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What's the consensus on ENBoost?  I moved to an ENB preset built on the latest release (0.201), with the memory management improvements included.  Still had a couple CTDs, but I'll probably never get away from that.  Seemed a little more stable but it's hard to say after only a couple hours. If this ends up being the solution to the memory cap issue, this becomes an essential piece of a heavily modded game.

What's that? Â Too busy trying to figure out if they needed to merge their favorite pre-set with ENBoost? Â I'm actually a little surprised at how dead this topic is. Â Is it because Boris' documentation is a little hard to grok and this whole thing just runs on blue smoke and magic or something? I'll say this - The right ENB with the right settings (and that's a tricky combination) can completely overhaul the look of this game with no discernible loss of FPS. Â I just wish the guides were a little clearer when I started down this road. Â Thank the Nine for ENB Manager and the ability to survive my mistakes.Â

I'm still a Skyrim noob, so I'm hesitant to make any changes without feedback from the regulars (assuming I even have permissions) but the ENB guide is now waaaaaaay behind the times IMHO given the emergence of Boris' performance improvements post 0.193. For a heavily modded game, it's hard to see the wisdom in using any presets built on an earlier release. BTW, as an edit to my previous post, might want to add somethign like this: 8. This is beautiful, but it's killing my FPS! SSAO and DoF are usually the biggest FPS hits. Try turing it off and see what the tradfe-off gets you >> To disable SSAO set EnableAmbientOcclusion=False & UseIndirectLighting=False. >> To disable Depth of Field set DepthOfField=False.

As a little update for anyone who comes later with this same issue, I got the new power supply, but it's still sitting in a box on my floor. The slow-down issue never happened again. I still get CTDs, of course, but that's pretty normal. Now I'm theorizing that whatever was wrong with my hardware was "fixed" the first time I tried to replace my power supply and realized my spare wasn't good enough. Putting everything back must have jiggled the right wires. I'm totally guessing. At this point, it's all blue smoke and magic.

To answer your questions, no, I didn't just add any new large textures - I did those first, I did the 1k & 2k versions only, and performance tested all of them before beginning my "real" play through. Oh, and I did follow Neovalen's guide as a companion to my STEP install. I have (recently) blown the dust out of my case, and confirmed my fans are working. I've also started using the spot cooler I have in my office to lower the ambient temperature. That said, I'm beginning to think we're barking up two different trees. The first is the CTDs, which isn't that unusual for a heavily modded Skyrim (at least from what I'm reading). That one is bearable. The other issue, which hasn't happened that often but did happen again last night, was the framerate drop. This can happen in mid-play, no scene change or fight required, and it can happen even before start-up (meaning game start is excruciatingly slow). Yesterday, I had Skyrim Perf Mon up and saw that, while the game was struggling to launch, the GPU wasn't even engaged. It's so random, it's hard to see how it has anything to do with my mods. As an additional data-point, twice this weekend, I came in to my office to find that my PC was shut all the way down (which is not how I have patching set up). The second time, I couldn't get it to boot back up until I had taken the entire thing apart. Based on that last bit, I'm beginning to suspect that my (not very old) power supply is dying. I tried to replace it yesterday, but my spare power supply didn't have the right connectors (and possibly sufficient wattage) to power my video card. I have another one on the way, and I'll swap it out and see what that does. As an aside, I'm planning on adding the "AutoSave Manager" to save me from the occassional CTD when I've been negligent with my saves. I've heard that auto-saving increases the odds of save file corruption. Any truth to that rumor? Thanks for all the advice, folks!

Sigh. Nope. No difference. But since the performance drops have transformed into plain ol' fashioned random CTDs, maybe this is just life running 200 (even hand-picked, carefully ordered and cleaned) mods. Other than the fact that it seems to get worse with time, this isn't that different from what I had with Oblivion. Thanks for all the ideas!

This one is almost impossible to troubleshoot. Looks like the behavior has changed. Now, I'm not slowing down but, instead, go straight to CTD. I did run Skyrim perf mon and what I saw was that, after an initial period of no problems for about 90 minutes, every time I approached a GPU temperature of 170 degrees, I became increasingly unstable. It could run around 165 for a while, going and down, but at some point, I'd press the wrong button and it would CTD. The periods of stability decresed until I stepped away. Then, the longer I was away, the longer I could play. Is this game killing my video card? Did I get a bum card?

