Aiyen

To me it seems fairly consistent. You got a somewhat detailed roundish object, you place it at a distance ingame where the total amount of pixels it has to work with is not great considering the geometry. It is something I also notice in modeling software that does not have AA on... if you zoom to certain view distances you get more and more noticeable flickering etc. You can increase the poly count of the model which will reduce it, or increase the resolution of the view window. Both have the same effect, but both cost more performance. You will most likely also have the same issue with certain actors and armors, in general any somewhat detailed model with circular slopes etc. Software AA cannot solve this since it only works on the final render and interpolates based on edge detection. A small way you can get a bit better results from SMAA etc. is to have increased contrasts which will make edges more defined and as a result improve the overall AA. Alternatively you can also increase bloom amounts which will help smooth out transitions which will have the same effect.. however both will radically change the overall image. As a final suggestion you can also try to find brighter textures... this will again help smooth out transitions and make them less noticeable at a distance.

I would imagine that if you can run 4x MSAA you should be able to scale down other effects, and then downsample instead and have a decent SMAA... MSAA´s only problem is that the cost is so prohibitive and even modest resolutions these days. Temporal is entirely dependent upon your FPS.. if you can sustain high FPS it is by far the best technique around since ghosting will be minimal to non existent. Also it is not really the textures that flicker.. it is the models. If you actually remove stuff like ropes and fences and replace them with the original 2d planes you wont have any flickering. It is entirely an issue with the meshes being just detailed enough that they cause flickering at 1080p. Solutions are either remove the meshes, or increase resolution... or get a detailed DoF which will blur out most of the flickering.

Software based AA solutions depend almost entirely upon your resolution. SMAA at higher resolutions will always be the better solution over MSAA due to the performance difference relative to visuals. If you indeed have jagged edges try to downsample at higher resolutions. Ofc. make sure that it is an AA issue first and not a sharpening issue, since lines can easily be because of that. The reason MSAA does look better than SMAA, is that MSAA 4x is more or less the same as saying you play at 4x the resolution.. if you play at 2x the resolution and then use SMAA you will probably have about the same quality overall. At least SMAA with high settings at 1440p will have removed just about all sort of jagged edges... if you go to 1600p they will have all gone. Downsampling is not that difficult to do, and for any who really just do not want jagged edges it is pretty much the best and easiest go to solution.

Based on the screenshot the only things that look a bit off is some of the textures which might not be the best for that particular preset. Best thing I can suggest is that you try to adjust whatever brightness or contrast values the preset has in its enbeffect.fx file. The differences between contrast from a monitor to a TV can be quite huge. Also most presets have sharpness as a seperate option as well, you can try to reduce that amount as well. If your monitor does sharpening there is no point in also having post processing doing it most of the time.

Any issues with various ENB versions are almost always a result of either drivers, or other 3rd party software at the users end. If a wide spread issue was present with any given version it would have been reported en mass at the ENB forums. So far nobody have reported any such issues. If you can eliminate that drivers or 3rd party issues are to blame then you can make a report of your findings over there. Also make sure to try with just the default files first, and then add a preset afterwards.

That is just the LOD texture that is loaded instead of the up close one. After a while it should transition into the proper one. The most common cause for this is that the game cannot load in all assets quick enough.

Make sure to disable terrain parallax unless you have textures made for it in your enblocal.ini.

Nothing additional is really required off the bat. The extra 8 will just allow the other processes that run in the background some more room, also you will have more room for cache so you should experience more smooth transitions once you have been in a location one time. Especially cities should load faster as you go in and out of houses.

The guide could always be better, but it was never meant to be a tweaking guide... one of those takes a long long time to create (I have been working on one for ages, but every other week I tend to discover something new that makes what I knew kinda obsolete.) The problem is that you can do so much... and you can go about getting the same visuals in many different ways with only slight differences. Only by actually working with it and exploring options will you get around to how to do certain things. Another thing to consider is that eventually you get to get immersed so much in the technical aspects, that you tend to forget the artistic sides of things. At least I know I suffer from this. When I look at images people create these days I more or less see the code to the shader that make up the style.. and not the artistic aspects such as color balance etc. (JawZ is much better in that respect than I most likely ever will be! :) ) I do tend to agree somewhat about the weathers... the main issue is that there are two different save buttons... one global and one for individual weathers. However once you have made the mistake of editing with game time running, or running about in the game while editing a few times the system tends to sink in. :) As for the fustrations, then I agree with JawZ... it is vital to have something else to do. Another suggestion I can come with is to start from a blank slate. Do not try to build on top of another preset... it will confuse you a lot more than if you start from a blank slate and slowly build up what you want. You might end up with something close to what inspired you, but you might also discover things you did not know looked good in the process. I would especially suggest this if you do not have the technical insight into the various math involved. And finally... only try to do one thing at a time and accept the compromises you have to make along the way. And as always... try to avoid using the base enbeffect.fx and bloom file.. they are not really user freindly you understand. JawZ have made some excellent files that does the same but are much easier to understand. Again it helps to understand the shaders as well and it will reduce fustrations. Ofc. the problem with all of this is if you get hooked and you never get to play the game.... I have still been told there are dragons and such in the game, it does sound interresting.. but I JUST want to adjust this one thing! :)

