Then why does it look so different on the xbox?

Here are a few more screen caps from the pc

[IMG]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/TESV2012-01-0621-11-21-70.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/TESV2012-01-0621-10-58-36.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/TESV2012-01-0621-12-13-84.png[/IMG]

It seems painfully obvious to me that there is a problem. Saying it was 16 bit color may have been the wrong thing to say, but can you look at those last three screen shots and tell me that's how it is supposed to look?




Your load screens looks way better than mine!

There is a clear difference between this:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/Smoke1.png

and this:

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/2011-11-17_00005.jpg

Game looks like mine. I know in the north sometimes it can look black and white.

Okay, she wants better fog (Transperancy AA super sampling outta do that) and more colour saturation. Before anything further though, killerkittykat: Tell us about your computer's hardware. There may be a reason Skyrim's system evaluator set you up with settings that look like that rather then something better.

This is how color works: A 32-bit color pixel is actually divided in 4 parts of 8-bits (called channels): Alpha, Red, Green and Blue. You cannot see the alpha part. It is used internally for translucency. Each of the parts can have a value from 0 up to 255. That means there are 256 different values per channel. To produce black the Red, Green and Blue channels are set to 0. To produce white all of these are set to 255. A grey value is produced by setting Red, Green and Blue to the same value. That means that there can only be 256 pure grey values (including black and white). That number is not enough to make a smooth gradient of grey. That's why you see those bands. A game developer should know that and instead of using pure grey the colors can be made a bit off and that allows more grey values or colors that look close to it. Bethesda did not do this. So, there is not much you as a user can do about it.

Edit: Corrected some mistakes.

It's not just fog. Do you see the indoors from my last reply?

I turned the settings up to ultra and it was of no help. Anyway, here are my specs:

Video card: NVIDIA GTX 460 with 2780MB of memory
CPU: Intel core i5 2.8GHz (quad core)
RAM: 4096MB DDR3
Vertex plus 120gb SSD
Direct X 11
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

I think that's all, let me know if I'm missing something.






Then why do these look different? What can I do to make mine look like his?

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/Smoke1.png
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/2011-11-17_00005.jpg

Looks like ...
Try upping AA and or adding AF....
Gamma correction?
What are your Specs...your right, the Screens (your and mine) , look way different...my settings..

Gamma correction OFF
AA/AF OFF in game settings..

Using Nvidia inspector to force..
AA behavior flags = 0x 05 Skyrim
AA mode = Override application settings
AA setting = 4x
AA trans multisample = disabled
AA trans super sample = 2x
AF mode = user defined
AF filtering = 16x
AO compat = Fallout 3 (this is in the top setting in Inspector)
AO = Performance
AO usage = enabled
Frame rate limiter = 59
Tripple buffering = ON
Max prerendered frames = 0

Edit : you posted specs while i was typing...slow old guy...

Thank you, I'm going to set my settings like yours now. Where can I changed the gamma correction to off? I was looking for that earlier.

EDIT: just saw that you said to use nvidia inspector. Okay I'll do all of that now. I'm going to go eat and I'll update you after that. Thanks.

Okay yah there is a distinct difference between those two images for sure, yours is much brighter looking and washed out and yah the fog looks less well rendered. Your other screen shots though are of rather bland areas to begin with, the greybeards' lair isn't exactly a prestine place to catch some nice colour to compare things with, its all literally shades of grey. Could you get another shot of say a spot in whiterun with a lot of colour, much easier to compare with. Btw I'm kind of still in the opinion we deal with your fog and you'll see everything else fall into place.

Also give this a quick try, its a quick & dirty but this should force higher detail fog: right-click the desktop->Nvidia Control Panel->Manage 3D Settings->uncheck the box 'show only programs...'->find the Elder Scrolls Skyrim Profile->Find 'Anti-aliasing - transperancy' and set it to SuperSamplingx2 then apply and try out the game again.

Just to start things off.

As far as I can see only the resolution differs. The high-res version has the same type of banding.

