NVidia RTX3090 drivers pain - game looks like a mess

[Lupine00]

I "upgraded" my video card to an RTX3090 a few weeks ago, having previously used a 1080Ti.

With the 1080Ti, my Skyrim looked good.

 

Now, though my frame rates are better ... it looks like a total mess. It's basically unplayable. It's been like this since before Christmas, but finally I'm trying to sort it out.

 

I have a faint translucent pinkish rectangle covering the left hand side of my screen, which I think is an artifact of the debug prints that menu mods use being extended to fill the full screen height.

I cannot remember what mod made that text fill the screen instead of only using a few lines at the top left, but I *never* wanted it. It's always annoyed me, but now it's totally toxic.

(It was a requirement for something, but I can't recall what).

It disappears if I use 'tm' to turn my UI elements off, so I'm sure it's some kind of busted UI element.

It's impossible to see on a dark background, but against snow, or a pale sky, it's very obvious.

 

My smoke looks more like water ripples. It's very strange. It looks sort of OK at first, then quickly deteriorates, and gets more ripple-like as time passes.

This is most obvious on the loading screen, though it's also visible on other smoke. I'd say clouds too, but my clouds are all whited out, which is also wrong.

 

The subsurface effect for skin looks harsh, very on/off and is kind of pixelated, and generally shows up too much (or not at all).

I was able to improve this a bit by modifying the _sk texture for the skin to be larger and smoother, but it's still ... not doing what it should I think.

 

 

So, I updated my ENB core files and now...

 

 

I have a translucent gray "shell" around male characters outside in the rain, maybe female too, it's harder to tell.

 

My weather is busted and everything outdoors is washed out and undersaturated with a slight greenish tint and dark desaturated reds.

 

 

Cleaning and reinstalling all my ENB files has made no difference.

I'm currently using Caffeine. I guess I could move to Rudy easily enough to see if that fixes anything, as Caffeine hasn't been updated in a long time.

 

 

Has anyone else had similar pain, and if so, what did you do to fix it?

 

 

[Jabezare]

Never had anything similar, but I'll try to help. If you're using MO2, you can filter your mods on the left side with Contains Interface. You can run through those and check which one is causing the pink rectangle. Regarding the "shell" effect, it may be the new-ish Rain Wet shaders, but it's hard to say without screenshots. Try toggling them off in the ENB menu, see if that helps. 

[t.ara]

That RTX 3090 is a newest GPU on the consumer market (yet)....anyway is the question here, if your CPU and the "rest" of the computer is suiting together with such an exchange. Also GPU s rely on the CPU ´s power and also on simply the POWER of the POWER SUPPLY.

 

 

I also renewed my system and I have done that by shopping a complete new system. The Graphic Card RTX3090 is very HEAVY in different point of views, I added a suiting i9 intel-processor and a suiting MB with a new chipset (x299) as well. And NOT AT LEAST is a fine POWER SUPPLY necessary to give a huge possible peak-power (I choosed a 1200W supply) to keep the stystem far away from any risk of damaged parts of the computer. At least I would say it is better to use this stuff with windows 10, also under that circumstance, that I personally loved to stay with win 7 in the past)

 

My skyrim-I actually posted it into my thread of ZAP 9, is now working EASILY with a 3090 with 120Hz of refresh-rate and an ultra wide screen-format all together.

 

 

The drivers for the card are the last ones. If you have a problem, it is based on the other computer parts, which can not handle your new GPU.

If you use a different screen-format, send me a p.m.- skyrim (the GUI)  can only be handled by using a RAM-patch if you use custom screen formats).

 

 

[verel]

I would take a look at the NVIDIA driver settings. If it has some sort of profile setting for Skyrim.exe and would try to disable them one by one and see if that fixes your problem. My AMD gpu driver came with settings for Skyrim that always crashed when loading an outdoor cell together with ENB enabled. Disabling most of the stuff there fixed the problem.

 

[Lupine00]

1 hour ago, verel said:

I would take a look at the NVIDIA driver settings.

It does have some settings, but the settings you can control for the 30XX series are almost nothing compared to what you could force on/off in the 10xx series drivers.

I already turned off anything that looked remotely capable of causing an issue (relating to transparency or FXAA), and beyond that there's just not many options in the driver any more.

