» Tue Feb 04, 2014 2:31 am So I encountered an issue in Skyrim of shimmering/flickering textures. Now to clarify what this is, this is not Z-fighting (when mountains flicker in the distance).
This video shows what texture shimmering is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9NhFItnyEs (not my video).
tl;dr of the issue:
Your texture resolution is too high. 2048 x 2048 is too large, 4096 x 4096 is also ridiculously too large and will only make it worse.
Texture shimmering comes from using a texture (particularly one that moves, eg: swords, plants, armours) that is larger than the screen resolution and is being compressed into a smaller area. By compressed I do not mean 'image compression' I mean you are forcing a large texture onto a model that is to small for the texture. The details of the texture become so fine that in order to fix the problem, you require increasing amounts of anti-aliasing and because of the limitations of the Creation Engine, most AA techniques cannot be forced.
This can also be present in videos, and can be seen on Youtube. Take any video with a 1080p resolution and keep it in the small player rather than expanding the player or making it full screen. The same issue arises, the 1080p video will have aliasing and parts of it will 'shimmer'.
This ad for Bells recently posted on reddit will work for the issue in videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VteDp3IK-60
Note: The shimmering in the video will be less in Gecko powered browsers (Firefox). They seem to have anti-aliasing down pat for the most part, Chrome however will show the shimmering.
How to fix it:
There is only one way to fix texture shimmering in Skyrim. Lower the texture resolution, this is the reason why Bethesda's textures are only 512x512 at the most in nearly every circumstance. Ground textures can be larger because the model the texture is being applied to is larger, but there is no way to remove the problem of you do use 2K+ textures.
I hope this answers a problem that I see many people can have.
