Greetings,

I remember Witcher 2 having trouble with shadows and dithering...
After I played W3 for a while I started to notice dithering on some surfaces, some times on NPCs but the most annoying thing is the fact that textures appear/dissapear with that kind of dithering effect...

I added a screenshot of a shadow that was cast on a cliffside near a beach...
Basically...if I ride through bushes, trees or other foliage, the foliage I'm passing through dissapears in some kind of "grainy dissolve" like seen in the screenshot instead of simply vanishing of fading out "cleanly"...and they are reappearing in the same way...it really breaks immersion for me...

It's kinda hard to explain...I hope someone is getting what I mean ^^
I'd be happy if there was a solution or if someone could tell me that this behavior is normal...

I already checked everything (temps are fine, newest drivers, changed ingame settings...to no avail...)...

I think this is an nvidia problem with their drivers.. Had this also in Fallout 3..

Unfortunately, I can confirm that i've seen this on my AMD R9 280x as well.

I noticed this in the Witcher 2. It isn't often, but when these dithering artifacts appear it does indeed look very horrible; is it something to do with the sharpness filter perhaps?

R9 290x joins formation. :) Same problem, tried various post-processing, made dozens of screenshots, can't find much of a difference really.

Well...at least I'm not the only one having that "issue"...
If someone finds a solution (or an improvement) or an explenation, it would be awesome...

As written on geforce tweak guide you should play with CascadeShadow values

[Rendering]
CascadeShadowFadeTreshold= [Ultra Value: 1] - Decrease the value to improve the maximum view distance of shadows
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0= [Ultra Value: 1] - Increase the value to improve the quality of close-range shadows
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1= [Ultra Value: 1] - Increase the value to improve the quality and visibility of close and medium-range shadows
CascadeShadowDistanceScale2= [Ultra Value: 1.5] - Increase the value to improve the quality and visibility of distant shadows
MaxTerrainShadowAtlasCount= [Ultra Value: 4] - Increase the value to potentially improve the quality of terrain shadows
CascadeShadowmapSize= [Ultra Value: 3072] - Increase the value to slightly improve the fidelity of shadows
CascadeShadowQuality= [Ultra Value: 1] - Increase the value to slightly improve the fidelity of shadows

you should play with boosting the Scale0 mostly as there's problem with close shadows being rendered kinda weirdly.

On top of that you should raise the foliage shadows

[Rendering/SpeedTree]
FoliageShadowDistanceScale= [Ultra Value: 54] - Increase the value to enable a few extra trees, bushes, and grass clumps to cast shadows

My values which fixed the problem for me:

FoliageShadowDistanceScale=32
CascadeShadowQuality=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale1=2
CascadeShadowDistanceScale0=2

Hope it helps Have fun !

you are my hero dude, this issue was annoying me hardly on witcher 2 even after i spend hours on google to find a solution i didnt found one, as i saw it in witcher 3 too i almost lost my hope that i can ever fix it, at the end i thought my gpu was the reason because i couldnt believe that such a ugly shadow is normal in high rated games like witcher.
This changes almost fixed it too a unoticeable amount.

Big THX !!!!

Hi guys, is this the same kind of bug?

Its not a bug it's how the engine works witch shadows.

This is not a bug, it's how the engine works.

CDProject does shadows "dithering" style. It's their choice. Its barely noticeable in the Witcher 3 tho in their defense. I dare you to go look at TW2's shadows. Absolutely horrible. I assume there's some kinda performance to quality gain...

Anyway, you could try some Sweetfx / Reshade presets/mods from nexus, in some cases they help make the effect less apparent, but removing it is simply not possible.