Hello chaps. TES veteran here, but new to Skyrim. I've been testing and tweaking Skyrim for about two weeks now, haven't really had the time to actually play it yet. I was wondering if this glitch is known to anyone. I'm hoping it's not an engine limitation (there seem to be many of those in Skyrim) and fixable.. but I'm not holding my breath.

The glitch appears as jagged lines on the surface textures, but only at certain distance. I don't think I'm seeing this in the more distant LOD landscape. Here's a bunch of pictures I took of the bug. I cropped them quite a bit, but they are not as far off as they might seem.

http://i.imgur.com/SG2Koqo.jpg

At this point I had been standing in the water so long that Frostfall started freezing me, applying a blurry shader to my screen. That *really* punched out these jagged lines for some reason. Maybe that implies it's a shader issue of some kind? I am really not an expert on these things though.

http://i.imgur.com/W9q6raF.jpg

Does anyone recognize what may be doing this? Ini setting? A mod? I will post my ini and modlist later, as I'm at work right now.

Quoting alt3rn1ty which did wonders for me:

The setting that helps with external striping is ..

fShadowBiasScale=1.6500

Setting it higher than default I think raises its influence on surfaces, but depends on the angle of the surface .. so there isnt a perfect setting for this


I think 1.65 is the best happy medium anyone has ever found

This one goes in SkyrimPrefs.ini
Under [Display]

Thanks, I'll try it out as soon as I get home.

Edit: Ah, I remember this setting actually. Like you say, there isn't an ideal setting for this as it tends to disconnect shadows from their origins very easily if set too high. I think I found some kind of optimal value where it didn't quite do that, but I may have to do check it out again.

Darned engine limitations. I wish consoles would stop setting the bar for PCs.

I had a similar problem, for a while ago.

I had those stripes on rocks, and things goes more messy as i moved close to those rocks.

I played with shadows at high.

Changing Texture filtering to (high quality) on a Nvidia card or changing the MipMap detail level to high if you have an Ati card will fix the issue.

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But i don't know if that's the exact case here...

Also......

What kind of anti-aliasing are you using? In game, driver?

Nope, Chuck is closer to the mark. Problem goes away after I get within a certain range too.

FXAA, as 4x and 8x are not required, worse-looking and cost more resources. And that would in-game. NVidia won't actually let anyone enable it driver-side for a game that already has built-in support for FXAA. Why are you asking?