Spock

I can't think of many instances where load order can make patches obsolete. Either both mods edit the same entry or one has dirty edits (which should be cleaned anyway). Things like region settings might be an exception though. That's why shifting around shouldn't happen too often. I can't really think of an instance where the load order of two mods A and B should be changed because of a mod C unless you are in a situation where a manual T5E patch is advisable anyway. Hopefully LOOT will detect patches and moves them automatically, I'll have to try that.

Yes, that bench seems more reasonable. But the problem is that refence 290(x) cards perform quite differently and have very insufficient cooling. Comparing card A with a bad cooler to card B with a good cooler while there are better cooled versions of card A on the marked is kind of unfair imho. Benches of the r9 290 vapor-x suggest it is on par with the 780ti in many games, with the 290 having quite some OC headroom. But those reviews lack Skyrim benches. Those benches are of limited use for modded Skyrim anyway since things change a lot if you add a lot of shaders. ENB is NVidia optimized, I dunno how much of a difference that really makes though since AMD comes with more shader power anyway. Boris supports AMD cards well enough imho. NVidia is probably faster for textures and geometry while AMD will gain with high resolutions and lots of shaders. Vram should also be considered. According to MadWizard 4 gb Vram is a good idea when going for 2k textures and 1k normals in a heavily modded game. Nvidia cards with 780 performance or better and more then 3gb vram come with a price tag. On the other hand r9 290s will cost a more on your electricity bill, depending on the country you live in. Bottom line: I strongly disagree with people saying NVidia is better for Skyrim. It really depends on what kind of visuals you want to add, what resolution you are playing on, what texture resolution you want to go for and how much money you want to spend. Currently the r9 290 series is cheaper then the Nvidia equivalent, costs more power though and you have a little more of a gamble in the silicon lottery. [edit] Ninja'ed: Like I said, according to MadWizard 4 gb Vram is advisable if going for a heavily modded game and 2k textures with 1k normals. The 3.1 gb cap is pretty much removed by ENBoost and the Skyrim memory patch. Skyrim still has the 4 gb cap (which results in the 3.1 gb cap as ~900 mb are used by the kernel), but that's nearly impossible to hit if textures are managed by ENBoost. SLI can cause problems with ENB. I'm not really into dual GPU solutions but I would advise to search the ENB forums for it. 45-60 fps seems fine, but this again is a subjective point. I'm playing with vsync and a setup geared towards holding 30 fps, but 1440p puts a lot of strain on the card so I cannot expect to maintain 60 fps anyway. I wouldn't expect huge gains in minimum fps (most important for gaming experience) unless you spend a "lot" of money. But how much is a lot of money and what it's worth is totally up to you of course.

That's resolution dependant. For example: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_780_Ti/22.html Techpowerup.com is a very good site but I do not fully trust that review as average fps go up with resolution for the r9 290, which is very weired and not the case with my card. On the other hand ATI cards have much more shader power, and that's what ENB is mostly about. Well this surprises me, maybe my performance breaks in if using 2k textures because of some texture filtering performance issues or ini file issues. Maybe it's something entirely different. But I get much better fps on my system, that is with NLA though.

Afaik the gtx 760 is a rebranded 670, maybe with slightly higher clocks. The 780ti is at ~700$ on newegg, I don't think it's worth spending that much money on hardware but that's kind of a personal decision. I think a 780 or r9 290 have a more reasonable price tag, the sapphire r9 290 vapor-x (450$) is probably the best bang for your buck in the high end segment. I get 30 fps around very intensive areas with STEP+Slightly tweaked NLA+Some mods for parallax @1440p with my overclocked 290. The 780 seems to perform slightly worse from what I've seen in Gopher's vids (my 290 can hold 60 fps @ 1080p without DoF and SSAO in more demanding scenes while Gopher drops below 60 in some places), but I don't have a direct comparison so this is partly speculative.

I personally prefer the AOS sounds. I did a little test with my sword, they just sound realistic (like pretty much everything else in AOS). One thing that could be considered is installing it without any esp before AOS just for the spell sheath sounds.