 

I have about 800 things (no that's not a joke) in my MO going into the game build, and the dependencies on them are complex, due to the many merges, so just turning them off is non-trivial. It's a path I'm familiar with, and don't much love, so I was hoping there might be something to shortcut it.

 

The grey shells seem related to the rain shader/wetness, for sure. I wasn't aware I could just turn that off in the menu, so I'll try that.

 

My RTX3090 is "fine" running more modern games with pretty much everything cranked to the max, including Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, RDR2, and all the stuff that people love to use for performance testing. Fine is relative though, yes, nice graphics, nice frame-rates, but I had a lot of trouble with the drivers prior to the ones I'm using now not supporting my resolutions and refresh rates, and that support is still not as good as it could be  - the 30XX drivers have a long way to go to get to where the 10XX drivers were. That's not an issue for Skyrim though, as 60FPS is the limit of what I want there anyway.

 

My problems seem to be a mix of ENB changes and something in alpha-texture handling that defaults differently from the 10XX drivers and doesn't seem to be configurable in the driver - but might be adjustable in ENB somewhere if I could find what setting to change.

 

Turning off the annoying full-height debug messages doesn't seem to fix the faint pink-tinted rectangle though.

[Grey Cloud]

Obvious first thing is to remove the ENB from the equation. See what things look like without it.

Next thing would be to pray fervently for either a good driver update or an update for the ENB/binaries or both.

 

2 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

the annoying full-height debug messages

Isn't there a setting in one of the ini files for the size of onscreen messages and such?

[MaxRex]

Delete Skyrim.ini, SkyrimPrefs.ini, from game directory and from MO2, run the vanilla game without MO2.

Adjust resolution and parameters, exit. Run MO2...

[Lupine00]

6 hours ago, MaxRex said:

Delete Skyrim.ini, SkyrimPrefs.ini, from game directory and from MO2, run the vanilla game without MO2.

Adjust resolution and parameters, exit. Run MO2...

I tried that before I posted here.

You don't really need to do it anyway if you customize those files.

 

I have Skyrim running in a VM - for my mod development - on the same physical machine that looks fine. It has no ENB though.

I'm reasonably convinced that the problems are an interaction between the drivers and ENB that needs some ENB settings changing somehow.

 

Why others don't have the same issue, I don't know? Older ENB core files? Different ENB? Or just stuff in enblocal.ini?

 

6 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Obvious first thing is to remove the ENB from the equation. See what things look like without it.

That is what I was thinking. My guess is it will look OK in a vanilla sort of way, but I need to confirm.

 

I was hoping somebody would be running an ENB on this card, with latest ENB core files + latest NVidia drivers, and have it looking right, and could post what ENB they are using and enblocal, Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini for comparison.

 

 

I was able to get rid of the fullscreen debug messages, but it didn't remove the rectangle. It might be coming from SkyUI or something else, but it's definitely a "broken" UI element because "tm" hides and unhides it. It's like some polygons from a flash rectangle that were supposed to be fully transparent have picked up some universal ambient color or something.

 

The smoke issue seems to be related to the multi-pass rendering somehow ... it's like the smoke is rendered twice, once in the main scene render and once more as a post process - and will go over the top of everything.

 

 

I'm looking for an ENB that has been updated and tested with 3090 and it's magical drivers, but ... so far I can't find one. The closest thing I could find is this RealVision derivative: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/104653 ... anyway, first step, remove ENB entirely ...

[woodsman30]

18 hours ago, t.ara said:

That RTX 3090 is a newest GPU on the consumer market (yet)....anyway is the question here, if your CPU and the "rest" of the computer is suiting together with such an exchange. Also GPU s rely on the CPU ´s power and also on simply the POWER of the POWER SUPPLY.

 

 

I also renewed my system and I have done that by shopping a complete new system. The Graphic Card RTX3090 is very HEAVY in different point of views, I added a suiting i9 intel-processor and a suiting MB with a new chipset (x299) as well. And NOT AT LEAST is a fine POWER SUPPLY necessary to give a huge possible peak-power (I choosed a 1200W supply) to keep the stystem far away from any risk of damaged parts of the computer. At least I would say it is better to use this stuff with windows 10, also under that circumstance, that I personally loved to stay with win 7 in the past)

 

My skyrim-I actually posted it into my thread of ZAP 9, is now working EASILY with a 3090 with 120Hz of refresh-rate and an ultra wide screen-format all together.

