Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Bugs & Technical Problems Light Shadows causes huge black artifacting. [PC]

So this has been a problem since before the game was released. I have seen it talked about on several steam forums but maybe the devs just have never seen it.

When "Light Shadows" is on in the settings, the light shafts in caves, dungeons, and ship interiors are opaque black pixels. It is 100% the light shadows setting that causes it, I have ruled out all other settings. All 3 quality variations of light shadows have the same effect. I will link 3 pictures. 2 of the starting island prison with the setting on, and 1 with it off.

https://imgur.com/a/o4n2vyF

And here is a video of the issue, where I enable and disable the setting, and rotate the camera to show the issue.

https://youtu.be/YcfOcWY8BIk

Specs: Windows 10, Nvidia gtx 1070, 16gb ram. Some sort of i7, don't know exactly which one.

I have also tried disabling shader cache in the nvidia settings, which I saw work for someone on a steam forum, but that did not work for me. I tried disabling god rays and that did nothing either.

This has been an issue since beta, does anyone know a fix?

This has been reported for the original release, but we have not been able to reproduce the problem. The programmer that looked into this said it was probably a driver issue.

But this has never happened with any other game as far as I can tell and I've updated my drivers countless times between when I experienced it in the beta and now. I will also report it on nvidia's forums but I doubt they will actually look into an issue that is only happening with one game that has persisted for a year of driver updates.

Comme on Larien it's driver issues?, as I've had it with every driver since release, and OK if you can't reporduce it, at least tell people the known work around.

Most users don't even report it, because they find the top search result gives that fix.

Large black artifact blocking a large portion of the screen. Possible Fix.

DarthMalik in the second post states


I can confirm
I'm Also using a Nvidia card a 1080 and have the latest drivers
v399.07

I notice there's been no driver update for this game.
Yet it shows the GameWorks logo (sic), but I have to reduce the lighting setting to stop the artifacting.

Both workarounds still work so we have to reduce one or the other.

Maybe remove the Logo until they fix the Drivers, eh?
selling it AS GameWorks is a joke, when mAX Settings don't..

I had to downgrade my graphic card driver to 385.28(the last driver before it starts artifacting like that).
works perfect on full ultra settings also fixed the little fps dips i was getting....obviously nvidia changed something in thier drivers after this for a different game and it screwed up this one.

I'm getting that with lighting quality high & light shadows.
It goes away in medium quality.
It blacks out the painting scenes at the difficulty/game mode selection.
It never did that before (but different nvidia driver, now using the 399.07 too).

Update: Still having this issue. 1 year later and several driver iterations later. I still cannot play with light shadows, which look amazing when they work. Maybe when I build my new computer in the next few months it will go away.

I'm disappointed that this hasn't been reproduced and fixed after an entire year.

Edit: This page is the first google search result for "divinity original sin 2 light shadows bug". I tried to find a fix again since I'm playing the game again, only to find my own post from a year ago that has no solution other than disabling light shadows.

In the nvidia Control Panel (right click an open area of the desktop to start), check the Antialiasing - Transparency setting and if it is set to 8x (supersample), reset it to default (that can cause this issue), or reset the 3D settings in general to default.