Now that I'm on patch 1.5, when I'm in an exterior cell I get wildly flickering shadows. It gives me a splitting headache and it's making the game unplayable. If it weren't for the shadow issue, my game would be fine.

Any idea how I can move back to an older patch, or fix the shadows problem?

With 1.4 it was interior shadows that were flickering, now it's outside as well. Quite annoying. I guess the only way is to disable shadows completely.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/115016-13-skyrim-shadow-flickering-problem

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1655072

These might help.

oops. nvm

Because it's no longer in beta. 1.5's been officially released into the wild.

I just got updated to 1.5 on my PC this evening (1.5.24.05 it says inside the game). Last night I was on 1.4 something.

Since then I to get very annoying shadows flickering all over the place whenever I move inside or outside. Mostly on upward facing surfaces such as roofs or sides of bridges etc. The whole thing looks like the shadows have changed (looks a lot brighter)

I have win Vista 32bit SP2, 3g ram, Intel quad core 2.4ghz, NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT . Tried it with and without patches. Had absolutely no problems before, it ran fast before on low settings.

One thing I don’t like about this auto update is I cant roll back till this problem is fixed and it has made the game unplayable. Also who / how are we supposed to report these problems to? Steam forum, or Bethesda forum. The tech support link in the game is beyond useless taking me to a very simple very un-detailed tree of FAQ's.

Some people are reporting bugged shadows when using Vurt's tree/flora mods with 1.5. Are you using those? If so, disable and/or check for an update.

On the other hand, I'm seeing some weird shadow behavior too, and I'm not using any mods that modify shadows in any way. So there's clearly some issues with vanilla Skyrim in 1.5 as well.

Havn't played for 2 or 3 days.
This evening, I launched my game. 3 minutes later, I started an horrible headache.

All because I get the same shadows flickering problem. Each time I move my char, shadows are moving in every directions, appearing, desappearing, flashing everywhere.
I also get some uglies dark polygons moving into the sky...

So I think I get the same problem as others on this topic, problem that came with 1.5 patch...


A little precision, I'm playing in high res, I get no mod and I didn't change anything on my PC or game config.
(Win7, Intel? Core?2 Quad Processor Q9000, Geforce GT240M, 4Gb ram)



Hope this will soon get fixed, because it's totaly unplayable this way...

The only mods I'm using are Orlong's Hearth and something to increase the respawn rate.

Neither of them has ever caused me problems before.

I just updated to latest NVIDIA drivers and the shadow issue went away! Hope that helps you other guys! (ps tried it before with no mods and still had issues before GFX driver update)

I was having problems with shadows "popping" in on exterior objects like rocks and ground textures. I had a strange striped shadow bug going and figured out that it was due to this setting in SkyrimPref.ini (fShadowDistance=). I had set it to 8000 and that fixed the popping in of shadows but ever since I updated to the new patch and created new ini files this setting kept reverting to 2500. I wasn't fooling with the in game settings or in the configuration menu. I eventually had to set my ini files to read only so that the game wouldn't revert my settings.

Is the shadow flickering issue like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LTy4rwEmOA? I have it both in interiors and exteriors with 1.5. On 1.4, I have been using ENB antifreeze patch 096 (not interested in the full ENB), but with 1.5 the underwater enviroment is just a solid color, so I dropped the ENB patch. However, that makes my game unplayable because of the shadows. All mods uninstalled (just Live Another Life to be able to test), even tried to revert to 12.1 Catalysts, deleteing INIs and letting them recreate, nothing, no success.

I've had this problem with interiors ever since game launch, I believe. If anyone comes up with a solution, I'd be thrilled. Is it worth trying to disable shadows altogether?

I've got the same problem with the flickering shadows since 1.5 as well, making the game more or less unplayable.
Whenever I move or look around, it seems that many surfaces are first rendered fully lighted, and get the shadow applied one frame later..

Is there any way to disable shadows completely, so I can at least continue playing?

(Usual system info: WinXP64, Intel Core2Quad, Asus GeForce 9600GT)

Well, after reading lots of posts on lots of forums, I found the suggestion to update my graphic card to the latest.

And that works !


So finally the solution was quite easy for my problem ^^'. And I suggest to http://www.gamesas.com/user/787319-climbingivies/ (that seems to have the same problem as me) to try to update his graphic card too.

Oh HELL yeah. Worked for me too. Can't believe it was that simple of a fix. Nice to see NVIDIA being good for something other than losing me a crapload of money in the stock market last year.

This is likely the reason that fShadowDistance gets set back to 8000 each time a new update is released.


This is a separate issue having to do with light source values and is largely addressed by a http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=8043.

Mother of Fail Bethesda

I've just upgraded my NVidia drivers from a version ~2-3 weeks old to the current 296.10 and the shadow flickering bugs are all gone. I could even turn up the shadow details one step on my old 9500GT card without losing performance.
Seems you really need bleeding-edge drivers for Skyrim nowadays

Ours is to update, friends.

I've updated my drivers. It did not fix. Rolled back the exe and all is fine.

Take Steam into offline mode, or disconnect from the internet. For those with Windows 7, right click the .exe file (in your Skyrim directory), click properties, find the 'previous versions' tab, hit the button that say copy, make sure to copy to a backup folder. Then copy to your skyrim directory.

Now you have a permanent back up of your old version, and your game will run like it didd pre patch.

Note, if you connect to Steam online again, it WILL update again. Either turn off auto updates (if you can, I didn't have the option), or just stay offline and recopy your 1.4 backup exe.