Aiyen

Techangel85: You are right with the memory for the OS, 2Gb give or take. I use about 1Gb for steam, AV, browser etc. Was also what I meant, my brain was just already ahead at the 3Gb for the game... sorry about that! :) However if you only have 4Gb ... then that leaves 1 for the game which is very much in the low end! The way windows assigns memory depends on the max amount of total memory available, so his windows would naturally use less and allow more for the game, but would not experience as smooth an experience as even 8Gb would provide.  Stuttering is because of bottlenecks. If there is not enough RAM for cache, then the cache will be assigned on the HDD by windows. If this has to be read then you will get stuttering due to the extremely slow read/write speed of a HDD which is the worst bottleneck. It will also happen when memory swapping happens since the game then has to wait for the CPU to swap the memory.. this is the second worst bottleneck. There are other types.. but they are progressively less noticeable. As for the closing of everything Possible conflicts between running applications are almost exclusively due to the applications fight for CPU time and memory. Which is why back in the 32bit OS days you had to close everything because the OS only had 3Gb give or take to assign, so alot of CPU time was required since memory was swapped all the time. Now with 64bit the OS can assign as much as is required as long as it is physically present in the machine. If an application has all the memory it could ever need, then the amount of CPU time it requires is minimal because memory swapping is minimal since it is already loaded. So unless you are running a full DDSopt while playing or rendering a movie or some other thing that requires alot of CPU time, then the chance of an issue is very minimal. If there is an issue then it will most likely be because they try to access the same resources at the same time. One example here is OC software that runs at the same time as ENB... This will cause issues, and most likely a CTD. Nitrohell: Never trust a "tech" guy that says you will NEVER need something... he just proved that he does not know what he is talking about! :) Also about the OC... All I can say is, if you got the money to spend on OC´ing you might as well just get the extra RAM. Never OC anything unless you are sure you can get a replacement part in the odd case that some resistor etc burns out. You can not use warranty unless you got a factory OC´ed component. Also you can actually get really high in RAM even with low VRAM... You just get progressively worse stuttering due to the massive bottleneck you create between GFX and RAM. Followed by missing textures, which always cause a CTD after a while.. up till the point where you just get a CTD or inf loading screen. At least that it what I experienced when doing a full stress test of the game to see how it handled progressively more massive memory loads.Â

There are only 3 different textures, so just try them out. My test was very limited, since I found out how to fix my ENB issue with WATER, so I had no more need for the pure waters texture. I did not find any big issues with mixing the types... but then again I did not know where to look properly. So no promises. As for the bashed patch issue... would it not be enough to just remove trade and barter from the bashed patch ?

STEP baseline is a good starting point... but I would still recommend that you buy some more RAM .. they do not cost a lot and having 8 or 16 Gb is just smart since then you do not have to close down everything in the background while playing. 4Gb is going to give you some bad stuttering because the OS takes up a large chunk and other programs as well which means there is not enough left for cache use. Might also cause you some unnecessary CTD´s when you start to add more mods. In general you want 3 Gb for the OS, 3 for Skyrim.. and then what is left over for other stuff like media players etc etc you might want running. Your GFX is nice enough. It is in the 600 series which is more then good enough.

SR is using WATER instead of pure water. Mainly because it has more features and some extra options that are nice. If you just like the pure waters texture more, you can install WATER and then make copies of a texture from pure water, and rename them so they fit with the WATER file names. Pure waters has 3 different textures WATER has different textures for different types of water and also some normal maps etc. You only need to replace the ones called "ocean, river" etc. Then you get the best from both if you are so inclined. Aside from a small (hardly worth mentioning but it is there) color issue with the waves option in WATER DB then everything fits together nicely. This effect is also strongly dependent upon ENB and/or lighting mods you might be using.

Glad you like them. I was just annoyed with the fact that trees in the distance where brighter then ones up close.. which made no sense to me... also during the night the pines would glow in the distance which made it almost impossible to make an ENB preset with it installed. I know Vurt is aware of the issue, but I also respect his standpoint that he cannot make a separate texture for every ENB preset out there. This particular one is only optimized for my own. As for the basic edition... yeh if you have not played with SFO for a while then you can do it. I personally find that I miss all the trees since I have got so used to them being there.

Ah that issue... yes it happens sometimes when you use SFO! Especially with the trees that vurt has added like aspens etc. The reason they look darker is because the LOD trees that are far away are not affected by shadows, so they will look brighter then trees that do have shadows on them. Also sometimes the game is a bit slow to update the trees from LOD to near...I believe this is also a vanilla issue that is linked to how the game loads in new cell data etc. I do have a small solution I could provide... I have remade the LOD textures while working on my ENB preset which in turn have turned the LOD trees darker so they do not stand out so much. If you are interested then just throw me a PM.

