Spock

With all the tree mods and ENB SSAO, it did make a small difference on my r9 290, even a few fps when I used a lower value like 5000. I imagine it might make more of a difference on older machines. (talking about mid lod switch) The difference is probably a little lower on NVidia cards because they can traditionally handle more geometry (but SSAO will be more expensive, especially on Kepler cards).

Under the [Display] section you state (assuming the question mark means you could use more information) This looks very similar to the screenshots of skinned trees from the Configuration guide in game, with the difference that it is a distance parameter. It is too bad the switch doesn't fade, it could really help with popping. 14000 is the value that pushes it very close to cell transition if you like two separate smaller pop ins (with the later showing full foliage) to one complete pop in.

The Samsung 950 pro 512 M.2 seems like a nice choice for an SSD at the moment (of your Mobo has the slot). 1,5 gb/s write, NVMe and 'enough' IOPS for 350 bucks is nothing to sneeze at.

What kind of things are you planning to render? RTPT?

That is very true. But it is imho not obvious that ENB requires that setting. Maybe I'm just a little slow but it really took me quite some time (and frustration, I even reinstalled Catalyst) to find out. I just thought putting that line there prevents others from going through the hassle.

What I was trying to point out was, that a performance gain is highly unlikely. Skyrim can dump some tasks (like ai, physics etc) to other cores. But at the very core, the game logic and renderer are almost certainly single threaded. You could maybe do more rediculous things with the havoc engine but during regular gameplay the game will be limited by your single thread performance.

Looking through your ENB Must-have tweaks, I would add bDoDepthOfField=1 because it is required for some under water effects to work.

Thank you for the great guide! One small thing: There seems to be a type on this line. iNumHWThreads only sets the maximum number of havok threads. It doesn't allow the game to be truly multy threaded as the important tasks (game logic and renderer) are single threaded.

Between 1) and 2) I'd add "use Tes5Edit to check for conflicts". That step is critical and everything else will fall into place once you do.

I thought I remembered 75 to be default and being designed for 16:10, which would mean 85 is the equivalent for 16:9.

Thank you very much for all your time and effort at ini research! I didn't actually launch the executable as I like to work with my ini files myself. Some small addition: If this does what I think it does (bDoDepthOfField), it should be enabled with ENB. At least with oder versions of ENB it was required for proper under water effects. Such things can take quite some time to find out :/ It might be a good idea to add an ENB option that sets: bDoDepthOfField=1 bFloatPointRenderTarget=1 bShadowsOnGrass=1 bTreesReceiveShadows=1 bDrawLandShadows=1 iShadowMapResolution=2048 fShadowDistance=6500.0000 + some good bias scale, shadow mask, shadow mask quater and shadow mode (I used to leave those at ultra default but there is probably a better setting) With ENB shadows 2048 shadow resolution is more then enough on 1600p. If you want to save performance on an older card, use 1024. When ENB handles the filtering the resolution doesn't seem to impact quality by much. I only use 2048 because it costs only 0.5 fps on my card. Distance however does seem to impact quality regardless of resolution. I found 8000 to be simply too much.

I'm not too sure about that. If I remember right, it is the right distance for the lod switching bug (which is fixed by ENB). Even with an ENB I had a better experience when using a shadow distance of about 6500 then going all the way to 8000. Since Skyrim produces one shadow map, the larger the size the lower the quality.

From what a friend who has way more knowledge then I do told me, that is exactly the advantage of Chrome. It is better optimized for multi threading then FF. Afaik, FF has an update background service too.

Yes, NVidia can affort a bigger driver staff. Still, the r9 290 overall gaming performance was comparable to the gtx 780 on release. Now it is often close behind the 980 and usually ahead of the titan. That is a very significant leap imho. The special thing about Ashes of the Singularity is full multi thread support. Not in the sense that Skyrim is multithreaded, dumping some miscellanious tasks like AI or Havoc. But a truly multi threaded renderer and probably game logic. This is not neccessary for all titles and will probably not be used by all titles, it is kind of a new tech. But dx12 and vulkan will be huge promoters of this approach because it is feasable to do. Here is an article that describes this better: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading I never played on FAF extensively. Sadly, I lack the time to really learn another strategy game :/

[offtopic]If you are a supcom fan, check out Forged Alliance Forever if you haven't already I don't think AMD declined at all. The 290 was paired with the 780 on release, now it is closely behind the 980 in many titles (and outperfroms the titan in most). In my personal experience cards with better shader performance used to age more gracefully in general.

https://www.overclock.net/t/1569897/various-ashes-of-the-singularity-dx12-benchmarks https://www.dsogaming.com/news/amds-directx-12-advantage-explained-gcn-architecture-more-friendly-to-parallelism-than-maxwell/ https://wccftech.com/amd-r9-290x-fast-titan-dx12-enabled-3dmark-33-faster-gtx-980/ There has been some flame war from NVidia about the Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks. From what I heared they really started flaming the devs for being biased. I just wanted to point out that NVidia is telling is probably BS. Their current drivers seem to just not be optimized to handle the draw calls from a game that really uses the new multi threading capabilities of next gen APIs like dx12 and vulkan. Also, the lack of Async Compute really hurts their hardware. Whether or not they will be able to fix their draw call problem or if it is a hardware limitation remains to be seen. I go with the dso gaming article and bet on hardware limitation though.

