Aiyen

lol! Good one Ess! And very true!

Ah okay! :) Guess I am not as fancy yet! Guess it comes with time! Carry on then!

Body tattoes where implemented a while back. That is the only thing I can think of. they also require SKSE and racemenu... never played with them myself so a bit on your own in that regard.

I am sure it is because of the tint masks used for tattos etc. Since they require a SKSE edit in order to function at full resolution. Also the only textures that affect only the player, and is in some way connected to SKSE.

If I had the time I would be moving the many threads you just made on the matter into this one..... just silly really :P They might be seperate but clearly all are part of the same thing. :P

First off.... Biology... meh... Microbiology.. that is where the fun starts! Give me a fungi or bacteria, and I will start to create funny mutants that change color! :) Its good stuff! Used to do theoretical astrophysics, with stellar oscillation and general star modelling... was one of the first to make it work on GPU´s which improved the computation time... 10000x compared to my professors old fortran code hehe... good times. Guess I should have become a researcher instead of a lab rat. Oh well life is funny that way. Now back to Skyrim! 1st. One giant single card >> Two lesser cards in SLI/Crossfire... since Skyrim and ENB is not optimized for it. So it is just a waste of money. My card. GTX 660 2Gb EVGA Superclocked. Lovely little beast. had I waited a week I would have got the 3Gb version... will always say DOH to myself for that. 1½: PhysX is pointless for Skyrim... it uses havok not physX for its physics. 2nd. Bloom quality: I have it to high, since I like my bloom, and I have never seen any really noticeable impact from setting it lower. But it has been many version since I bothered trying to mess with it. 3rd. Grass.... reduce the amount to gain large boosts in performance! Especially in forested areas. Those silly heavy grass images you see on the ENB forums are not for playing. They are for screenshots. I recently put up a few shots that showed a difference of 10 FPS depending on grass settings. So there are massive boosts to be had there. 4th: Skyfalls: Depends on your settings, if you increased the decal amount as it suggests to get that LOD smoke on waterfalls then it will hit your performance... not much point in it imo since it also affects oh so many other things. Other then that then stable as long as you do not have a silly complex list. I think that covers it... I am tired now! almost 5am!Â

The entry furthest to the right is what applies. This gives you two options when making patches. Either create a new .esp by right clicking at the top and create a new one. Or just copy the entries into the existing .esp. Benefit of the former is that it works even if you update the mod, the bad is that you spend more .esp slots. If you just plan on getting playing soon, and not much for down the line maintenance then just copy into the existing .esp.

Your monitor seems fine and should be able to render images without any apparent issues since it has a 2ms response time. Mine has 5ms and I can notice "motion blur" if I turn really fast at 60 FPS etc. This is not as prevalent at lower FPS however... since the turning cannot happen equally as fast. However I wanted a quality IPS panel (Dell U2713HM) for the colors, not the response times. But that is a different debate all together! But yes I can understand that if you play at mainly 60 and get drops to 30 you are going to notice. What you could do is cap it at 30-40 then you should not notice it at all after a while. My average FPS is about 25, and span from 20-35 in normal playing. Interiors are 30-50 mostly. I do play at 1440p so that does help a bit with any blurriness due to reducing quality parameters. I cant play at 1080p since it just make everything look blurry. But again this is monitor dependent. I would get 40-60 FPS in exteriors if I played at that resolution however. But again I prefer more eye candy and a sharper image compared to the super fluent play at 60 (Where I would just get motion blur due to the response time anyways!)

afaik, and have studied up on then game engines can only determine whole textures and their mip map levels for memory assignment. Also they can depending on design decide how many unused textures are used and load them regardless to speed up later rendering. I have not read about anything that says they can just take in part of a file and then only use that, since the whole file would have to be in memory in order to access it to begin with. Only things I have read about that could do that sort of thing is if you had like a 4000M(Or similar random high number) pixel image that you obviously cannot just load in at once, but have to create special routines to load in smaller chunks at a time... I believe this sort of method was used from a massive panorama in London some time back. But again have not read anything that indicate that this sort of code goes into game engines for the sake of foliage. But if someone with more in-depth knowhow about the inner workings of game engines can say otherwise then fine! :)

Yeah but the the entire texture is still loading into memory... always wondered why the regular one was not made larger to use more canvas, hence provide more pixels for more detail. As it is now then over 50% is just wasted space that still requires memory but does nothing visually. And yeah vurt, your latest there are really nice looking!

Like I have said before.... people its a guide, not a rulebook :P STEP is always going to play catchup! If a mod has a clear "fix" for something then you most likely have to use it regardless of what STEP says! :)

Skylighting essentially affects how deep shadows look... which can be hard to control using just basic tonemapping. I personally disabled it since I know how to tweak my tonemapping now. And it does take up about 10-15% of the performance hit. It does not alter any of the SKY settings, since those are all aimed at individual parts of the sky that you can also edit from the CK. Also double check that transparency AA is not enabled since it will demolish your performance in that region due to the large amount of foliage. As Ess says then try to alter the size scales since it does provide a boost as well. Also you can just lower the quality parameters to low, hit save and enable.. but yeah stuff will get a bit more blurry. If you reduce the size scales too much you will start to get flickering depending on how intense the AO is in your preset. As rule of thumb you can lower it until you have no more flickering.. setting it higher is just a waste of performance really. Only required for really pretty screenshots etc. Also Ess seems to be adamant in that enable compression should only be used with "plenty of VRAM".... but it can also be enabled if you have plenty of RAM. My settings have 8gb set in the allowed VRAM, and that works very well for me even though I only have 2Gb on card but have 16Gb RAM . And I run without any CTD´s with full 2k textures, even quite a bit more 4k then what is healthy. In general all of those memory parameters, you have to play with them. Every system is different since moving data around depends on much more then just the total amount of VRAM and RAM. It is a hassle but worth it if the stuttering at load really bothers you. Now for the fun part... I like it when people say they go down to 30FPS and its back... that is when I have my highest FPS :P The riften area usually run between 20-25FPS as does all heavily forested areas. But I also prefer a bit extra eye candy over fluet shooter like movements... I do not need them in skyrim.

