Spock

Thank you very much, this is an informative read! I am also very intrigued what will become of this project. Someone who really knows what he is doing looking into the parallax options. As for Mesh options: As far as I know there are only Animated Clutter, Ruins Clutter Improved and ELFX which alter meshes. ELFX is probably not really relevant because ELFX colors usually do not look good with ENBs. I would suggest NLA for a very natural color look. Another thing to consider when talking textures if also using an ENB is SSAO/SSIL: If you have tiles, the joints shouldn't be dark, there shouldn't be a lightmap effect. The darkness should come from the SSAO, or it will look bad with good (i.e. most realistic GI approximation possible) SSAO/SSIL settings. Many ENBs use very artistic settings for SSAO/SSIL btw. Mine are tweaked towards GI approximation using ray tracing as rough reference while adding a little artistic AO to hide texture/mesh seams. Since you are so much into your search, I would like to ask what your favorite LOD textures are and if you know what textures need billboards for DynDoLod. I'm currently using Skyrim High Definition LODs - Dark LOD Textures. Nexus links for convenience: Animated Clutter: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/48287/? Ruins Clutter Improved: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/14227/? Skyrim High Definition Lods - Dark: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58818/? ELFX: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/27043/? NLA: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50065/?

Mator Smash seems like the tool that could finally do what bash used to be able to do for oblivion. I would be surprised if it could completely replace a patch because of the cell edits. But it would indeed be tremendously helpful for a lot of patching.

Just wanted to drop by and report that the current high res compilation installer (7:17, 16 February 2016 version 2.2.9.2i) left 2 STEP patches on my system when installed without ELE. One named STEP Extended Patch - No ELE.esp last edited 25.11.2015 and one named STEP Extended Patch.esp last edited 13.02.2016. Both have the right masters. I would very much prefer a separate patch download. I mostly re download the file because I sometimes do not know what changed exactly. That creates a lot of traffic for the Nexus and takes time. It also takes a lot longer to install patches when testing things, because the archive has to be extracted.

That is strange indeed. Sure there is nothing running in the background? Any kind of tuner? My next guess would be ENB version or graphics driver. Did you disable AA and AF in the drivers? https://enbdev.com/download_mod_tesskyrim.html Please try 0.303 and 0.292. You just need the d3d9.dll and ENBHost.exe from the wrapper version and your enblocal.ini. Nothing else. You can also try this ini:

Those settings seem fine at first glance. Off the top of my head there are a myriad of different things you could try. But it would probably take several hours. I would highly recommend ENBoost because you might hit the 4 gb limit and cause crashes. Did you test Skyrim without ENB? Just deleting the dll will do the trick. If that fixes the problem, I would try a preset ENB (with an example enb local file) and see if that works. Do you use anti virus or any other "optimization" software?

Not really. But out of experience, pricing is not radically different over the generations. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a high end option with the new architecture but not the best/full chips in the 980 price range. There usually is a highest end (fury x/980 ti) and a high end (fury/980) option. Those usually have the new architecture. Whether there will be a new higher midrange card (970/390 segment) has to be determined. For news on GPUs I'd advise to read Videocardz.com.

Fp 16 double performance means you get double performance with 16 bit (half precision) float point numbers. For many use cases you do not need single precision. This is on top of the usual performance increases of new architectures and smaller processes (so more transistors will fit on the die). Depending on how well the implementation is, and how big the new high-end chips are, we could be looking at half a magnitude in performance gain for certain tasks. That is just huge.

That is quite the complex question. I would say buy the cheapest card that does fp16 double performance and has the best shader architecture. My 2 cents on the GPU teams: NVidia: + power efficiency (Gaming only!) + fast rasterizing (Gaming only) + gameworks/hairworks if you play games that use it +/- drivers are highly optimized for many games, this is good now but your card will fall off once the generation rotates out and doesn't get new updates - more $ for performance - some openCL compute shader features are crippled - async compute may be broken on hardware level (afaik only fixed on case by case basis), probably bad with DX12/Vulcan games that really use multi threading (not future proof) AMD: + faster shaders + very nice openCL compute shader features + better performance per dollar - needs more power to run games - some chips get really hot because they are smaller, you need to choose the right cooler - higher failure rate (currently, changes every generation!) As a rule of thumb over the past 10 years of game development: The newer the game, the more important are pixel shader features and the less important is polygon throughput and texture fill. So AMDs architecture is currently more 'future proof'. Two years ago, when the 290 got on the marked it was compared to a 770 in benchmarks. Today it is compared with a 970/780ti. NVidia makes more sense if you really want the card for gaming only and are willing to buy new cards regularly, or if you are willing to pay a lot of money and want the uber expensive uber card. The next generation is going to be very interesting as NVidia is heading in the right direction in architecture and is closing on AMD (who are actually ahead in architecture features atm). A very important feature in new videocards is fp16 double performance. It is coming with Pascal (NVidia). AMD already has fp16 power saving features, the question is whether they will have fp16 double performance. If they do, AMD will be very attractive because their shader performance on the new process will probably allow for real time path tracing. If they don't NVidia will be ahead.

