Hi - am having serious issues with some weird texture lines wherever I go, most noticeable on snow/ice.

I have uploaded a video to youtube to demonstrate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeL41XLZd3A

I have tried messing with lots of shadow settings in the prefs ini file (distance/resolution/bias/blur) but nothing seems to work. If I disable shadows completely (fdistance=0) it is still there?

PC details: core i7 Alienware M17xR3 laptop with Geforce 560M GPU, Windows 7 x64 with latest Geforce drivers etc

Any ideas, it's really spoiling the game for me...

Thanks

EDIT: added youtube link

this is happening to me too but its not that close to my character and its darker.all distance settings on ultra 12.2 drivers on 6870

What is your Radial Blur quality set to in the Launcher? set that to high. Then try the Distant Object to Ultra.

It was set to low and my distant object detail was at medium, unfortunately changing them to max didn't fix it for me...

However I have just spent the last 5 hours or so going through each settiing in both skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini. I have literally started Skyrim over 100 times today

Anyway it is now fixed. I found that changing the iBlurDeferredShadowMask value to 7 in skyrimprefs.ini (iBlurDeferredShadowMask=7) made a massive improvement and the pattern almost fully disappeared but the fade line was still really obvious (I had tried values of 1/2/3 previously but it did not make much difference). Increasing the setting past this did not make much more improvement.

Therefore finally realising it was actually a shadow issue, I played around with the shadow settings. By changing 3 shadow settings (which I had believed to be interior only?) to a higher res of 3072 cured the issue. 4096 caused a FPS drop:

iShadowMapResolution=3072

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=3072
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=3072

Hope this helps somebody else and my 5 hours of fiddling makes some use

At first glance it looks like a definite texture issue. It's great that you figured it out to be related to shadows instead as well as having resolved the issue completely for yourself. Well done and congrats.

The last time I tried using 3072 for my shadow values, some psychedelic crap started to go down. It was unplayable.

Shadow sizes should double like this. 512/1024/2048/4096

Yes ..power of 2... Otherwise strange things can happen...but wouldn't the engine round up or down?

Pretty sure it wouldn't and would just show glitches.

Thanks for the comments guys. I thought it should be a binary thing too, but when searching the net for different blur settings, I came across a post:

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/468671-skyrim-enhanced-shaders/page__st__1700__p__4040347#entry4040347

I've been having this issue ever since the last patch and it's incredibly distracting. I've tried everything in here listed to fix it, and also went to the link in your location and tried the suggestions there with no luck. Anyone have a permanent solution to this or a mod that can fix it? It's SO horrible looking that I almost want to not play Skyrim because of it. Lydia's face should not look like this sitting by the fire in my Breezehome.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a128/Alexial_MS/ScreenShot56.jpg

Thanks for making this thread, tr15tanp, and going through the trouble. I've had this same problem. I didn't notice it so much when I first started playing b/c of all the graphics "wow" factor, but once I started paying attention to the (jagged, weird, horizontal lines) shadows around campfires, and started noticing a similar effect happening on distant mountaintops sometimes during the day, it didn't seem like a normal effect to me. I'm able to run everything on max, so I was suprised to see such a weird graphic issue. I've tried a few tweaks for this based on stuff that I've found online, but nothing worked quite perfectly for me. I'll try some of the stuff you guys mentioned (except I keep my shadows on 4096) and see what works for me.

This seems to be a pretty common issue, and since it looks pretty crappy and firepits (not to mention shadows) are pretty commonplace in Skyrim, this really should be a "pinned" issue, but I guess they can't pin everything. The first page would fill up quick.

I saw this fix which is specifically for the firepit in Breezehome:


Shadow Striping Fix

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=8043


I don't have the issue any more so I haven't tried the fix!

EDIT: Deleted post, link added above.

Yep - once you start reading/researching you quickly discover that the shadows cause a lot of issues in Skyrim. I still have an area of very slight darkness (slighty darker than more distant terrain) around me as I'm moving around. It's a halo that extends say in a 5 metre radius/circle as I'm walking but I have decided to live with it as it is not as noticeable as the stripy shadow problem. This issue is still there on a fresh install of Skyrim and with all patched versions too so I know it's not an added mod.

I have the same issues with shadows, both indoor (breezehome) and outdoors. Has anyone found a definitive fix for this?

Seeing the screenshot I presume its the same problem I had with exterior shadows on land. A different problem than the stripping produced by projected shadows.
I solved my problem absolutely reverting back to the vanilla ''bDrawLandShadows=0'' on the ini file. The improvement of this option its minimal in any case.