Smile when it looks like mine! The gamma setting is in Inspector also...you will See..

Edit: too add

Yes my Rez is @ 1920x 1080 HD with a 32" HD TV

What REZ are you at?

Apart from the colour banding issues, Bethesda's games often seem to have some very strong shader effects applied. Depending on the weather and time of day, Skyrim tends to get either a strong sepia tone or really really blue. It's a stylistic choice that some people don't like. Fallout 3 had the same issue. Mods were soon released that changed the lighting to a much more normal and vibrant palette. We will probably see the same for Skyrim.

According to the resolution of her screen shot its 1360x768. So yah, upping that to 1920x1080 should help, provided the monitor can do it.

I turned off AF in the game and set it to 16 in the nVidia control panel and then selected high quality for AF. Colors are definitaly more vivid along with more detail everywhere. This setting allowed me to turn off AA and use FXAA which had been too blury when using the in-game AF.

+1 I do this as well, not really for any sort of colours but it certainly helps with the water.

Ok So I downloaded that program and matched my settings to yours and turned off AA and AF in the in-game settings. The only setting I couldn't find was "AO compat = Fallout 3"

That definitely helped a lot, but I still feel like there can be improvement. It's nice to see it looking better, though.

I'm going to post updated screen shots. The first is the current loading menu. The second is the back of my character, which I think looks too dark, like the contrast is too high, and I can't see anything that is on her. The third is just a landscape picture because I think someone asked for that.. And the last is just indoors in a shop.

Over all it's better, but things look a bit desaturated now and also dark. I turned the brightness up, but that didn't help any.

Thanks for helping me out so far, guys.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/smokepic.png

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/dark.png

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/dragoninbackground.png

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y39/jerseygrl33458/TESV2012-01-0813-41-14-80.png

Your screen shots look a lot prettier than mine. I'm running on high settings. Is it because you are using mods? Also, AA looks like it is off for me even though I set it to 4x in the inspector program.

edit:


I turned FXAA on and it looks a lot nicer. That fixed the problem that made it look like there was no AA (even though I had it on the nvidia settings to override.)

Indeed, it looks more like a gamma, brightness issue or some driver issue. Your shots do look too bright.

BTW, Gamma Correction AA is only for OpenGL.

I am using the beta drivers at the moment, maybe I should roll back? I just installed these yesterday and didn't notice a difference. When you say Gamma Correction AA is only for OpenGL, what does that mean? Does that mean it wont help Skyrim?

I could def use some help with the gamma/brightness settings

EDIT:
Still reading through some of the replies.. You guys said a lot while I was AFK


Going to look into that now

It's doesn't use Gamma Correction AA because Skyrim is DirectX and that option is only for OpenGL. Triple Buffer is OpenGL as well.

Yes, callibrating your monitor would be beneficial as to me, your shots are too bight and brightness exposes graphics like that. Turn your brightness down in the game and calibrate your monitor with the Windows calibration tool in the control panel(Windows 7) .

The same thing happens with the forum. Look at the image in the background of the Skyrim guy and if the smoke looks similar to your problem then your brightness/gamma is too high.

Anti-Aliasing doesn't apply to the start screen and there is not reason transparent AA would fix he issue, it would just reduce performance because it applied to transparent textures. You only should use that if you have a mid/high end GPU.

Bah no worries Camero had that covered with part of his set of stuff to setup in Nvidia Inspector so its already in place. My biggest suggestion once you've gotten a good baseline of settings established is go to review the various ENB based mods on skyrimnexus, ENB is a pretty powerful and open-ended 3rd party 'everything visual enhancer' and many people have their own variations of it available as mods. The ENB mod does a tramendous amount of good towards taking the vanilla Skyrim lighting engine and transforming it into a visually spectacular environment. But yah work out these sittings here in the nvidia inspector and skyrimprefs.ini first then afterwards throw one of the ENB mods that appeals to you on top.

Fog is a transperent texture and the GTX460 is still a pretty capable mid-range card.