 

 

The drivers for the card are the last ones. If you have a problem, it is based on the other computer parts, which can not handle your new GPU.

If you use a different screen-format, send me a p.m.- skyrim (the GUI)  can only be handled by using a RAM-patch if you use custom screen formats).

 

 

This and so much this! Up-grading is more involved that just a quick exchange of cards the base computer must be-able to run it...windows system, memory, processor, and power.

[Lupine00]

On 1/4/2021 at 8:01 PM, woodsman30 said:

This and so much this! Up-grading is more involved that just a quick exchange of cards the base computer must be-able to run it...windows system, memory, processor, and power.

But not relevant. My machine was already suitable for the card, which works with other games - many of which are more demanding than Skyrim - as previously noted. I continually renew parts of my system as newer and better components become available; there are no old or underspecified parts in it.

 

It's just not helpful to get on a rant about system building, which is just not part of the problem. There is no issue of hardware insufficiency. It's just a clearly reproducible software issue.

 

What I have discovered is that the "game looks bad" issue is due to changes in ENB base behavior that are not well supported in:

(a) my old ENB configuration,

(b) almost any ENB configuration for Skyrim LE ... because most of them haven't been updated in years and the ENB core has continued to change regularly.

 

After doing a clean install of Snapdragon, I got a decent looking game ... but still with the pink tinted rectangle.

 

With the files I have, Snapdragon is perfectly playable on my hardware, but I probably won't stick with that, as I can certainly observe lower framerates than I had with Caffeine, and I believe Rudy is probably likely to work, as it has been actively updated for recent core ENB capabilities.

(Small update)

Spoiler

Rudy ENB and SURE ENB both work ok with the newer ENB core files, as expected.

SURE has the minor advantage that it automatically retains the aspect ratio when running in borderless windowed mode.

I'd like to replicate that in Rudy, but I know almost nothing about how ENB allows that to be specified.

I couldn't find any obvious parameters like aspect ratio or scaling. I guess there is some kind of final present shader somewhere ... ?

Anyway, it's not important, and I don't really care much about it, as I can fix the ratio in Rudy via my monitor settings.

 

I might go back to Snapdragon after all and try and fix the bright interiors so they're more reasonable.

 

There are probably many ENB configs that work with the latest core files, but I'm guessing a few that no longer work quite as intended too.

I will probably try a few more to see if I can find something I like as much as I did Caffeine.

 

I experimented with reverting to an old Caffeine-based setup, that had old (compatible) core ENB files, and it worked well - except for the persistent pink rectangle that blights everything ... see below how I fixed that.

 

Thankfully, I used ENB and ReShade Manager to manage my ENB setups, so I can revert to complete configurations from the past, which have the old ENB core-file versions that the ENBs need to work correctly - though there are flags in the new ENB core configuration you can use to disable the new behaviors, but that's just another thing I experimented with.

 

 

I also - eventually - discovered how to make the pink tinted polygon go away.

 

Various options that did remove the rectangle:

• Run in windowed mode (borderless or otherwise). The rectangle only shows up in fullscreen exclusive mode!
• Run in a resolution other than 2560 x 1440 (which is vertically letterboxed on my 32:9 ratio display).
  e.g. When running in a 32:9 ratio, 24:9 ratio or 21:9 ratio, it doesn't display the rectangle. The rectangle shows up in 16:9 though!

 

What does not remove the rectangle:

• Running in accelerated only, no FX mode in ENB.
• Running without ENB at all.
• Removing every single mod I possess and reverting to completely vanilla Skyrim.

 

So it turns out ENB is completely unrelated to the issue, as are mods. No mod is to blame.

 

It may be that the rectangle is an artifact of NVidia's own driver utilities; as I use an option to "not rescale" to run a 16:9, 21:9 or 24:9 window vertically letterboxed on my 32:9 display.

 

Probably, most people running this in ultra-wide mode have a 24:9 or 21:9 ratio monitor, and their goal was to fill their screen. I'm guessing they wouldn't see this issue, and most people with a 3090 bought it to work with a 4K 16:9 ratio monitor anyway.