Fundamentally yes. There is even data that supports saying 512 256 is all you will need at the moment and in the forseeable future. You could probably save a few mb in ram usage by lowering the block a little. But the margain is so low compared to total memory usage that it's not worth testing. 512 256 is well tested, I'd go with those values. Well 1.7 is still incompatible with ENBoost for some users.

The Skyrim Stability Guide on Nexus has some insight on Papyrus settings with links to dev posts. It might be interesting for you. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50244/?

What I would propse is providing a STEP ENB that only contains shadows, parallax, some settings (like vsync) and the relevant game fixes. ENB shadows alone cost very insignificant performance which can be mitigated be lowering shadow resolution. Enabling effects cost me up to 8 FPS though because some shaders start running. This might be avoidable by altering the .fx files, but that's beyond my knowledge. Aiyen seems like a good candidate to ask for help. ENB shadows are only really necessary if you run a certain shadow draw distance as that's what introduces the shadow lod bug. For more information see this post. It would probably be better if the ENBoost link in the 2.2.8 (and 2.2.9) wiki would point to the enbdev download. The nexus download is outdated.

Hm.. from what I've read leaving a little vram for other applications can be beneficial, e.g. going for 2000 in case of 2048 mb vram. Maybe this explains Rootsrat's crashes but appearently the outcome can vary from setup to setup. I'm wondering why there isn't an explicit feature to preload textures to ram. From what I've read the method of setting VideoMemorySizeMb above vram seems unofficial but works for some people (Boris once complained about people setting VideoMemorySizeMb to high amounts). The downside for people having access vram could be that vram is crammed with textures you don't need while the textures you do need are in ram when turning around. This is speculation though as I do not understand much of the inner workings of ENBoost. Ayien what texture resolution do you use? Maybe ENBoost just preloads as many textures as it can while leaving some working space.

Thanks again for your detailed post! I really need to test this and maybe get together with someone who is optimizing his texture sizes for 4gb vram as well.

Thank you for your informative posts! Sorry for not being clear on what I meant with the pictures. I did mean the constraint tabs for different options that have been there last time I consulted the guide. The values seem to have changed, last time I used the guide 1kx1k was the recommended colormap size, I remember there have been more pics about the constrains tab with different recommended options. When I finally get a working r9 290 and reinstalled extended I will do some benchmarks. As far as textures go: Doesn't the optimized SRO download contain 1k color maps for exteriors? I thought I could use the batch to sort the full 2k download and copy over the color maps. What baseline STEP mods' HQ options would you choose first if you could go a little higher? Or what mods would you recommend not choosing a higher resolution with? My thoughts so far: landscape textures, SMIM and beast races profit from 2k. Indoor textures for clutter, caves and furniture can probably go 2k as well. Mods touching smaller items like jewels, HD misc, food etc. should probably be left alone. Do you know what folder door textures are in? I'd like to go 2k/2k on them because you see them up close so much.

Hm... I dunno if it's my browser or something but I see only three pics of options under "Optimizing STEP mods". Normals seem to be a fair bit larger then color maps, at least in SRO. Is there data on Vram use of the various quality options? More specifically on 4 gb Vram, since the release of the 290 and 760 4gb this setup seems to become more popular.

Thank you for your suggestion. Cool extras and modular, this has to go into the guide. Wizard what CPU are you using?

I am too thinking about going 2k exteriors, the guide seems to have changed since I consulted it last time. I can no longer find the exterior/interior distinction. Is there a general movement to 2k exterior color maps for high quality or did I overlook something? One part of the guide says that normal maps are responsible for blurrieness when up close. I always thought normal maps are only there for a 3d-ish effect and color maps are what gets blurry when too close. My plan was to go 2k color maps and 1k normal maps for exteriors. My texture knowledge is very limited though, I'd like to understand more about this so I can choose a reasonably quality/vram option.

Money/FPS wise the 290 is probably the best bang for your buck in the high end sector. Pcs+ and Tri-x are the best, no exception, see if they fit in your case though. I very rarely dropped below 30 fps in some angles in very taxing areas. 1440p, STEP:Extended+parallax+Vivid Landscapes full, ugrids 7 and NLA. 1080p got be to mid 40's in FPS. I had to RMA a lot of cards though, definitely bad luck in the silicon lottery but there are lots of reports of blackscreen issues with the 290(x).

