay as i chose a good mix of distance and quality. The key point: They did not shimmer.

 

Bottom Line:

 

The frustration of having wasted my entire night with this issue is killing me. When i think back to when i started with Skyrim, i I thought i'd get a good graphics card and do myself a favour. Well, very much not so. But before i return it to where i bought it from, i would like to give it another chance because aside from the shadow glitch it works just insanely well - i mean the whole performance is mind-boggling. The card delivers a constant framerate that seems to suffer only from having to render lots of fog or smoke. And all of that with VSync enabled as the game defaults to. No noticeable input lag.

 

Please note that i already went through game cache verification and all of that.

 

I would be very glad if you could share your thoughts on this and perhaps new approaches and fixes!

 

Thank You for your efforts!

Mainboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD3R rev. 2.0

CPU: Intel Quad Core i7-920 4x2,67 Ghz (overclocked to 4.0 Ghz stable)

RAM: 6 GB DDR3 Kit PC3-1600 Mhz, CL8

Graphics: NVIDIA / EVGA GTX 680

OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit DVD

Screen: SAMSUNG 2233 RZ TFT @ 120 Hz

 

[blitzen]

You didn't mention anything about trying different graphics drivers. Which drivers are you using? I had to revert to earlier drivers due to some oddities I saw when using a GTX 570 with the last drivers. I don't know if you have that option, since I believe that is a newer card and you can't roll back to a driver that existed before the card was out. Perhaps it's a problem that may be fixed in the next driver release, if that is the situation.

[Tenlethar]

You didn't mention anything about trying different graphics drivers. Which drivers are you using? I had to revert to earlier drivers due to some oddities I saw when using a GTX 570 with the last drivers. I don't know if you have that option, since I believe that is a newer card and you can't roll back to a driver that existed before the card was out. Perhaps it's a problem that may be fixed in the next driver release, if that is the situation.

 

Thank You for your input!

 

I am currently running 301.42 but there seems to be a BETA out 304.48 - i might try that, the question is why no other 680 users complain about such shadow issues.

 

As you already said - reverting back to an older driver is difficult with newer cards, i thus hope that perhaps testing on the BETA will do me good.

 

I'll do that within the next hours but i remain open for other suggestions as well.

[blitzen]

It may also be caused by something in the Skyrim engine that could change without warning. After 1.6 came out, I started seeing shadow striping inside again (I have the mod that used to fix it), and noticed moire patterns on some of the landscape textures that were not there with patch 1.5. Right now, 1.7 is in beta, so who knows what will change with that. You might want to see if that changes the shadows, so that you aren't killing yourself now for something that will be changed by the next patch anyway.

[Tenlethar]

I have now tried the 304.48 BETA driver, but to no avail. The issue just remains the same. I now also tried more things, such as lowering my refresh rate in windows to 60 Hz (i usually run at 120 Hz) but it did not help. I also reset my CPU clocking, so that its no longer overclocked, but the issue is still there, so it probably has nothing to do with the overclocking.

 

I have now recorded a few short videos that display the issue i experience. Perhaps you guys could take a look at them - maybe you recognize something.

 

 

Edit: This is a shame! I just realized the effect is NOT VISIBLE on the YouTube videos - somehow YouTube when converting to whatever they use, must have used some filtering or - i don't know what - which fixed the shimmering/flickering.

Edited July 27, 2012 by Tenlethar

[Tenlethar]

Alright, i have now uploaded a full resolution video to show you how this problem looks like.

 

Click here to download

 

Just use free download mode - its only 60 MB.

 

In this video i set iBlurDeferredShadowMask to 0 to fully sharpen out the shadows which intensifies the effect and thus makes it more visible in the video.

 

Concentrate on the shadows not in front of the character but further away (the second tree shadow group). While i move the character slightly forward and backward you should see the flicker/glimmer.

 

Does that help?

[NagualAmaru]

I have a 680 & have not had this issue, i can't download your video right now because i'm working but i will because this sounds like an issue i had with a radeon 6970 i was using before the 680. I'm pretty sure my issue went away when i started using Confidence man's ENB. do you have or have you tried any ENB's?