Spock

Hey DoubleYou, I have been toying with Skyrim SE lately. Thanks again for your great tool, it really helped. I got some questions if you would be willing to help out: It seems that some DoF blur effects where not entirely disabled by disabling DoF. I still had some DoF blur going on, dunno why. Is there a way to make grass fade more aggressively towards the edge? I'd like to start the fade earlier and have lighter grass at the end. [edit] found a guide for some of these settings. Do you happen to know if terrain lod setting distances are similar for LE and SE? Is fMeshLOD used by the game? Does this actually reduce poly count? Did you notice much of a difference with decals and particles? Particles can be a performance hog in some engines, so it might be desirable to restrict them in some way. It would be nice to have some indication on what kind of visual difference to expect, what to look for. Thanks in advance for any input!

Hey Mator, just wanted to drop by and thank you for creating this! Proper Bash/Smash/Mash patching was dearly missed by me in Skyrim. It is surprising how many people like to give modding advice and have no idea how entries work btw :) Is there a tag and Loot implementation? That could simplify conflict resolution for a lot of people! Regards, Spock

This looks very much like SSAO. Which version of ENB are you on? edit: I'm probably not going to visit these forums for a long while. The oldrim SSAO looked best with AOAmount=1.1 AOIntensity=1.3 ILAmount=1.0 in my humble opinion. This is reasonably close to an indirect lighting approximation I saw in a raytracer written by a friend of mine, with some slightly higher occlusion to add a moody effect. Way too many people put in wild numbers in their SSAO presets. While this is of course the artistic freedom of the creator of the enb preset, it goes against the goal of SSAO/SSIL: approximate global illumination. Slightly more AO then 'realistic' (meaning best approximation with Boris' method) helps to make mesh transitions look a little less artificial. But I would try to stay somewhat close to 1.0 values. Also note that some textures might have an AO effect already baked in (kind of like a light map, but only on the texture). It might look odd to add further AO.

Hey Steppers, I know you are mostly in team green. The first Volta benchmarks are very exciting imho. nVidia seems to finally close the gap to AMD in their architectural features. Great Async compute performance and probably all the dx12/Vulkan shader functions. This is the first nVidia generation I am excited about since the Kepler debacle (those cards where just trash, only good for a single generation of games). I'm probably back to team green :)

I think the 1080 is boutique already. Imho 500$ is a lot of money to spend on a GPU that will fall of significantly when the next generation arrives. The 780ti is the perfect counter example. At launch, it beat the partner 290s handily. Today, they are on par. Pricing was 350$ vs 700$. That card aged like Charlie Sheen. Nvidia caught up a little, their architecture is not as far behind as it used to be. But I wouldn't expect those cards to age well either. Not 700$ well at least. I know you are the enthusiast who likes to stay on the current gen GPUs and who enjoys top end performance and I think you should. But such cards really are not an 'economic' investment (as far as that can be said about gaming hardware anyway).

After the most glaring bugs are ironed out, Ryzen's performance is pretty impressive. And given their inferior process, their design is also more power efficient then Intel's. Ryzen is at the moment hardware for tinkerers though. If you want your stuff to 'just work', get an Intel CPU. The high end parts are very interesting for productivity, because Intel's 8 Core solutions are so excessively overpriced. For high end gaming, Intel is just faster. Ryzen has the better bang for your buck and the Mainboards are cheaper. Since Intel hasn't managed to get much more performance out of their past few generations, I expect the next AMD generation to really catch up. They will hopefully iron out most of the weaknesses of their architecture and platform, in that case it will probably become an easy recommendation for budget builds. I doubt they will catch up with Intel at gaming performance any time soon. I'm personally looking forward to the Skylake-x hexacore.

No native async compute, no FP 16 double throughput. This is again a pricey card that needs to be replaced fast. At 700$, this is extreme enthusiast only :/ If you are willing to pay that much money on a GPU, I'd rather get the Titan and grab the FP16 performance too.

