Shadows, please stop dancing...

[Hanaisse]

This has been driving me crazy for awhile now. Not only did I have shadow striping, but they like to dance. Every 5 seconds they "ripple" for a couple of secs then stop, rinse, repeat.

These stripes are everywhere, and it's very distracting. Through some option setting voodoo I've been able to reduce the striping effect, but not the dancing.

The dancing/rippling effect is still noticable and I'm looking for help.

Specs;

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NVIDIA GTX460 GPU

driver: 306.97 (no, don't tell me to update to the newest one released yesterday, their forums reek of issues)

Settings on the card through the NVIDIA Control Panel;

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Ambient Occlusion set to Performance

Antroscopic Filtering set to 16x

Skyrim Options;

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Antialiasing: 4 Samples

Texture Quality: High

Radial Blur Quality: Low

Shadow Detail: Ultra

Decal Quantity: Medium

FXAA checked

The only setting I've changed is Shadow Detail from Medium to Ultra, and that took care of the obvious stripes, but I can still see dancing especially on objects I'm near.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[WillieSea]

There is a setting for how often the 'sun' moves in the sky. This can cause it to 'suddenly' move when the time interval is met.

I am pretty sure its in the INI file somewhere.

[Hanaisse]

I searched for "sun" and "time" in both the skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini and nothing comes up. Could you be more specific?

[darkstone]

The variables that Willie is talking about are

fSunShadowUpdateTime=1.000

fSunUpdateThreshold=0.500

and they have to be added to the [Display] section of Skyrim.ini

More details on shadows can be found here, about half way down the page.

[Hanaisse]

Excellent!

I was able to increase the frequency and shorten the duration so that, even though it's still there, it's less often and does one jump instead of a dance. I can live with this!

Thank you both