Anti-Aliasing doesn't appear to work in Skyrim

[Awesomeade]

EDIT: So I think the problem I was seeing was with Skyrim Flora Overhaul. I was using the grass to judge whether my AA settings were working, and when I uninstalled the mod, the jagged lines were much less noticable. I'm not 100% certain if the problem is actually resolved, or if it is just much harder for me to tell whether AA is on or off.

As the title states, I can't seem to get antialiasing to turn on in Skyrim. Changing the settings through the launcher does nothing, and there is no visual difference between having AA at x8 or at off.

Here's what I did prior to this occurring:

I recently put together a new PC with a GTX 780. I was excited to take it for a run, so I installed Skyrim and performed all of my graphical tweaks prior to first starting the game so I'd have it looking great from the beginning. These tweaks included installing nvidia inspector and beefing up AA settings as high as they would go, turning on AO, as well as other things that I don't fully remember (I no longer have the exact settings profile I used, unfortunately). I noticed that I was still getting some jaggies, so I went back out, tweaked the settings, and saw no change.

From there, nothing I did seemed to make any difference. AA simply wouldn't work regardless of whatever settings I chose.

Things I've attempted in order to fix the problem:

I've un/reinstalled skyrim, I've reset the nvidia inspector profile to default settings, I've un/reinstalled my graphics drivers, I've tried changing the .ini settings, and I've even tried deleting the .ini settings to let the game create new ones from scratch. Nothing has worked, and I'm still plagued by jaggies.

I was using the GTX 780 with 320.18 drivers and the latest version of nvidia inspector on 64-bit WIndows 8.

TL;DR: AA won't turn on in skyrim and there are jagged lines everywhere.

If anyone has any advice, I will gladly accept it and be very grateful.

Thanks in advance.

[Marble]

Which OS is this?

[Awesomeade]

Originally posted by Canti:

Which OS is this?

Windows 8 x64

[Bullet Sponge]

Did you try the "clean install" option in the custom section of the Nvidia driver install? If that doesn't work, uninstall the drivers and run driver fusion to get rid of all traces of the nvidia drivers. If driver fusion leaves some behind and wants you to buy the premium version, you can look at what it left behind ad remove it yourself or run driver sweeper to get rid of the rest. Reboot and reinstall the drivers once they are all gone.

This time, if you must force AA, try doing it from Nvidia Control Panel and forget about AO for now. If that works, you can fool around until you break it again ;)

[Awesomeade]

Originally posted by Bullet Sponge:

Did you try the "clean install" option in the custom section of the Nvidia driver install? If that doesn't work, uninstall the drivers and run driver fusion to get rid of all traces of the nvidia drivers. If driver fusion leaves some behind and wants you to buy the premium version, you can look at what it left behind ad remove it yourself or run driver sweeper to get rid of the rest. Reboot and reinstall the drivers once they are all gone.

This time, if you must force AA, try doing it from Nvidia Control Panel and forget about AO for now. If that works, you can fool around until you break it again ;)

I just tried Driver Fusion after uninstalling the drivers. I made sure to remove absolutely everything nVidia from the computer, doing a system search to make sure I got everything. After that and rebooting I verified Skyrim's game cache, reinstalled the drivers (using a clean install via the custom installation settings), and then I rebooted the computer. Upon opening Skyrim's game launcher, letting it auto-detect ultra settings, and booting it up again, it still looked like AA was turned off.

I should mention that I also have some texture replacers installed via Nexus Mod Manager. Could that cause any issues with AA?

[Bullet Sponge]

Just saw your edit. You say you were using the grass to judge - the only sort of AA that affects grass is transparency AA. In Nvidia control panel, set AntiAliasing mode to "Enhance the application setting" (you can try "override" if that doesn't work), and set "antialiasing - transparency to 8x. See if you notice a difference.

[76561197986452325]

xyu

[Bullet Sponge]

You also might want to try FXAA if you haven't already, not sure if that affects transparent textures but it has less affect on framerate. You can use it with other types of AA too.

[Awesomeade]

So, I just re-installed Flora Overhaul to see if there was still an issue (as everything seemed normal when I chose not to run the mod). To my surprise, everything worked normally and looks great.

I have absolutely no idea what caused the problem to begin with, but it appears to be fixed for now. I did update to the 320.49 nvidia drivers between having these issues and attempting to run Flora Overhaul again, so there's the chance that that somehow fixed my problem.

In any case, thanks for taking the time to respond to my question! And since you mentioned it, I did attempt to use FXAA when I was initially having the problems but that did not seem to have any effect.