If you also use dual combat.. make sure to get the archer perks addon or you will get one shoted by every falmer archer in the the game after a certain point! :PÂ It also nerfs ranged damage for you though.Â

Yes i have it added in the ASIS.ini under mod exclusions. Even if it does nothing on your system it cannot harm since ASIS have absolutely nothing to do with the AV.esp anyways since it does not add anything but textures to the world.

If you run ASIS and AV without adding AV to the ASIS exclusion list, then for some bizarre reason some of the textures will not be used ingame. Mainly noticeable with wolves and mammoths. When you check your AV list you can count how many individual textures you should see... then go ingame and spawn 20 wolves.. if you do not see at least one of every kind you have the problem.

If you only use a 32bit OS your OS can only use 3.some Gb of RAM so obviously the game will not be able to access that much in that case. Hence it becomes even more unstable earlier. It also means that you cannot use RAM for cache at all since the OS cannot assign the space at all. So you only have HDD cache which is so much slower that it is not even fun. But seriously if someone are still using windows xp they need to get shaken really bad, thrown in a cold lake and have a cake thrown in their face. I have been trying to tell this to certain people for years now.. and only in this past year have they finally realized that a 64bit OS is superior to XP in every way, other then wining museum awards. And this only because the newer games deliberately say to them that they work better with more memory...

This is also why running the main quest straight up to the first dragon is such a powerful bench-marking route. There are so many things loading and scripts running etc. that it really puts your setup to the test. If you are able to run (IE no fast travel at all) the entire route up to the first dragon kill with no CTD, but perhaps a freeze or two then you got a really stable setup. (The freezes are due to scripts failing and nothing can really be done about it.. it can happen at all times when you play with many mods. Though some mods are more notorious then others.) If you get 1 CTD then yes you got a slight memory issue, but this could be solved if you just save and quit to menu on a regular basis when you travel. This cleans up all unrequired textures etc. If you get 2-3 CTD then you most likely have memory and also script issues... If you CTD more, then you got a massive memory problem.

The issue I had with it turned out to be due to ASIS not the DDSopting if that is what you are referring too :) And well they do not really like it as such being character mods more or less... but the sad fact is that AV swallows a lot of memory to perform what it does.

You can get the effect at reduced cost ... if you like increased flickering while moving and/or in certain weathers. In the enbseries.ini find the following under SSAO/SSIL SizeScale=0.50 SourceTexturesScale=0.50 By reducing them you lessen the performance impact of the SSAO texture since it becomes smaller, and also take up a bit less VRAM. Before you do that then make sure the quality settings are set to 2 however... the impact of doing that is less then the above but the gain not as high. You can use the same under Reflection to get even more performance at the cost of quality. But again the effects get really noticeable once you get below 0.50 but it is up to you! :) In general you should have about 100Mb of RAM/VRAM for ENB however so I would recommend that you find some textures to reduce rather then doing this if you still have instability. I have mentioned that shadows are done by CPU multiple times around the STEP forum, since people seems to think it is done by the GPU as in certain other titles... but sadly not. Keeping the shadow settings at 2048 and 1024 is enough for the exteriors... you do not need more. The quality improvement is so small compared to the cost. Depending on your DoF file then open it and see if it has a quality number and make sure it is on one of the lower settings. DoF can require so much computing power that they can reduce even the best computers to slow moving turtles. In my file it is #define DEPTH_OF_FIELD_QUALITY 1 Where there are options between 1-7 with 7 being silly perfect DoF but properly you can only go ingame... setup a screenshot and then get out again. Detailed shadows: You can change the quality parameter in the enbseries.ini to 2 for better performance -1 for best quality. Same for Skylighting Bloom does not really take up much performance wise so I always keep its quality at 0 in the enbseries.ini. Adaptation does not have anything performance wise attached to it. But again most of these options do not really affect the memory part of your card but rather the GPU. But there is a bit you can change. I would still recommend that you lower some texture sizes since that will give you more. I assume you have halfsized the normals of the AV mods... also optimize them into better compression. You will not really be able to see it most of the time, and it provides immense benefits memory wise. Hope that helps, otherwise just throw me a PM.

Actually on laptops games can break the hardware because laptops have extremely... Let us just say BAD, cooling solutions that are never designed for max performance several hours in a row, and they are for some strange reason also always placed so that you cannot easily access and clean/change them. It would be best to start with STEP base and medium settings, then scale up as you find out what you have performance for. Edit: There now the kids can also see it! Sorry for the bad s word! :D

Also if you get the master level version then as I understand it it scales the vampire abilities up so they make sense, also for the NPC´s.

