thanks

wind blows through the trees making the leaves rustle, branches and boughs sway... shadows react accordingly.
The wind effect isn't a realistic one though, unless viewed from very close up - ie on the ground
I'm thinking also that AA is applied to the trees, making them shimmer

Exactly this. It is my opinion too that it is the wind settings that cause this shimmering. If you zoom in really close to the leafs of a tree you will see how over the top animated they are.

Easy solution would be to slow this animation down like a hundred times in the Speedtree settings (something we cannot do ourselves unfortunately I think) or even turning the blasted animations off on them (wish there would be a setting that let you do that) Also, a lot of the flickering in mid distance is because of a funky animated LOD version of the trees, at least it seems like that for me after examinating things more closely. I think the trees go from fully detailed + animated, medium LOD + Animated, low LOD not animated, etc. The LOD + Animated version causes a lot of the shimmering in the trees further off in the distance.

I have managed to severely lower the flickering by tweaking my Anti-Aliasing and setting all shadow related settings to the max I could in conf.ini (eg shadowmap size, target rendering quality)

It is a lot less for me now and only noticeable flying relatively low over the ground in bright sunlight.


TL;DR

Unrealistically fast animation of the leaves on trees definetely seems to be the problem. Please give us an option to either slow the animations down seriously or shut em all off altogether.

Is not the wind, it happens to the houses as well.

If you watch carefully is flickering the whole shadow, even the parts that are not affected for the movement because its a all dark zone.

Explosion shadows also flicker, check out the black death track when the first bombs goes off and you'll see.

Mmm...sounds like something I should try. I was just about to ask about the shadowmap size and then I saw your post. Thanks.

Just remember everyone, the latest patch release is still beta, it wont stay like this forever. Luthier will get the team to fix the ATI issues.

It isn't unique to ATI, also it has been like this from release so it has nothing to do with the beta.

look at the shadows in cockpit, to get an idea of what is going on with building shadow flicker (saw tooth edgings)

Well I must be the odd one out because I haven't had any flickering problems until installing the April 27 beta patch. And because the only significant change to the code, graphically for me, was the implementation of Crossfire I suspect CoD has a sync issue between the two cards or hasn't used the right Crossfire mode. When I disable Crossfire the flickering disappears.