I heavily disagree with the conclusion of the video. It's like saying WV cars are really good because the Lamborghini by the same company is really fast. But vast majority of people doesn't want to afford a Lamborghini. The high end marked for GPUs gets huge marketing attention but for the vast majority of customers, it is really irrelevant. What really is important are the 200-300$ GPUs and how long they stay relevant. That is the segment and use case where NVidia cards are consistently worse for the past 4 years. The points about power efficiency mentioned in the second are only relevant for gaming btw. If you want real power efficiency, look at Furmark benchmarks. [edit] Sorry, tuned it down a little. There is just too much misinformation out there, I find it annoying at times.

Well, CPUs are not very relevant for games in general, with very few exceptions. So broadwell single threat performance (that's what Zen is currently compared to) is totally sufficient for most games and the mobo and CPU might be much cheaper. Remember that Intel boards are also more expensive too because Intel forced their board partners to make the pins for the socket. Vega 10 has some really great architectural stuff btw. fp16 double performance for example (something NVidia promised but didn't deliver). NVidia has better marketing (as seen in these forums) but AMD certainly has better architecture in the GPU department.

Zen is really good for the CPU marked because competition is good. I have hopes that it will lower the ludacrious prices of the HEDT segment. Only the releases will tell what budget options zen will bring. But I would definitely wait for two months before buying hardware atm. Many people think Intel will have problems getting more single threaded performance because all the low hanging fruits are in the basket already. I personally hope for a well clocking desktop edram chip, possibly HEDT. More cores definately mean more performance for many important tasks, just not for games.

Maxwell and Pascal were definitely improvements over Kepler (which is comparable to AMDs x1000 in design and shittyness). But until they implement true async shaders and substantially improve their shader arithmetic I still think GCN is the overall better architecture. Don't get me wrong, NVidia has made, and is making great cards. If I'd be willing to spend the money, I'd go team green. They are really good at the usecase of 'play current generation games'. They have the resources for a huge driver team which is essentially reverse engineering (often with help/partnership) games and try to optimise performance. That is a pretty big and expensive undertaking but NVidia is doing an exceptional job at it. The big and expensive driver teams is part of the motivation for next gen APIs, to cut the team and raise profits. But AMD really has another problem that is deeper then driver level: The established libraries do not properly support their architecture. That is the other motivation for Vulkan (and it's successor Mantle); get a better intermediate language that can use more features of the cards. Vulkan is also another try at dislodging MS by attacking dx, hence why Valve is such a big partner. AMD has made some good incremental improvements to GCN since it's invention. But most of them are hardly used by many applications. But you are right, most of the extra power from modern AMD cards come from bigger chips and smaller processes. You are right, I hoped I made clear I was mostly speculating. Most info about Zen is hype and I highly doubt it will be able to truly compete with newer Intel chips for high end single core performance. It will probably be a little of a let down for some people. It still looks like it could shake the mid-end marked though, CPU prices are really high at the moment. The newest rumors on videocardz is that Vega 10 is roughly around gtx 1080 performance in Ashes. That means behind gtx 1080 in most other games and ahead in stuff like madvr. Pretty much like the last high end generations of AMD. They still tend to price their cards rather competitively though and Vega 10 (according to rumors) might arrive before Zen does anyway. But I do not expect a major price shift in the GPU marked, the rx480 is already priced rather competitively and the 300$+ cards are largely irrelevant for most of the marked (except for the stupid 'NV has the fastest cards' hype). We have a pretty good idea of what Intel's future chips will look like, and a decent idea of how nVidia will continue to design, but I don't know that anyone has a good idea of price/power on Zen or Vega, which makes it difficult to make value extrapolations until we see them.

If doing college tasks means ms word and some excel, pretty much any laptop will do. Maybe it would even be beneficial if you can't do much gaming on that device, I know it is for me The two factors I would look at are battery life and weight. A 13" laptop with a skylake 'u' processor and an SSD should to the trick just fine, there are some left-overs on the European market which are fairly cheap (around 400€). DDR3L is just fine btw. With your budget you won't be able to also make huge leaps with your desktop gaming machine though. You might profit from waiting a little because AMDs next CPU generation Zen is right around the corner. It is not expected to beat Intel in the high end marked but it is expected to bring back some much needed competition to the mid end market, bringing down prices. According to videocardz, the rx 490 seems to have been spotted (next gen AMD GPU) as well. AMD GPUs are known for very aggressive pricing, so that might bring down some GPU pricing as well if you look for a new desktop GPU. So you can probably get better hardware for your money if you wait 1 or 2 months. As for GPUs: They way you seem to purchase hardware; namely buy budget parts that have to last long, stay away from NVidia. The difference is, that NVidia has the bigger driver team and thus more driver optimisations for the current generation of cards while AMD has the better architecture that only game further down the pipeline can make use of. NVidia is better for people willing to spend 300$+ a year on GPUs alone (enthusiast market), apart from some specialized compute cases where NVidia is faster.

