Skyrim: AA not working or am I doing something wrong?

[dmoney1980]

My rig:
i5 2500k
Radeon 7950
Win 8
2560x1440

Skyrim (latest update through steam) with the following mods:
Unofficial Skyrim patch
High rez textures packs 1,2, and 3
Pure waters
Improved interior lighting

I have everything maxed out under graphical options in the Skyrim menu, and I was getting jaggies like crazy. So I went into CCC and set it to override application settings, and set AA to supersampling. I still get jaggies like crazy (pic below-look at the shadows). What am I doing wrong? Also, any other high rez texture packs out there? This game still looks kinda crappy to me

 

[Red Hawk]

First step when troubleshooting a modded game: turn off all the mods.

As for shadows, IIRC shadows are all generated real-time in Skyrim, there's no "pre-baking" like there is in other games (particularly Unreal Engine 3 games). In order to make this possible, there's really no filtering done to the shadows. The result is one of the most comprehensive and inexpensive shadow systems in games, but also one of the ugliest. I've tried looking for ways to improve them through .ini changes but there really isn't; there might be a mod to improve shadows but it would probably be very performance heavy.

And yes, there are a variety of hi-res texture packs available on the Steam Workshop/Skyrim Nexus; the only official ones are those you already have though.

 

[shortylickens]

Theres like 5 mods to improve shadows, and they all kill performance.


http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/

 

[Martimus]

Those jagged shadows aren't the kind of Jaggies that Anti Aliasing would help. They are caused by the way the game renders shadows. A low-pass filter wouldn't really help in this case, although if it were wide enough, it would blur the image enough to flatten out even those edges. It would just look like you needed glasses.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

You can use an ENB config that is specifically tuned to keep the vanilla color palette and lighting and ignore all the special ENB effects like depth of field or ambient occlusion. You'll get the improved shadows of ENB with none of the extra eye candy. Because, as others have said, there is literally nothing you can do ingame that will make shadows completely smooth; it's a limitation of the engine Skyrim uses to render shadows.