 

As I am happy running in 21:9, which I can do using Ultrawidescreen Fixes for Skyrim LE, I have overcome my various problems.

 

As for why the pink rectangle appears under the conditions that it does, whether there are other ways to get rid of it, and whether it may vanish in some future 30XX drivers, I have no idea.

[t.ara]

The heading isn ´t suiting to the problem, which you have.

Your problem is how to set up SKYRIM with an 32:9 screen format.

What has been exactly changed after the 1080 has been used (hard- and software-changes).

 

[Lupine00]

No. My problem is not this.

11 hours ago, t.ara said:

Your problem is how to set up SKYRIM with an 32:9 screen format.

The 1080Ti worked PERFECTLY with the 32:9 monitor. Thus the problem is not the monitor, or how to set up Skyrim with it.

The problem is specifically the 30XX drivers, with that monitor.

Also, my monitor has features to impersonate different monitor shapes and sizes, so once I know I need to use them, I can do that.

It's not a problem I needed help with.

 

The 1080Ti also offered extensive ability to customize rendering behavior in the driver control panel, and the 30XX driver equivalent of this feature is ... a joke.

 

There are so many problems with these 30XX drivers, though the latest are the best so far. The earlier ones I had, when 3090 was new, wouldn't support my monitor at all, performed badly, had broken HDR, had broken G-Sync, broken control panel application that would hang the PC, and several other defects - so they're getting better - but the release of 30XX is a mess. The initial driver release was barely working and it is still only half-baked. On top of this, much touted RTX features such as DLSS look worse than simply running at a lower resolution. In practice, 3090 is usually fast enough to run without DLSS anyway, unless you have 8K, but it's a questionable over-hyped feature that produces irritating artifacts in the few games that support it.

 

As I explain above, I had several issues:

 

1) pink tinted rectangle on display

2) grey shells appearing around characters and broken weather effects

3) weird smoke

 

1) is an NVidia driver bug - workarounds are to run in any resolution except the one I want, or use windowed mode - why is the best resolution broken? No idea!

2) was caused by updating core ENB files to latest combined with an old ENB shader setup - fix was to install a more modern ENB with support for latest core.

3) was a simple mistake ... ENB particle patch was overwritten with stupid candle smoke mod - fix was to move ENB particle patch down in left pane of MO, though fixing (2) also improved it.

 

In the case of (3) the "weird smoke" actually looks OK in-game when (2) is not an issue. but it does look strange on the title screen.

(2) + (3) gives a bad outcome for smoke, because the ENB issues seemed to result in the smoke being double rendered.

 

Returning to (1), that problem appears when I'm running at the perfectly normal resolution of 2560x1440 (half my screen).

So why would I blame it on the monitor? It's a 16:9 resolution, so why would I say it's a 32:9 specific issue?

I don't even know that it is specific to 32:9 monitors. I haven't tried it on any non-32:9 monitor, so that's just speculation - and I made that clear.

 

Maybe the same issue occurs for other users on different monitors at different resolutions? How would I know it doesn't?

 

 

There is a valuable lesson from this...

 

If you have weird translucent rectangles appearing on your Skyrim with 30XX drivers the problem is:

• Not your ENB
• Not caused by a mod
• Is caused by NVidia

 

And you can probably make them go away by:

• Using a different resolution, or,
• Running in a non fullscreen-exclusive mode (i.e. windowed, or borderless window)

 

Also...

Spoiler

Possibly, there's a secondary lesson, though this is most likely just common sense: ENB's are tied to the core release they were built on. You can't always update the ENB core (to get bug fixes or features) without breaking the ENB. Sometimes you can get away with it, and that leads to thinking you always can - but it's not always possible.

 

Newer ENB core files are best used with an ENB configuration and shader-set that properly supports them.

 

Or put another way, if you're using an old ENB, and it looks fine and is stable, you probably shouldn't update your ENB core files.

 

In my case, I had a reason. Things weren't working well, so I updated ENB core in the hope it would work better with newer NVidia drivers. It only made more problems.

