I'm having an issue where most, but not all, textures in the game look absolutely terrible. They look exactly the same no matter what I set texture quality to in the launcher, and whether I have the official texture pack enabled or not. I've reinstalled the game and removed everything in the Data folder (more than once) but it hasn't helped. Has anyone else experienced or heard of this? It's bad enough that it makes me not want to play the game.


Screenshot of the first loading screen you see on making a new game for reference:
cloud.steampowered. com/ugc/576700870438047951/16975172E1AD67DBDB910559BD434C94800DF6C3/

It does looks horrible... posting your specs and skyrim detail level would help us help you better.

Try this, run the game without your video card control panel running. This to make sure that some setting in there is not messing things up. You can use the task manager to shut down the program or disable it in MSCONFIG/Start Up and reboot.

To that end, did you recently update your video card drivers? If so, then roll them back.

You can also try deleting your ini files and have the game create them again, sometimes ini files stops working after an update.

Video card is a Radeon HD 5770, and I haven't updated my drivers recently. I've put plenty of hours into Skyrim previously (on the same drivers I'm using right now) and it looked fine, this is a recent problem. It might have started after updating the game to 1.5, but I can't be sure.

I'll try shutting off the catalyst control panel and report back (it'll be a little while, since I'm reinstalling again)
edit: I deleted the ini files between reinstalls at some point, it didn't change anything.

We are on the same GPU, when i updated to 1.5 my game became a lag hell... so bad i was hitting 25 as my max and 12 as my min and i thought it was my GPU, what i did was just delete both Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and all went back to normal.

Yah I was wondering if you were on AMD. Do me a favor and check your Radeon Control Panel. There should be a "Restore to defaults" button you can press. I'm wondering if your mip map settings are borked.

I just had a look through the control panel settings while I'm waiting for the game to finish installing, and the mipmap quality slider was for some reason all the way down. I restored everything to default, hopefully it'll make a difference. Thanks for suggesting that, I probably wouldn't have thought to check if anything had changed in there.
edit: Success! I have no idea what made things change so much in the catalyst control center, but reverting that fixed the problem. Thanks for the help, everyone