DoF is a separate shader effect with separate settings in the enbeffectpresspas.fx file. This means you can use a DoF from another ENB preset if you like it better. Just overwrite the one in your skyrim dir. It is a common misconception that people think that all the files in a preset "belong" together. If you find one in another preset that you really like.. just use that. The same works for rest, including the textures. The only one that you really need in order to preserve a preset is the enbeffect.fx and the enbseries.ini. The loading screen issue cannot be helped.. since sometimes the models are just in the wrong spot of the screen. The racemenu issue can be helped.. if it blurs while making a new char you are using a DoF that does not have the Focus point set to around the middle of the screen. Another possibility is that they have set settings that cause objects at that range to start to blur as well. Alternatively.. you can just disable DoF during the generation process and enable it after. Use the injector version of ENB instead. Many of the CoT and CoT/RLO "compatible" presets have only done a bare minimum of testing weather transitions and weathers when they are first released.... I guess the authors just do not know about the sw and fw commands in the console. Also even with that there are so many combinations and transitions that it is pointless to really check them all. Fog Is mostly a SSAO problem. If those settings are not optimized for foggy weather you will get some very ugly shadows etc. This is mainly because ENB alters the transparency of the the fog texture. Again if the author has never tested with a foggy weather he/she would not know about it during first release! If you want a more fantasy like preset... there is a small "trick" that works for SOME presets! Get SweetFX and activate its HDR, Vibrance, Curves, Dither, and Lumasharpen features in its settings file. Then in the enbseries.ini file in the first line set EnableProxyLibrary=true and then in ProxyLibrary= "d3d9_SFX.dll" Where the stuff inside the " " is the name of the SweetFX .dll file. If you get it fresh from the nexus it will have the same name as the ENB .dll so you need to rename it. I added the _SFX to the name. These settings cause the saturation and contrast etc. to increase, which gives really sharp colors and contrast to help give that fantasy feel. Now again... it only works on some presets, not all.. if you have a preset that is very blueish etc. then this would mainly just make the blue more extreme and properly make it look worse. In general the SweetFX settings are easy to play around with and can "fix" issues you might have with the colors looking a bit to bland etc. Â

The game is already threaded "enough". There is no noticeable extra performance gain from activating them so might as well leave them off. At least that was the conclusion of my tests.

Neo: Just replace the DoF with one you like! And niceness on the monitor! :) PCgamer: v119 has inferior SSAO optimization so you will have worse performance using that if you are using higher SSAO settings... If you want ENB for the SSAO and shadows etc. use v.157.. if you just want color correction and hardware AA + AO use v119. Project ENB is made for CoT the others bronze has made can be used but are not really optimized for it. Also in the end you will realize that there are so many ENB presets and none of them have exactly what you want. Another good reason to use v.157. Then you get the ingame GUI to alter the most critical parameters.

try to reinstall Skyrim Flora overhaul... if you change the textures in that then you can end up with this issue. Mainly because the LOD texture file have the textures in specific spots, but when you change the texture etc they can get shifted slightly which translates to the issue you explain ingame. SFO is very specific with its LOD file... more or less any changes to it will cause weird LOD effects. Also make sure it is happening everywhere... there are still a few places where the LOD locations do not match entirely! These are bugs that vurt updates as he gets the time, and people report them.

Depends on what you mean by performance... FPS wise there is no difference since VRAM is never the bottleneck. You will get increased stuttering perhaps as the textures are loaded but that is about it. Skyrim is mainly a CPU intensive game since shadows etc. are all done by CPU and not GPU. So the real bottleneck performance wise is how fast your RAM is, and how old your CPU is. The gtx470 should be able to handle full 1k textures without any real issues. Here I also assume you have at least 8Gb of RAM... DDR3. If you still have DDR2 then you might get really noticeable performance drops with stuttering because the RAM are fairly slow relative to the texture sizes then.

I am working on my own preset, based on an entirely new post processing code... and also a few custom tweaks. So it is not just something you can go in and tweak in your own enbseries.ini file sadly.

Well he stated it was in a finished state... and I only tested that it actually worked as intended. Which it does. Dragonborn support I do not really see is an issue since it does not provide new potions does it? It is still skyrim.esm that provides those. Might be wrong but that was what I could gather when I checked. The perks I have not looked into... will properly do that later this week.

Ouch if you have to go below 1k in resolution... :s The benefit in memory is normally very small... only about 700kb pr texture... where from 2k to 1k you get several Mb in difference. So should really not be required to go so low.

I do not use any enchanting altering mods atm... as I recall :S too many mods on this list really. However I recall from when I was looking that they where easy to find. As for alchemy then I use this to make sure I do not abuse healing potions... which is one of the worst things about the alchemy/potion system in vanilla.Â

Skylighting is a really good immersive feature... gives shadows that actually follow the sun. Which is also why it takes up so much performance. Also affects the AO. SSAO have variable performance impact depending on the size of the AO texture relative to your resolution. The quality settings have only a minor impact in comparison. Also Reflection takes about as much as the AO does since it is in effect another texture that needs to be loaded. The new rain feature takes up about 2-5 FPS depending on settings, card(s) bla bla bla. I still prefer just using a 2d transparent texture for rain. Also you can get a DoF that takes up a lot of performance, or set up SMAA so it eats more into your FPS but you get better quality. Low SSAO quality is however really noticeable under some circumstances (Foggy weather), which is why it is preferred to make sure it looks really good, and also why it tends to eat up the most.