Yes, I have the loading screen fog remover. And, yes, this is probably a hardware issue. Last night I went back to an earlier profile, and it loaded and ran fine. Then I added everything back one mod at a time until I was back to the same exact profile that was killing me the night before, only now it worked just fine. I played for around an hour, and then the frame rate started dropping off like it did the night before. I went and walked the dog, and then came back and it ran just fine for maybe a half hour, and then it started dropping off again. The rest of my PC seems to be just fine, so now I'm wondering if my video card, which is only a couple months old, is starting to overheat or something like that. Maybe I should take this as a sign to stop playing marathon Skyrim.

Even when the same profile loaded up and ran just fine a few minutes earlier? Â The same batch of .esps? I've got several saved profiles I can fall back on, so this is doable. Â In fact, that was my plan, anyway. Â Really didn't want to lose the time I spent playing last night as it was a real challenge (the Ghostblade dungeon). Â It ran so well right before it CTD'd...

I'm having almost exactly the same symptoms without the OS upgrade. Are you sure that's the trigger?

There is a very informative explanation by the mod author a few posts above. I read it. And the instructions on the mod itself. It's on my short list. What I'm suggesting is what he's suggesting: Load at initiation, but don't activate it until Helgen has "settled". My question was more along the lines of, "why do many folks see this as a problem?" And, to make sure everyone understands my tone, I'm truly curious. I'm a long-time Oblivion modder but just started Skyrim a couple weeks ago.

So what's the concern with waiting a few days to activate the ESP? I'm assuming you can have it installed and BOSSed and BASHed without it being active, without any risk of corruption, right? I've seen some people saying not to add ANY mods after the initial load, but isn't that a little conservative?

Hey, folk - I need a little guidance. I'm playing a new-ish Skyrim set-up, using the latest S.T.E.P. (somewhat modified) and Mod Organizer. Â Here's my set-up: i5 Dual @3.47GHZ 12 GB Mem GeForce GTX 670 2GB Mem S.T.E.P. 2.2.6 Baseline + some of the optionals Mostly 1 MB textures, with some 2 MB interiors Last night, I added about 5 non-S.T.E.P mods, mostly gameplay related ESPs, and they worked pretty well for about two hours. Â I had a CTD which, for a heavily modded game I'd been playing without error for 2 hours, I counted as pretty good. Â However, when I restarted the game, just *launching* the game took over ten minutes (from @ 2), and I'd lost maybe 25 FPS from what had been playing fine just a few minutes earlier. Since the problem starts on launch, this doesn't sound like a corrupted save issue. Â And, in fact, I can continue to play the game (at 5-15 FPS). So I have a few questions: 1. Â What just happened? Â Did my install somehow just get corrupted? 2. Â How do I recover? Â I was thinking that maybe I just need to re-install Skyrim. Â If I do that, can I re-apply the mod configuration I was using last night? Â I've been modding this thing for a straight week and just about had it done so I would hate to have to start over from scratch. Â Especially if I don't know what happened. Â I have been saving my mod profile every day before any significant change. I haven't advanced past 5th level, so it won't kill me to start over though, of course, I'd rather not. BTW, if the Mod Organizer team is listening, you guys are gods. Â The ability to un-apply a texture overwrite that didn't work out is just fantastic. Edited to add some setup detail

This is something I compiled for myself (mostly from one mod author's Nexus page): ******* 1. Day/Night too bright/dark! I hate it! Increasing directlightingintensityday/directlightingintensitynight or ambientlightingintensityday/ambientlightingintensitynight makes things brighter and vice-verse BLOOM: Increasing amountday/ammountnight makes things brighter and vice-verse 2. Shadows too dark/light! Directlightingintensity determines the darkness of the shadows, greater values make shadows darker Ambientlightingintensity brightens the entire scene so it can be used to brighten/darken shadows Adjusting contrast is the easiest tweak to make things look good 3. Fire/lights too bright/dark! Adjust 'pointlightingintensity' greater values mean brighter lights. 4. I cant see the sky!!! Its all white!! Adjust 'Gradientintensity' to suit your taste, remember to check dawn and dusk too in all types of weather! 5. I hate the sunglare! Adjust 'Sunintensity' and 'Suncoronaintensity' to suit your taste. 6. Everythings so shiny! I hate it! OR, I need more shiny awesomeness! Adjust 'Specularamountmultiplierday/night' to suit yourtaste. As a side note dont set it too high or everything will look like plastic. 7. Black bars? Ewwwwww! open enbeffect.fx with notepad and change: float2 sqvigpwr = float2( 1.7, 1.55 ); // For square vignette: (top, bottom) to float2 sqvigpwr = float2( 0.0, 0.0 ); // For square vignette: (top, bottom) or Look for any line enabling "letterbox" or "vignette" and comment ("//") it out. ****** Would it make sense to put something like that under "Troubleshooting"? I know each setting was explained in detail on a different tab, but this might be easier for people coming to that page looking for a solution.