 

[27X]

On 1/3/2021 at 8:51 AM, verel said:

I would take a look at the NVIDIA driver settings. If it has some sort of profile setting for Skyrim.exe and would try to disable them one by one and see if that fixes your problem. My AMD gpu driver came with settings for Skyrim that always crashed when loading an outdoor cell together with ENB enabled. Disabling most of the stuff there fixed the problem.

 

 Boris has done zero troublehooting with AMD hardware and has already stated flatly he has no interest in any kind of compatibility work. AMD since Vega also uses a completely different rasterization chain to get graphics to the screen so what works for AMD folks will very likely not work at all for nVidia, especially in memory management, and this is only going to get further apart with Zen iterations as AMD moves to Big-Big GPU CPU and APU integration. nVidia literally has zero answer for this other than what Intel feels like doing on their behalf, which is right now zero.

 

Under dxvk, Skyrim >LE< can run 8K 50 with a 3090 without DLSS because fuck blur and the most punishing ENB made, I should know as it's my ENB.

 

 

3 hours ago, Lupine00 said:

My problem is not this.

Except that's exactly what it is, and it was an issue before the 30XX ever existed. You should also probably drop the Vyxenne level "i know about graphics coding cause one time I graphicsed a code" seeing as Boris has pulled at least four different ENBs over the last year because the coding couldn't be made universal for differing hardware.

 

More specifically two of the issues described are directly resultant from the interaction between windows 10 WDDM  and the ENBs base initialization check in .local before ENBseries even initializes.

 

 

This is a reoccurring set of issues between the ENB, the verion of WDDM that is currently installed and whatever hardware is present in the chain of getting the image to screen after the ENB has injected whatever changes the user has set, and Boris has again already stated he can only troubleshoot what hardware permutations he has access to and what other users can provide, and moroeover has refused anyone giving him charity hardware to use as a base.

 

If it was a driver issue it would be a universal bug and it isn't, period. It's your hardware configuration and the interaction it has with windows 10 and it was present in both 10XX and 20XX, replete with same exact issues reported by users with differing hardware.

[Lupine00]

7 hours ago, 27X said:

Except that's exactly what it is, and it was an issue before the 30XX ever existed.

Why do you say this, when it's obviously absurd?

My problem is what exactly? My monitor? That is what t.ara is saying, if you can decode it at all.

 

PRIOR TO 3090 INSTALL THE ISSUE DID NOT EXIST

 

I had no issue with my 1080Ti.

With the same monitor.

With the same windows install.

With the same motherboard.

With the same CPU.

With the same memory.

With the same Skyrim.

With the same ENB, not that it matters - as I easily demonstrated.

 

The issue occurs regardless of ENB - even with no ENB installed. Let me repeat that ENB has NOTHING to do with my problem.

 

7 hours ago, 27X said:

This is a reoccurring set of issues between the ENB, the verion of WDDM that is currently installed and whatever

It's not, because it happens even in an unmodded, squeaky clean vanilla Skyrim with no ENB files installed.

Not just the no-fx path, but with NO ENB wrapper DLL or EnbHost installed.

 

 

Whatever you think you're talking about ... it's NOT MY ISSUE. Maybe it's a really similar issue? Whatever. Thanks for your contribution. i.e. trolling patronizing "setting me straight" but offering no help to resolve an issue that is ... already resolved.

 

 

 

 

Maybe you should actually READ MY POST before telling me what I'm saying?

Maybe YOU should drop the attitude before telling me how to act?

 

If you want to tell me that the 3090 drivers haven't had a spray of massive fixes and updates every release, you know that would not be true. The amount of problems with those drivers is a matter of record. 

 

 

I think it's blindingly self-evident that this is not a universal issue and has some elements specific to my install. Of course everyone isn't getting random polygons all over their games. I really shouldn't have to qualify every tiny detail of what I say to the point that the entire message is lost in a massive sea of text. Even if I put hours into saying something so clearly and completely that you couldn't accidentally misinterpret it, I'm guessing you'd still twist what I said so far out of shape that it would be unrecognizable.

 

 

FOR ME, the one factor that was changed was the drivers and graphics card. Nothing else was changed. The problem wasn't caused by a windows update. The problem wasn't caused by adding a new monitor. The problem wasn't caused by replacing my entire motherboard and CPU. The problem was caused by the change of 3090 and attendant drivers.