For the samples you can simply extract the bsa to a folder and open the samples with any kind of waw player. It's a matter of 2 minutes For the esp settings it would require a video and ingame testing.

This is only partly covered by AOS. But I personally find the swing sounds and the way the BWS.esp makes them play too loud. It reminds me a little of old Kung Fu films.

You can just open the samples with a program capable of playing waw files. Personally I like AOS better (see a pattern over my sound related posts? ::), but EssArrBee might be the better judge as he has more nature experience then I do. The samples in the far files of Realistic Wolf Howls sound more like a little dog tbh... The medium distance howls of AOS are vanilla, maybe Realistic Wolf Howls is prefered here. The medium samples of Realistic Wolf Howls sound much better then the distant ones imho. AOS changes the howl behavior though so we would need to see if there are oddities (info from LoRdKoRn). Otherwise STEP could just install Realistic Wolf Howls first and let AOS overwrite. That's what I have done with my install for now. Some videos of howling wolves.

Those are really easy to compare, simply open the samples and play them (I use MPC). Like I already pointed out AOS is the realistic one. Other people having shot a bow can confirm that (Techangel, sources of Gopher). The AOS samples also are of higher quality but that's hard to hear in game. That doesn't mean people have to to like the AOS samples better though. There is nothing as subjective as sound. I think the realistic approach is a good baseline for STEP as it might become very difficult to decide on sound mods if not.

Just checked, AOS doesn't touch crossbow fire samples. Dunno if the esp does something but that shouldn't do much as both samples are geared towards vanilla. The Ultra Realistic Crossbow Shoot Sounds sound very similar to what I heared in documentary videos. I haven't shot a crossbow yet, so I cannot tell about the real sound.

Yep, mass effect is a Requiem feature, I should have made that clearer. I would ask around in the Requiem thread on the Nexus, there are some really helpful people around there and Ogerboss is very active too (if he isn't on holiday or something).

Yes, I would surely go for the 2.0 update. For me it obsoletes improved combat sounds, better sheath and draw btw. The AOS bow sounds are also better imho, without having tested it I assume the same is true for xbow sounds and weapon swings. Hopefully those will change in STEP 2.2.9. As for the Masseffect I do not know where they come from, tbh I haven't checked my papyrus log so far so I cannot tell if it's SR:LE or STEP. And I cannot check atm because I send my graphics card back again. [edit] Just saw Azirok updated his WAF patch, a new Requiem pack patch is probably in order (with AOS 2.0 compatibility).

Turning effects on in ENB alone costs performance because some shaders start to run even with all effects disabled. Maybe this can be minimized (or even circumvented) by editing the fx files. If shaders already run and shadow distance is high enough to cause the shadow lod bug using ENB shadows at high with 512 resolution looks better and costs less performance then vanilla shadows at 8k resolution.

I searched the development forum and saw parallax was brought up over half a year ago by TheCompiler and a few months back by EssArrBee, I hope I didn't miss any significant discussion in between. Since ENB made it into the STEP:Core, what about using parallax and shadows? Maybe introduce it to extended? There is an non ENB ini fix for the lego shadows but it involves reducing the draw distance significantly (to about 2000 depending on FOV), I think the vast majority of STEP users will want to use ENB for Shadow fixing if not more. Those who have performance concerns that do not allow for parallax or ENB shadows probably won't use extended. Please correct me if I'm wrong this this speculation. I personally think parallax mapping can add a lot to the visual pleasure of the game and using such mods has become quite popular.

It would be nice if you could do that, but please don't push yourself for my lazy ass. I could also make a 2.2.8 patch without Ars Metallica and Diverse Priest. It would be more convenient to use the 2.2.9 patch though since you will probably want to do that anyway at some point. Or what you could do is make AOS 1.51 STEP 2.2.8 for now and integrate 2.0 for 2.2.9. There will probably be one or two small updates in the next week anyway.