My character's facial textures flicker for some reason. This applies to any character, main or newly created alike. Flickering stops at certain light angles. If playing a Khadjiit with war paint, the base facial texture is alright, while the warpaint texture flickers. This is temporarily fixed by Showracemenu command and changing skin color, but not for long. Any known fix for this?

If you are using FXAA, turn that off and use the regular AA

Switching FXAA on and off has no effect.

New AMD drivers seem to have fixed the issue.

Yeah, flickering is back. Anybody else having their face flickering and, most importantly, knows how to fix it?

Is skyrim vanilla or with mods?
Suggestion: do a reset settings (the default settings) in your CCC. Then set all to max except AA in CCC. (my setting and i got no flickering).

Shadow flicker is related to (MultiSampling), They ask you not to use that, instead using (SuperSampling).
THEY = Hardware manufactures, ATI, INTEL, NVIDIA

MultiSampling is like "ghetto-sampling". It does a lot of guessing, and optimization/short-cuts that cause many shadow flickering issues, disappearing objects, missing surfaces, texture-fighting... etc... (That is the price you pay for fast. Reduced quality and errors.)
SuperSampling is less ghetto, but more stable, at the cost of speed reduction in the sampling-rate.

MultiSample = Old code for AA and Anisotropy
SuperSample = New code for AA and Anisotropy
AdaptiveSample = Mixture by depth-selection, speed, angle, and center (Super when going slow, Multi when going fast. Super near the center of view, Multi near the edges and on distant objects. Steep angles/edges use Anisotropy less and AA more.) Also called ProgressiveSampling, or OptomizedSampling, or EnhancedSampling

Interestingly, the problem seems to only start once I alt-tab from the game and go back. But I do that often.
I tried setting AA Mode to Super-sample AA in CCC, but that didn't seem to help. Tried going default settings, but that didn't help either. Any other suggestions?

For me, when I lowered Anisotropic filtering (to gain more performance), the flickering wasn't as bad. Try also completely turning it off. You may loose some clarity in distant textures, but so far I can live with the game as it is (I installed FXAA injector, which makes everything look so nice and sharp without AA and AF) Try different settings with AF too, the game shadow engine is bugged and I doubt they ever gonna be able to fully fix it, this is probably the last game with the same 6 or 7 year old gamebyro engine.

That didn't help either. No combination of AF and AA seems to fix the bloody face flickering.

mmm try the settings on the skyrimprefs.ini

see if you can find the line "ishadowbiascale"..the default amount is 0.3..try to change to 1.5000

i hoped it works man...else,i don't know..goodluck there friend...

note:if you're worried don't forget to backup your saves

I've experienced this same issue when upgrading from CCC 11.11c to 11.12. Rolling back my drivers fixed the issue.

Put several hours of game play in with 11.11a/b/c, and none of them had this issue, which was game breaking for me. 11.11c fixed the intermittent artifacting I had experienced with 11.11b, so... I'll be sticking with c for a while.

Rig Basics:
Vista 32bit
4870x2
3.16 Core 2 Duo
4gb memory

This did not help. Gonna try rolling back driver I guess. It svcks to buy a game and still have so much issues.

Apparently, this is not caused by shadows. If I use showracemenu in console, I can see that the game has changed my character's skin color. Any alteration triggers flickerihg. Any overlay (like war paint) also triggers flickering.

Try 12.1 preview
"Performance highlights of the AMD Catalyst? 12.1 Preview driver (in addition to the AMD Catalyst 11.11c performance driver)
· Improves performance (10-15%) in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim when Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing is enabled on the AMD Radeon? HD 6900 Series for single GPU and AMD CrossfireX configurations"





http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalyst121Previewdriver.aspx

Indeed, this driver version seems to have fixed it.

Has anyone been able to get AA to work with Nvidia Inspector (or just nvidia tray) without enabling at least imultisample=2 in their ini? I can't find a single setting in Inspector that imposes AA (that works), of any kind at all, without at least minimal in-game AA being activiated. The best I can do is "enhance", and then all options open-up.

So, I am by no means an expert on the mechanics of what is causing this...are you saying this little bit of in-game MSAA (x2) could be causing light flickering (happens on water for me)? It happens no matter what type of AA I stick in with Inspector. (yes, I just updated 290.53 beta...same as before)

(gpu 590 3gb)

OMG! Guys, don't say things you don't know please. Antialiasing only forced in drivers can be the problem of any kind, but it's not the reason of bugs at all. It's all about game and video drivers bugs. And msaa is not ghetto antialiasing.