 

In fact, the problem didn't even occur with older 3090 drivers either.

 

Clearly, no information is allowed to EXIST on this forum without you having approved it first.

So my next response will be to delete all my posts, which is clearly the outcome you're looking for here.

 

Thanks for your "help" in solving my problem.

 

For values of help equal to "offering no useful guidance in resolving the problem but posting only after it was already resolved, while being abusive and condescending."

 

Bonus points for redefining the problem to be exactly what you want it to be, rather than what I asked about - so you could simply bang your favorite drum in a thread where you have zero helpful contributions to make.

 

I only just remembered ... this isn't the first time you've tried to bully me off a forum ... but I'd rather just delete the entire thread than have to deal with any more out of you.  

[t.ara]

If nothing has been changed, the new GPU is defining to prepare SKYRIM in a little different way. It would be a shame if I have it working here and you "there" have it not working.

I had to change the skyrim ini file to prepare to a different resolution and I also use a memory-patch for SKYRIM´s GUI, so that the GUI is perfectly well suiting to my OLDER vertical screen-format: 1600i. In my new installation I also had to switch vertical sync "ON" by editing the suiting ENB-ini. You could also try to change the refresh-rate peak inside of the ENB.

The WATER-ACTIVATOR (water) of skyrim may lead to make troubles with different FPS-rates. I use 120Hz which is absolutely steady and stabil working-anyway, I switched lot of ENB functions OFF because it is a minor effect for me to show up (not worth imo to be switched active). It´s a question if it is not better to limit the refesh-rate maybe to  119 Hz -or to go more down. You need to experiment for some time to see which parameters are for you optimal, combined with your monitor-the CARD with windows 10 are all in correspondence with each other...it is a powerfull trio (as you can SWITCH HDR (if the monitor is supporting this feature (I don´t use that)) and you can switch G-sync, you also have the same settings-options like for all older nvidia-drivers under the NVIDIA-settings for each software, which runs with GPU-support.

You can test maybe the game at the beginning by letting it run also on 59Hz and look if those artefacts still occure.

Good luck!

 

ENB is taking influence on the parameters of the way the game is acting together with the GPU-driver/CPU, it seems now that there´s no way around to make some changes for testings, what is working in a successful way for you-you probably need to find a suiting set-up now.

 

p.s. DEINSTALL the NEXUS-WIDE-SREEN-MOD(s) if you use the memory-patch

 

 

[JuliusXX]

I also had a 1080Ti and managed to get a RTX 3090.  When I changed the graphics card I already had a working installation and I didn't notice any of these problems. The version of my Nvidia driver is 460.89 and here's some info about my ENB setup:

 

- ENB series v0.448

- ENB Helper SE v1.5

- Skyrim SE Shader Bundle - 1.5.73 and earlier. This fixes an ENB SE problem with Skyrim v1.5.80. More info here. - Lucid ENB - for Cathedral Weathers and Seasons (own setup files attached)

- Skyrim Particle Patch for ENB-SSE (2020-19-04)

- ENB Light v0.94

 

I use a 3440x1440 monitor and for the wide screen I use these mods:

 

- Complete Widescreen Fix for Vanilla and SkyUI 2.2 and 5.2 SE v2.0

- Better Dialogue Control Widescreen Fix v1.6

- Better MessageBox Control Widescreen Fix v1.6

- Even Wider Rescaled MCM Menu for SkyUI - Widescreen Fix v2.0

 

I hope something here can help or give some ideas.

 

EDIT: And I forgot to mention that these are for the SE version of the game. Somehow I automatically thought about SE.

 

enblocal.ini enbseries.ini

[Mack71]

For what its worth, upgraded from 1080ti to 3090 also but also upgraded to a 5120 x 1440 monitor and only issue`s I had were wide screen related 4 squares in top left corner other wise looks spot on runs fast, ive had three sets of gfx drivers in the time of owning this card just keeping them up to date as usual, the only thing I can think of is that I search out the Nvidia drivers remover to toally clean them off the system and then installed.

If other games work surley its software related some place, sorry man not much help but hope you get sorted.

 

AMD Ryzen 3950X

RTX 3090 driver v461.09

32 gig ram