Shadow Striping in Mass Effect 3

[SingisTinge]

Hi

For some reason I am getting horrible shadow striping in ME3 on dynamic shadows outside and sometimes inside of cutscenes. The vast majority of the time cutscenees are fine but the second the cutscene ends all the dynamic shadows are striping. This seems to happen a lot and is especially noticible on worlds with high contrast light such as the hospital on the citadel. The issue also happened in the cutscene with the merc boss, i forget his name whoever the one who says Aria will sleep with him.

I have tried all manner of tweaks but nothing had made the problem go away. Has anyone got any ideas or a possible fix. Is anyone else experiencing this problem as all over the internet I have seen no one with this issue?

http://i61.tinypic.com/2yl769w.jpg

Note the shadows appear as stripes on his back and also on shepards face. Every shadow in this room appears as stripes. This is especially noticable when things are movings as the shadows stripe up and down objects.

Please can somebody help?

[TheNoseKnows]

In Coalesced.bin, change ShadowTexelsPerPixels from 1.27324 to 4 (the value used in ME2, which did not have this problem). This fixed it for me.

An explanation of what this setting does can be found here: https://tera-forums.enmasse.com/forums/general-discussion/topics/ini-tweaks-and-performance-guide

ShadowTexelsPerPixel= I am not entirely sure what the definition of this setting is, but I'll tell you what I've experienced it as. Let say there is a huge mob and a small mob. If the huge mob is stand next to the small mob, and your looking at them both, the huge mob will have a very large shadow compared to the small mob. But if the huge mob is far away, its possible that the large mobs shadow will be equally as big( in pixel count) as the small mob's shadow. So what this option does is it changes not how far you see shadows, or how many shadows you see, but how many pixels on your screen shadows will take up. So if you set this sufficiently high, you will see almost every shadow from every creature. But if it isnt high enough, you will start to see the very smallest (pixel count) shadows no longer render. So to define this line in other words it could be called "Amount of screen space taken up by rendered shadows". Larger shadows taking precidence.

Basically, if the value is too low, then the game will limit the amount of shadows displayed on a character. Some parts are shadowed, others are not, which results in the striping effect.

EDIT: I've bolded the most important parts.

[holger1405]

@TheNoseKnows

Wow, that's the second relevant necropost I saw in a day. Must be something in the Air.

A little advise, if you tell somebody to edit the the "Coalesced.bin" of ME3 you also need to tell him where he can find the Tool to do so. ME3 - Coalesced Utility

(For everyone, make a Backup of your "Coalesced.bin" before you use the tool)

Don't take this Post as a critique, that's not my intention, in the contrary, I like the fact that you try to help people.

[Forkinater]

I'm having this same issue and I could really use someone's help. I have edited so many shadow variables (one at a time) and nothing seems to work.

Before anyone suggests repairing my game or completely re installing, I've done this many times. I just want this gone.


. I've tried changing shadowdepthbias to many other values in a large range between 0 and 1 and nothing actually make a it go away besides disabling dynamic shadows.



Here's some screenshots of the issue

http://m.imgur.com/a/vNqin

[holger1405]

@Forkinater

What GPU do you use?

Do you use any Mods?

[Forkinater]

I use a GTX 1080 ti, latest drivers, just checked for new ones yesterday. I use a ALOT texture mod. I made my game vanilla and tried going in game again to see if it was the mod ALOT but it wasnt.

I vanilla my me3 by renaming the folder to "bak mass effect 3" and then I install mass effect 3 through origin as if it was never installed. After installation, I recheck the game. Oh and I delete my gamersettings.ini file and create a new one by starting up the game or running the me3 configuration tool, setting up my display settings and saving the changes.


It's so unfortunate this happens. I forgot to mention that I reinstalled the latest gpu drivers properly through DDU but that made no difference. The only setting that changes anything about the striped shadows is shadowdepthbias=


The lower the number, the thinner the stripes are, meaning they are spaced closer together. Higher numbers closer to the end spectrum of 1 reduce dynamic shadows but create larger, more pronounced shadow stripes.


Not sure if i shoukd mention this but this issue was happening before I got my GTX 1080 ti. I had a 1080 before this and I had the same issue as now.

[holger1405]

@Forkinater

So "shadowdepthbias=" without a value works? Never tested that, what is the effect in game?

Did you tested with numbers below full digits like 0.08?

Also try to change "texturegroup_apl_xxx" / xxx =1024 - 512 to "1" if it is "0" could be a LOD issue as well.

[Forkinater]

I'm sorry, I assumed that you understood that I was only referring to the variable shadowdepthbias and not the actual value being nothing. I have never tried setting shadowdepthbias to "shadowdepthbias=".


I have tried a range of values between o and 1 and none of them make the effect of th3 shadow striping go away. And yeah I tried a lot of values between o and 1 like 0.008, 0.030, 0.012, etc.


I will try the texture group tweak when I get on my pc and report back if it works or not.

[Forkinater]

Could you elaborate for me exactly what I should change the values of the APL  texturegroup?

This is what I see

TEXTUREGROUP_APL_128=(MinLODSize=256,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_APL_256=(MinLODSize=512,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_APL_512=(MinLODSize=1024,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)
TEXTUREGROUP_APL_1024=(MinLODSize=2048,MaxLODSize=4096,LODBias=0)

[holger1405]

@Forkinater

Set "LODBias=0" to "LODBias=1")

I have not much confidence that it will help with your specific problem, but only you can test that.