Jagged Shadows & Shadows Where They Shouldn't Be

[Layia28]

Hi everyone. I've been putting a lot of hours recently into Skyrim, trying to get everything working great and looking great so I can finally relax and just play. I thought I had everything finally figured out and done, but when I was playing tonight I saw that the shadows were messed up. Not only are the jagged and choppy, but there are shadows where there shouldn't be any shadows. For example, near Dawnstar, out in the open with hardly any trees around and nothing else to cause shadows there are shadows on certain sections of snow that just look horrible.

 

I tried looking up the problem to see if anyone else had experienced the same issue and I tried a couple of the solutions that I found but nothing worked. Now, I have NVIDIA GeoForce installed and it made a huge difference in my FPS - my game was/is running very smoothly. I let it optimize my Skyrim - it only made a couple minor changes that greatly improved performance - but one of those changes is causing the shadow issue. I'm certain of that because, on a hunch, I undid the optimization -reverted it back to it's previous settings- loaded up my game and the shadow issue was gone. I optimized it again and the shadow issues were back. But, for the life of me, I can't figure out exactly what change is causing this issue.

 

Here is one example. On my follower's face the shadows are jagged.

 

http://i50.tinypic.com/m8havr.jpg

 

Here is another. I'm not sure if you can see it clearly, but the entire patch of snow in front has those strange shadows.

 

http://i47.tinypic.com/3y2y8.jpg

 

Here is a closer up image of the snow patch.

 

http://i48.tinypic.com/2eeyau1.jpg

 

With the shadows on the snow patch, at least, when I move towards it, the weird shadows disappear, but it's never done this before.

 

I'm not sure if I should list the changes GeoForce made or if someone else has the same program and knows the changes it makes to optimize your game, but if anyone can tell me what would cause this weird glitch I would really appreciate it. Thank you in advance, I'm looking forward to your suggestions. I can't wait to get everything fixed so I can just play.