There are two kind of rays in ENB. The first is the one you see through threes and besides structures etc. Which is controlled via. the settings mentioned above. The other is controlled by the settings under volumetric ray. It mainly depend on which cloud texture you use, since just like with the trees it requires a decent alpha channel to look good. The main issue is that the trees etc. got fairly decent ones regardless of which textures you use. For clouds one set of settings will work with one but not another texture. So in your recent shots, the one with the clouds is one type, and the trees is the other one. The main issue like JawZ said is that to get intense rays, you most likely end up with a really blown out sky when there is nothing in the way. There are many reasons for this... both the alpha channel of the actual textures matter, but also the various settings. Depending on how your enbeffect.fx is setup there are certain visuals you are never going to be able to get on top of others because what produce one effect negate another....the trick is finding the balance where both are somewhat noticeable and bearable at all times. Also when it comes to rays the bloom effect is a huge contributor to the overall effect. Bloom works like a multiplier on top of what you have, so if you use high intensity values in enbseries... they will quickly go nuclear. I have always found that low values in enbseries and large in the shaders is a better way, since it allows you to use the enbseries values as a fine tuning instead of the coarse adjustment. The issue you have with what you are trying to do is mainly this. The preset you are trying to add a high intensity effect to is one where the entire visual style is about dim colors, and a smooth warm feel. This is more or less the opposite of having high intensity effects.. which is why it is going to be tricky to get done right. You most likely are going to have to make some compromises on the overall feel of the style to get your rays.

As long as you make sure to have all the .ini files with CoT in the name from the CoT download, and the vanilla from the pureweather one you will have the best from both worlds. I do not remember if I actually copied in the latest CoT ones into the pure weather update.. I might have in which case you do not have to do anything. Also if you think it already looks nice then all the better. At least all the weathers are in the weather list and it will all work just fine out of the box! Hope that did not confuse too much! :)

Make sure you have the correct version of ELE installed is the only major thing in terms of mods required. I am going to assume you are going to use the vanilla version. If you got the power you can increase the quality of the various effects and enable skylighting inside enbseries.ini. There will be some improvements in overall visual quality, but I always suggest that you try to see if the current settings are not good enough. Also under SSAO in enbseries.ini change SizeScale=0.65SourceTexturesScale=0.5 to 1.0 for both. That should remove the last remnants of flickering that can happen due to the rather low base values. But again it all depends on what your FPS expectations are etc. But for starters that will do. If you got further questions then just ask.

Got to admit from what I have seen that there are new shaders in play. Perhaps the LOD and the general open world parts are still more or less the same, but there are definite improvements to the lighting and shadows. They would not have to rebuild the entire engine from the ground up if they have something that sort of works... they could just recompile the various shaders so the are up to specs. I can imagine that they most likely would go for higher resolution textures over longer draw distances (sorry neovalen.. model popin ohoy! ) and still try to keep the overall memory usage within the console limits of around 8Gb. Also the other problem that is already present with the current engine when you throw too much stuff in.... long load times, and increased instability regardless of what you do.. it would be a nightmare to Quality assure, as well as maintain for PC... since if you run too close to the limits more people are invariably going to have issues running the game. My only hopes are really that they fix and improve the overall lighting shaders, as well as getting rid of the nif format... it is just horrible compared to everything in the industry. If they stick with it they better also release proper converters to the various modeling software. Finally one can hope they actually release a kit that does not suffer from all the horrible flaws that the CK does have.... I mean unreal engine, cryengine... etc. they all have it right (better if nothing else)... they do not actually have to reinvent the wheel here, just copy what is already industry standard for most projects!

The message is there to ensure the user knows the .dll is actually working and not being blocked by 3rd party software. As well as notify which graphics adapter is being used. This is relevant when you are on certain hardware setups. There have been some arguments over the amount of time it is displayed, but most people are not bothered by it, and on most mod lists the initital load times are longer than the message, so will be gone before you get ingame.

Ah my bad... just checked my archives. EgdeAA was not implemented until around v.168 and back then there was no enblocal.ini! Sorry for the confusion. If it is not aliasing you are referring to when you say pixelated you will have to provide some screenshots that show what the issue is exactly.

In enblocal.ini there are settings for the ENB AA effects, the egdeAA is similar to SMAA and can be used along side it. It will help remove most jagged edges at the cost of some sharpness. The catalyst settings should all just remain at application controlled.

Most likely you have additional AA effects enabled in your enblocal.ini... the edgeAA + SMAA will remove almost all jagged edges (which is what I assume you mean by pixelated). Just SMAA on its own will not be able to remove all, especially at lower resolutions.

Start by setting every setting to application controlled, and see if that fix it for you.

yes

Bloom intensity is too high, or you have a mod that alters the base intensity of the torches.

Point in fact.. if you have to adjust the gamma then your monitor does not display "properly"! :) Also I personally find that the only time I think really dark stuff can look good is if you want to emphasize some sort of lighting effects on characters etc... but for gameplay it just gets annoying fast. You do not have to go anywhere near RLO levels of dark in order to have it so a troll can still sneak up on you in the night while you are still able to mostly make out the terrain and general objects. But this is highly subjective... and if you get more enjoyment out of your game not being able to see it, who am I too argue! (too much anyways) :)

Probably because pitch black nights... are a bad thing. Most monitors do not deal with it nicely, and due to the way lighting works in the engine it just looks silly when you try to do it. You will always be able to find the inconsistencies between the various distances and objects.

Should be fixable by adjusting the specular map.

In your SweetFX settings files... you most likely have the effect called vibrance enabled.... scroll down and lower that value until happy. That would be the easiest way of the top of my head... Alternatively there also is a specific saturation option.. but most presets do not have that enabled by default. But it can also work.

"fairly easy.... IF YOU FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS!" Good laugh there! :)