Do you really need a laptop? What do you need it for? The second question is especially important regarding choices of models. You will alwas get much better hardware for the price if you don't go mobile. Especially for gaming. Zen will hopefully lower the high cpu prices. It may be beneficial to wait.

Tbh, both seem like rather poor choices. Very heavy for a mobile device and I'd expect poor battery life too, especially for the Haswell HQ. Asus is also known for high rma rates on their mobos, dunno if that applies to their mobile devices too though. But at least it's not HP :)

This is me being lazy, I haven't had the time for Skyrim for quite a while: How does the SSAO compare to ENB's SSAO_SSIL? ENB's SSAO and SSIL creates a very good approximation of indirect lighting, do you think SSE can compete? edit: Does anyone know if the script engine performance has improved?

Are you actually seeing the image getting 'slurred'? Or do you just have a sense of non responsiveness? My second guess would be triple buffering. But that usually doesn't give you a slurred image, it is more like the mouse is kind of floaty and soft and the image is less responsive (way more noticeable if you have a very responsive display to begin with). I had the feeling that enb enables it in the past but I never drilled any deeper, so I do not know. How many fps do you get?

Could be temporal AA. Try disabling it in your enblocal.ini and see if its better.

My favorite is currently still Natural Lighting and Atmospherics. It curcumvents compatibiliy problems because it requires no other lighting and weather mods. The colors just look realistic like no other ENB does. But im not a fan of the color screwing modern movies tend to do too, so maybe I'm just a loner with my choice :) I think the ssao settings could be improved though, but that is true for most ENBs as I like a 'realistic' approximation of GI, not a stylized one.

Mono Accipiter's point is a very good one. I think the capacity for fact based, logic thought for the average human brain is met. Information is ever more abundant, technology gets ever more sophisticated, circumstances in life change ever faster and chains of interest/how and why things are done the way they are done gets ever more complicated. Our brains are meant to survive and thrive in a stone age world and hasn't seen much evolution since then. Maybe we need to find a system to better accommodate that fact. Transcendence is an imho very good movie on that topic btw. The narrative pacing has it's weaknesses though.

I am having a similar bug. The game sometime won't load full res textures or not put grass on grids. Rebooting my system usually fixes it. This is with a full STEP install. I think it might have something to do with low ram and DynDoLOD.

Yeah! People are definitely growing too soft theese days! All that 'talking' and 'debating' they are doing, hoping for each other to listen to their 'oppinion' and 'feelings' or even trying to do 'logical' arguments to solve their differences. People should be smashing each others heads with spiked clubs more! Vote for Trump!

I think Boris had a little twist in that sentence: He probably meant to use the mod for memory management purposes and not shaders set UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=true. What that setting most likely does (very easy to test by deleting the shaders and measuring the overhead) is disable all dx9 api call interceptions not related to ENBoost.

I don't think that is possible...

Have you actually checked with something like performance monitor? Hitting 4gb is pretty hard, even with some 4k options (heavy 4k textures can do that though). I would advise you to go for 2k btw. The difference is not only hard to see unless very close, the stuttering from loading all those textures all the time is annoying in my experience.

Usually a good starting point for the display is: Contrast max Brightness half Color half Sharpness half or none (you will see which setting is right) Colour Temp Warm Gamma 2.2 Every other feature off That are usually the settings where your display does nothing to the image. Gamma is usually the only thing easily calibrated via test images. Everything further requires a colorimeter and display electronics that do not loose bits when calibrating color. For the average end user with a decent display color calibration is not really needed.