The downside of Multi Sampling is the lack of transparency AA. There are workarounds by AMD and NVidia, they do not always work though. MSAA tends to work less with newer titles (probably some pixelshading limitation?) Is often a good idea. The additional coverage sample AA methods (EQ for AMD) get you more AA virtually for free. You can also find the transparency hacks for MSAA here (they might not be needed, depending on the game). Adaptive MSAA (and the NVidia equivalent) is cheaper then Supersampling (SSAA) but doesn't always work. Are many sides of the same coin (the 'S' in SMAA stands for Subpixel, Boris just has his own implementation). They are post processing methods. Short story is, they run an edge detect shader for every frame and then do AA. They all have the disadvantage of not really tackling issues of aliasing happening from frame to frame (the shimmering when moving, foliage and stairs are typical examples). They also slightly smudge the image. Not as bad as FXAA (which is much worse then no AA and unusable imho) but some, so don't mix and match different sources of AA, you usually get the disadvantage multiple options when you could just have turned up the quality of one. Post processing AA is usually quite cheap. At least on good GPUs with decent shaders. Temporal AA fixes AA problems when moving. Afaik all Temporal AA methods have some degree of ghosting. How much this is visible depends on your monitor and frame rate. If done right, this is what NVidia wanted FXAA to be. The pinnacle of AA. It does not only AA everything without problems, it also adds more detail. This is the only AA method I'd recommend combining. I use MSAA+Downsampling for older games on a regular basis. Very expensive as the game has to be rendered at higher resolutions. For Skyrim, I personally think ENB AA with all 4 options + downsampling looks best, if your GPU can handle it. I'm usually not a huge fan either. I like the DoF of Opethfeld and Lumen ENB, the effect is very subtle.

This is a very bad time to buy a high end gpu. The next generation with great new architecture features is just around the corner.

I already draw inspiration from your list for my texture mod selection. There might be some things that could enhance it though. Pfusher's work for example, or High Definition LODs. I would assume there is no terrain parallax because there are no Solstheim landscape textures for it? The effect should be subtle but usually visible. Try rocky walls and change the angle, the parallax map should give more illusion of depth. Aside from obvious uses like brick walls, this helps high definition textures (2k) because your eye won't notice the high fidelity texture sticking on a simple mesh as easily.

I thought STEP parallax was out of the question anyway because of the overhead ENB FixParallaxBugs=true produces. Maybe a pack for high fidelity work that has more freedom to be vanilla unfriendly would be nice.

It wasn't meant literally, please correct me if I'm wrong. I would also be very much interested in parallaxed STEP. Overall Vivid Landscapes enhance the texture quality by a lot, textures lacking 2k definition and parallax mapping really stand out. I didn't run into mismatches yet but I probably didn't look around far enough.

I'm not sure it really in an issue with the parallax maps, afaik it might also be some of the meshes that use the textures. But don't quote me on that.

What I have done is using the IL values of a path tracer as reference and setting IL first (AO=0). SSAO_SSIL can never achieve the same lighting accuracy in a rasterizer but it is still decent reference. Then I added AO and going a little moody. It should be fairly realistic within the limitations of a rasterizer. The AO is a little over the top but I think it helps with texture and mesh transitions because in reality they are never as clean as in a game. IL should really only be very visible with plain single colored diffuse textures (such as test setups). It is a very subtle thing in reality, at least for 99% of the materials you see in Skyrim. To my eyes, the lighting looks more 'right' with those values. To me it seems like Boris aimed for values of 1.0 to be the physically correct approximation. For some reason adding more AO and IL makes the effect start to shimmer in some weather conditions. I'm currently toying around with NLA, which is as far as I can tell not a very high contrast ENB.

Thanks! It seems I need to learn a thing or two about DynDoLod. The HD lods are really good. I need to test the options next.

Hi everyone. I'm searching for ways to enhance terrain LODs over what STEP uses. They seem very low res compared to my 2k parallax vivid landscape install. I've tried this one: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58818/? But it somehow does not seem to look like the screenshots. Do I have to re-run DynDoLod?

I'm not really sure what exactly the problem is. But maybe this helps: Some things ENB does are not related to the enbseries.ini settings, some things are done via the shader files (.fx) directly. The dx9 dll will cost render time even without any effects because it will start intercepting API calls creating overhead. That's how the dll has to work.

Sorry for bumping my own thread, I did play around with the SSAO SSIL settings a little more. It seems like most ENBs use way too high ILAmount imho and it seems to be the reason why the AO is almost invisible. Something along the line of AOAmount=1.1 AOIntensity=1.3 ILAmount=1.0 is what I personally prefer.

Unless you really need a new GPU NOW!, I think this is a bad time to upgrade. I wouldn't recommend buying a new graphics card without fp16 double performance. Also 14 nm is around the corner.

Thank you for the paper! It is certainly interesting. But I do not think this is what Boris has implemented as I would estimate it would take a modern GPU still some time to do with several hundred textures and it is lossy.

Where did you get that information from? Is it by Boris? I'm just curious because a friend of mine told me it is impossible to compress textures in vram on the fly. He said this is most likely using LZ4 to compress textures in ram. There might still be benefits for doing that other then saving ram (like less fragmentation), but it also costs resources to do. I'm curious out of a technical perspective.

Shouldn't the recommendation be to leave the feature off unless you are in need of ram?

Yes, I do mean the STEP Compilation and I would actually recommend moving it because I prefer some sound files from AOS. The .esp should be handled by LOOT. I would also recommend to uninstall some sound mods as well. Improved combat sounds (needs to be removed from the patch), bow shoot sounds, weapon swing sounds and then move the draw and sheath mod before AOS.

This argument is very bad, you start out with state policy and end with a generelization of your idea of family. The point I was making is, that the differences show that the similarities you pointed out provide nothing to the argument. You are claiming, that the justification is objective. But in reality, the same logic you applied can be applied to justify racism or any kind of discrimination. You truely seem to oppose democracy, at which point your wold views and ways of believing things are 'ture' are probably so fundamentally different that there is not much point in arguing any further. I very much take this as Ad Hominem. It is very condescending and deplaced given all your fellacies pointed out to you. You want to belief in 'just' discrimination, you are not open to arguments against it, no matter how good.