Ok, I appear to have broken something major in Skyrim. Even though this character (Level 16) had gone several hours without any issues (other than a CTD or two), nothing like this had happened before.

What has happened? This:

[IMG]http://i39.tinypic.com/ohtw81.jpg[/IMG]

And this is what my map looks like:

[IMG]http://i40.tinypic.com/s6kpy0.jpg[/IMG]


If you're having a hard time telling, the graphics have gotten majorly screwed up, and with pixelation and overlapping and bleeding and what-ever-the-hell else you call it. Originally I thought it might be an issue with the Enhanced Distant Terrain or HD Map mods I had, but disabling them did nothing. And I don't know what mods could be causing it - I had an old character with over 50 hours of gameplay on her that used almost the exact same modset that had zero issues other than a couple of CTDs because of a bad load order.

So what did I break?


Note: Here are direct links to the pictures if they don't work here:

http://i39.tinypic.com/ohtw81.jpg
http://i40.tinypic.com/s6kpy0.jpg

Thanks for the help.

You didn't, AMD did.

Uninstall your current AMD drivers and reinstall with the latest 12.3 release. You're running on the old 12.2s (which incorrectly claim to be 12.3 in the Catalyst Control Center; thanks a lot for that typo, AMD), which produce exactly this kind of pixellation/artifacts when combined with Skyrim's AA. Uninstalling and upgrading will fix it.

Ok...can I do it through Steam or Catalyst, or are they currently bugged and it does require the manuel install?

Unless I missed a news post, Steam doesn't have the 12.3 drivers yet (not sure what the hold up is; they came out on March 28th), and I've had some people tell me that CCC wouldn't update them to 12.3 either. That was a few weeks ago, though.

In this case I would really only recommend manually uninstalling 12.2 and then installing 12.3. Some people have reported that just upgrading, which I assume is what CCC would do if it worked, doesn't fix the issue. They've had to completely scrub 12.2 and then install the new drivers.

I also just uninstalled my AMD driver and made a clean install to 12.3. I noticed that (at least in my case) it was not enough to just uninstall the old drivers via uninstaller. Something was left somewhere and I got a huge fps lag. I managed to get it work only after I used the uninstaller and also removed every folder named ATI or AMD from my harddisk + rebooted.

NOTE! I have an Intel based machine so it wasn't a problem for me. You got to be more careful with AMD based machines before deleting those AMD folders. They could contain something important and cause big troubles.