I'm not sure about uBlock Origin and uBlock. I heared about some dirt being thrown but you know the internet - it's hard to tell who is right. Disconnect isn't junk. It's no really necessary with uBlock but afaik it has got some good reviews by people who know what they are talking about. Ghostery indeed collects data by default. A friend of mine told me there is an extension that randomly clicks banners, even behind an ad blocker. He also told me there is an extension that randomly starts google searches in the background. Both to mess with the more sophisticated google tracking system. Is anyone knowing more? NoScript is too annoying for my taste. Moving the windows firewall to group policy (so no program can write exceptions), not allowing flash, MSE and avoiding xxxfreedownload.ru did the job very well for me so far.

I would suggest switching to Disconnect. It's non proprietary and afaik has a slightly better list. You may notice a performance boost with uBlock. It has the nice bonus of disabling "You use adblock" and "Cookie user agreement" messages.

A friend of mine told me that Chrome is actually faster then Firefox because it starts a new process for each tab. I haven't tried it extensively though. You might also want to try ad blocking via uBlock and host file. uBlock is very resource efficient and also blocks annoying cookie policy messages. A host file blocks a lot of unneccesary traffic right away but requires some CPU time depending on it's size.

I'm not really sure what prickly means since I'm not a native speaker. But you would not be the first person to assume water cooling helps with room temperatures because it's 'cooler', your comment just looked like you do. On a second read 'being ok with spending a lot of money on parts' is poorly worded, I meant you seem to be into high end builds. The 750 series SSDs certainly are expensive but SSD performance is still something your system experience might benefit from. Water cooling performance is very much tied to volume throughput, a parallel setup for all the blocks (always put pumps in line) is desirable. Since most waterblocks have different resistances you would have to adjust the flow with screws, e.g. while monitoring temps on your running system.

That would be the miracle cooler ;) The heat always has to go somewhere. Unless you build the radiator into the wall (a friend of mine is actually planning to do this), the heat will stay in the room. You could get air condition for the room though. Since you seem to be ok with spending a lot of money on parts, I would also suggest an intel 750 ssd (pcie 3.0 version). That thing is a beast.

What I was referring to is this: ELE_Legendary_Lite.esp ELFXEnhancer.esp Afaik they conflict. The general look seems like Lumen, the shadows do not seem to be quite right though (maybe something with the skyrim inis?). Could you post the load order you tested Lumen in?

Well, then the next best guess is, that some incompatibility is removing a script that should really be there. The problem may also relate to script file references. Check for .pex file conflicts in the left pane of MO. You are indeed running a very extensive list of mods, many of which really are outright redundant. The obvious ones are pure weather vs CoT (why install two different weather mods?) and ELFX vs ELE (both edit imagespace, pick one). SoS is also kind of conflicting with AOS installed as AOS has a different mix. While at the topic of cleaning the sound mix, I would also advise to uninstall Ultra Realistic Bow Shoot Sounds (keep the xbow, that is good and not covered by AOS), Improved Combat Sounds and Better Weapon Swing Sounds, then move the AOS files after Smooth Blade Draw and Sheath. The AOS samples are more realistic and snappier across the board. To clear compatibility nightmare for outdoor cells I would recommend the following: Uninstall Pure Weathers, uninstall CoT, uninstall SoS, pick ELE or ELFX. If you picked ELE try Lumen ENB, if you picked ELFX try T.A.Z. Visual Overhaul. Then fire up TES5Edit and hunt for conflicts. With such an extensive load order, you will have to do that.

From a first glance, the errors seem to come from a script that refers to objects no longer in existence. Did you uninstall any esps in that savegame (the classic reason that happens, you should always start a new game when uninstalling mods containing scripts)?

There is only one cable for all Sata standards. The Sata cable standard is so overrated (meaning rating in a technical context), just get the cheapest you can or an old one from a friend. I remember a video where people connected old sata cables across several meters and they would still achieve the maximum sata III controller speed. Afaik this is not the case for HDMI cables btw.