Fixed pixel artifacts

[ftlum]

Hi All.

I've noticed some difficult-to-describe artifacts that are like subtle hazy patches of dark pixels that don't move as you pan slowly around with the camera and you're looking at whiter areas. In 3rd person, there's a little more of this around my character, but it's not where shadows should be and it really is scattered all over the entire screen. It ends up making the screen appear dirty. I think it might be the like the 'fixed pixel' artifacts that have been described, though I've not seen such a term used with video games. I only see the artifact with ENBs and it's most evident when the light intensity settings are turned down.

I'm guessing it might be an artifact related to anti-aliasing, but I'm not sure. Is there a way to get rid of this?
I'd post a youtube video, but it's so subtle / patchy that I suspect it would not show up.

On a separate note, I also get artifacts where fine (esp diagonal) lines shimmer wrongly when things are slowly in motion. When I turn off lumashapening in SweetFX, it gets better-- so this does appear to be a function of sharpening and anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, turning off lumashapening completely makes for a fuzzier picture. Are there settings that will get rid of the shimmering artifact altogether? I'm currently using the Realvision ENB + SweetFX Ultra.

thanks in advance!

[ENBSeries]

May be temporal antialiasing artifacts? Disable it, if enabled. Don't have other ideas

[ftlum]

After a lot of trial and error, I discovered that these artifacts are from the software version of ambient occlusion. I am now using Enhanced Shaders FX and when I disable AO in the ENB menu, it fixes the problem.

I think I have successfully turned on AO via my driver-- I have enabled this (only) through nVidia inspector and set it to High as well. I'm not sure if I need to change anything else to get AO to work (please let me know). It's hard to know if it's doing anything since I can't see instant results like I can with the ENB menu one. If I do have it enabled this way, I do not get those pixellated artifacts.

I have not tried turning off AO in other ENBs yet, but since they all give this artifact, it's likely that doing so would work. I'm not going back to those newer ENBs, though. Any that use enblocal really slow down my loading screen times (by 4x in most places). Enhanced Shaders does not do this, nor does Stakado's. The other glitch I was getting with at least Realvision and possibly phinix, was that in certain places (namely the Bert's Breezehome mod and possibly the first Dark Brotherhood area) at night, several seconds after entering the area, the scene would become really dark over a few seconds-- it was as if the ambient lighting disappeared and all you had left was point lighting. I tried turning off adaptation but that didn't fix the problem. It would be great to see those bugs fixed too.

[ENBSeries]

I'm not going to fix bugs which aren't mine. Ask authors of presets.

[ftlum]

The long loading screens are a problem with all ENBs that use the newer files (enblocal was common to all of the problem ones). I think that one is in your camp .

The weird loss of ambient light might be unique to Realvision, however. I can't recall if it happened with the others or not.

[ENBSeries]

Loading times do not change at all with ENBSeries, because mod have IgnoreLoadingScreen parameter, which disable all effects, so game bug with fps not ~30 give longer loading screens does not occur. Longer loading screens when ENBoost functionality enabled can't be "fixed" and i won't even discuss this.

[ftlum]

It must be something to do with ENBoost then. Toggling the IgnoreLoadingScreen parameter does not affect the long loading times I'm seeing.

I'm actually quite happy with Enhanced Shaders FX. It's using the older ENB files and loading times are really fast. Plus, now that I've turned off ambient occlusion, the graphics look great. It does cause a strange shimmering on metal plates (possibly shadow related-- it's hard to tell), but that's the only real glitch.