Ok, i am really, really mad right now. Three months, three fricken months have passed since I played Skyrim. Why you ask? Because of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-7GlR2-KUY Shadows behaving like popcorn,textures behaving strangley plus I cant see [censored] under water. Its all blurry and stuff. All these issues appeared post 1.5. Today, I saw on Facebook that the 1.6 beta was up and i though that maybe this would set things straight. Well sadly no, it didn't.. F*** this sh**. I payed full price for the Ps3 version of the game, but that version turned out to be a nightmare. So i bought the pc version in hope of getting a game that worked properly. But NO! It turnes out my pc version is [censored]ed up asswell. So bethesda, could you kindley see to this problem? I feel a little bit cheated here, and I know im not the only one with this problem. Add some fix for this in the full patch!

I've never seen this problem myself. What graphics card and drivers are you using?

I actually had this happen once when I Alt+Tab'd the game, but noticed it only happens (sometimes) if I do that.

maybe it's related?

I have, it was all over the forums at one point .. Graphics driver update is the solution. Or at least I can confirm that is the case for NVidia graphics cards. We had the same problem on three different machines here, all were solved with drivers being updated post 1.5 game patch. Water transitions especially have looked fantastic ever since.

I was reluctant to update our oldest laptop drivers, but it was well past official laptop vendor support period so I went for the closest match from NVidia. I haven't looked back since

I had some minor issues with shadow flickering in vanilla Skyrim, but all of them went away when I used the latest version of ENB (1.12) with the enhanced shadow filters. I suggest you try that out (aside from the obvious things, like updating your drivers). Skyrim's shadows really look great with that mod.

Well I've never had that problem nor have, I dare say, the majority of users so I dont think a rant against Bethesda is warranted for something that could very well be third-party related (ie. drivers, hardware). Im sorry you're experiencing this. Now if you were talking about the generally poor implementation of shadows in Skyrim overall I'd have to say damn straight. What are your system specs/setup?

When I see weird shadows like that it usually means I need to restart my system.

I have i a 64-bits system with 4gb ram and Nivida GT 230M with DirectX 11.0.

Thank you for the heads up. I shall try that

alt3rn1ty, you have made my day! Updating my graphics driver worked! Thanks for the tip man!

As a word of advice, there are many reasons why something does not work, it's not always the game's fault and not fair to assume immediately that it is.
As a general rule of thumb check your drivers first, and your settings before you start having a go at the developer...

No problem , I was confident because the symptoms are so distinctive. Skyrim has other shadow problems too depending on your hardware, generally they are a pain which can be solved with ini tweaks ... except when the game launcher insists on reverting them.

Another tip, after a game patch and / or updating your graphics drivers .. Regenerate you ini's :

In the game launcher, go to options, and hit the default button. The game will then re-detect your hardware and adjust for what it considers optimal settings for your hardware / drivers / game patch version setup.

Yes you will have to re-do a few ini tweaks you may have applied in the past, but also proceed with caution .. Old tips may no longer be optimal.

With each new game patch there have been some remarkable improvements, and if you read the release notes of the last couple of NVidia updates they have been improving Skyrim performance / bug fixing too. So it makes sense to work from the ground up again.

And one more tip: For NVidia driver updates, there is a custom option as part of the setup, at the bottom of that screen is a small check box which when ticked will clean out your old graphics driver profile settings so that you start afresh with those aswell.

I knew it. Every eff'ing time. They STILL svck at alt+tab support. Every other game today supports alt+tab without issue, but no, these people at Bethesda continually overlook alt+tab issues with their games.

Just a question, why would you want to alt+tab anyway?

...I've never had an issue alt-tabbing out of a TES game, with the exception being the 1.6 beta for Skyrim, where alt-tabbing out prompts the Windows cursor to appear and refuse to go away. That's been it--and that's not fatal, just annoying. Just saying.


Some of us are multi-taskers...I frequently alt-tab out of games to answer emails, IMs, to look up something on a wiki, or just to take a quick break from the game to go make some food or coffee or what have you. There's plenty of reasons for alt-tabbing. Just ask us ADHD multi-taskers.

LOL.
Well fair play and all, I accept that people do that kinda thing - I wouldn't because it breaks my immersion and more to the point no game that I've ever played has been nice about that sort of thing. DragonAge for example was terrible for that...

I have a question about this shadow problem too. I also asked about this in the stickied thread on crashes, but I'll ask about it here too as this thread seems more specific to my problem. Anyway, from December through early March I played around 200 hours of Skyrim with zero problems. When I came back to it in late April (after the 1.5 patch had been released) I started seeing jumping, flickering shadows as I moved and looked around. The game also started crashing randomnly, with no error message, just straight to my desktop. Tweaking the ini files gets rid of the annoying shadow problem, but it still crashes! This is especially annoying as before I never had to worry about problems with Skyrim...
I have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 (it's for a gaming laptop, thus "mobility") with drivers 8.17.0010.1041. (By the way: I've always created more problems than I solved when updating my drivers...)

Of course the easiest way for me to fix this would be to go back to a pre-1.5 Skyrim. But from what I've read online, that can't be done (?). I assume if I reinstalled Skyrim Steam would just be installing the latest updated version of the game, not a clean, unpatched install?

I hope I get this fixed before any DLC comes out...