Fix for light & effect artifacting / flickering (Racemenu SE v0.3.2)

[Detail.movie💕]

Hi, thanks to Julle64 on Nexus for mentioning this fix. The first thing I did when I got this problem was search the Steam forums and couldn't find anything so I'm posting this here.

If you are suddenly experiencing light and effects artifacting and flickering then this should fix your issues as long as you have the mod Racemenu SE v0.3.2. If you don't have this mod then this fix probably is not going to fix your issue. Also, allegedly the mod author is aware of the issue and said it will be corrected in v0.3.3.

Go to this directory: "*\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\SKSE\Plugins\" and and open skee.ini or skee64.ini. Open it and look for "bEnableFaceOverlays=1" and change the value to 0. I tested it and it has fixed all the artifacting and flickering so no need to downgrade. This change also seems to affect old saves.

This would be the best example of what the flickering looked like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54TGeExAom4

What was happening in my game is not exactly like that because that video is showing texture artifacting. Instead, the light from the sun and candles was artifacting. Also certain shadows and smoke.

I thought my graphics card was dying because of this. I clean wiped my display drivers in safe-mode and installed new drivers and that didn't fix the issue. I tried Lija's guide for clearing appcache and recaching but that didn't fix the issue. I disabled all mods and the flickering was gone. So I finally built up the energy to painstakingly test each and every mod I had installed. I activated each one individually to see which was causing it. Finally, Racemenu SE was the cause. I checked it's Nexus mod page and looked at comments. I saw a user named Julle64 mentioning about the author saying it was glitched and had to do with a WIP feature called face overlays and to disable it in the skee.ini. I looked for this file and that's when I found the fix. I hope I can help you in some way and thank you for reading.

[Vecna]

TYVM for this info. Took me 3 days to figure out it was racemenu that was causing this exact same issue as yours and I was using racemenu since but there was too many mods and presets I liked that requires racemenu. Luckly I've found your post and followed instructions, now the problem's gone and I'm finally able to play the game my way!

[Unlucky7evens]

Race menu's character creation backlight