Get the updated textures for skyforged weapos on cabals website... its under optionals. He just did not want to reupload it all for that little which is understandable.

Looking forward to some screens Z... idea is interesting! :) As for your LOD´s vurt then they are pretty much spot on for vanilla lighting (Always amazes me how bad that lighting is)... Only thing I could think of is to add a bit more darkness to the parts of the winter pines that are close to the middle... since the ones in front are always going to be darker like that. And yeah... in general I have also found that going above 200/210 for any individual color is asking for trouble! :) Will most likely just cause stuff to almost glow at night.

Nationality: Danish Location Denmark Occupation: Unemployed Lab technician (Genetics and microbiology focus) Age: 28

The only real performance you get from doing this is less memory used when loading textures. Depending on your hardware this can be an issue. As for what to look for. In general you can think of it this way. The higher the resolution of the normal map. The more up close can you get to an item before it will start looking blurry. Hence for stuff like weapons etc. that are always up close when you are playing in first person... then a normal map of 2k is the best, or you will start to see really blurry textures. The same for armor since you are fighting enemies in close combat most of the time (unless you are a mage or archer only.) hence it would also be a good idea to have better quality for those. For stuff like landscapes and trees, rocks etc.... you can go close to them, but how much playing time are you going to be using staring at them up close ? Those you can reduce to 1k without much visual difference, unless you go looking for it. In general I do not recommend going below 1k ever... and never below 2k for weapons, armor and humanoid enemies, since those textures will become blurry messes (personal preference). Also the memory gained from going lower is so small compared from going to 2k to 1k that it just does not make sense...I also highly doubt that anybody can prove that going that low will help stability... since it frees up so very little. (5mb to 1mb compared to 1mb to 300kb for DXT5 compression roughly speaking.) Seams are always going to be present, these are due to the meshes mainly... it would be a really time consuming project to sort it out, since not only would you have to fit the meshes with all possible other meshes that can be placed near them, you also have to sort it out with textures. Hence why nobody really does it... and most of the time it is not that noticeable unless you stare at it.

When you put it like that then I almost have to try it out :P

Normal maps are what add depth to a texture. So instead of modeling something to have depth, you use the cheaper method of doing it with the a texture. If you want ONLY the normal maps at 1k resolution put both of the restaints to 1k. Then back where you select which files to edit, use the filter to only select _n.dds files (the normal maps) and then run the process ONLY on those. Then copy the end result back into the folder and overwrite as required. Now you have 2k diffuse, and 1k normal.

Also about the candles... you can ofc. use the vanilla ones, but they are not made to work nicely with the SSS feature. But tbh I guess it depends on your point of view.. some people think the extra glow through feature is extra nice and very vital.... I personally never stare that often at the candles.

There are essentially none of them that should not be used with a vanilla game (As long as you use ENB)... and other then the water fire exception then most mods use the vanilla meshes. So there is not really any point in adding anything to the guide about it. I think your confusion about it is a bit odd tbh... I know you are a big fan of concrete "place this here" but the affected mods are already detailed in the description of the particle patch, and there is not much more to it then that. And the only reason it is there is because it has never been removed. Both Water and Fire now use the meshes so there is no point in saying that any should be before or after, since the outcome is the same regardless. As I recall then the skylight issue was sorted ages ago. At least I have not seen it it in forever.

You can place it before or after it does not make any difference, since the meshes are the same. As long as the textures and meshes are the same then placement does not matter. You have to remember that these guides are made for people using NMM where they do not have the same easy going system to sort out overwrites. There it makes sense to make people aware of it. I think I personally just deleted the fire parts from the particle patch as part of my "saving" diskspace and clean up in my overwrites.

It already includes the meshes. So you can place it after it again.

There is not specific spot. If a mod includes the changes then there is no harm if it is placed after. So if you place it late then you are sure that the proper meshes are being used. Also moving this to ENB support since the meshes are only relevant for ENB users.

Skyrim is not made for locational dmg. The meshes are all wrong and it just does not work in practice. And not to mention that it is really random since the AI does not have the benefit of aim. The classic examples.. you sneak up on a guy and forward powerattack with a 2h sword in the back of his head... you hit his leg ? Random enemy archer hits you in the kneecap visually... but you just got shot in the head? After a while it just gets tedious.... add to that the extra script issues when using other overhauls, and additions that do stuff to combat and it was an easy choice that this had to go first. :) And yeah destructible bottles... why just why ? Bottles still only get destroyed if you use certain abilities, and they all only have one sound effect that does not even sound realistic. Add that it requires a script to work at all, normally people just installed it but never actually destroyed any bottles anyways :) Also "convenience mods" like auto unequip ammo, block steal etc. Are you sure you cannot play the game without them. They again add yet another script to your character which is just asking for even more trouble with combat.

That is just odd... if all graphical stuff is disabled it does absolutely nothing that should affect FPS noteworthy. So I am sure you have a setting somewhere that is not what it is supposed to be.