doveman

For my friend, who's only got a 512MB 4770, I'm wondering which, if any, of AF/FXAA/SMAA he should be able to use. I'm going to disable AA for him, as not only is that likely to cause an FPS drop but it considerably adds to VRAM usage as well. I think SMAA is better than FXAA but as RCRN uses FXAA I'm not sure it's possible, or advisable, to use them together, particularly if he's using the antilag d3d9.dll (haven't tested that myself yet to see if it helps at all). As for AF, I don't think that adds to VRAM usage but I'm not sure how much strain it puts the GPU under.

@z929669 I'm sure I'd understand the technical reasons behind it if I read that, but to my mind if I have to read technical docs to care then it's not that important. If I can't see a difference that I care about in the images, then it just doesn't seem significant enough to worry about to me. I was looking at some SMAA comparison images (not Skyrim-related) the other day and couldn't see a single difference and if I can't see a difference studying a static image I'm sure I won't whilst playing the game. As I said, I can see the differences in the images you posted, I'm just not sure that I'd be aware of them whilst playing unless I'd studied comparison images endlessly and I think I'd rather be playing Skyrim. I obviously want to get as good quality as possible without having to spend too much time to achieve that, hence why I love STEP as it saves me having to compare all the mods myself. I'll probably end up running the textures through DDSopt sometime anyway, just so I can forget about it. I'm just saying I haven't really seen enough evidence to be sure it's actually worth the effort. ;)

I don't see how that's a "kicker" that justifies manually running the textures through DDSopt, when you admit that Vano89's Optimized may well contain these corrections already. If you discover it doesn't, then that's a different matter. I do see the difference in the trees, although it's hard to say which is "right". The Vanilla ones are more "full", which might look better to some people, although after flicking between them for a while I think I prefer the post-DDSopt ones. Of course I might be influenced by knowing that this is the "right" image though ;) I can clearly see the difference on the ground in the second set of images, although if I hadn't seen the DDSopt'd one I doubt I'd think there was anything wrong with the Vanilla one. I guess these little extra details all add up and make the world a bit nicer to look at though.

Nice, I think it's much more helpful now :)

Well it clearly doesn't answer all my questions (who's not reading properly now ;) ) but I accept that paragraph does contain some warnings. I think it could be more helpful though. For instance "The exception is that if you have less than 1GB VRAM, this texture upgrade may be too much for your GPU, so apply it and the following options with cautious optimism.". Either the HRDLC+STEP will work on 1GB cards or it won't, so it would be more useful to advise one way or the other. As for "If you are lazy and have concerns about your VRAM, you can skip to step 8 below", I don't think it's helpful to suggest people who'd rather download one of the HRDLC Optimised packs, rather than go through all the hassle of following the steps manually when no specific or significant benefit is identified are lazy (and indeed using HRDLC Optimised seems the sensible choice in terms of reducing VRAM usage). Fair enough, in that case it might be best to keep it on a separate page and not copy it to the Skyrim Installation page, but also DLC - step 6 on that page should make it clear that for most people doing the optimizations is unnecessary and can be skipped.

I was talking about STD and HRDLC, not the others like SKYHD where there clearly are substantial gains (in some areas at least, others don't reduce much or at all until going to Hybrid or Hybrid+Vanilla).

Thought I might as well do the Optimisation for the new STEP, but I got a bit confused when opening the HighResTexturePack02.bsa as the bottom window still seems to reference the files in the folder selected there, which was still set to Vanilla Extracted\HRDLC1\ I'd expect the bottom window to just show the files contained in the BSA selected in the top window, so perhaps a note about this confusing behaviour might be worth adding to the Wiki to save other poor souls getting confused like I did. I don't really understand why the "Repair the HRDLC Textures" section links to another page either. Surely it's all part of the same process and would be better all together on one page? Wherever they are, perhaps the instructions could be a bit better organised as well, as if someone's going to use Full 1024 (AKA Standalone) they don't need to download the HRDLC, but it only mentions that at Step 8, so if someone was following the instructions they'd have wasted their time downloading and optimising the HRDLC! So maybe the guide could be setup to show a) steps to follow if using a 512MB card (or maybe <1GB), which I guess would be 1 - Optimise the Standard Textures, 2 - Install Full 1024 (AKA Standalone) b) steps to follow if using a >1GB card, i.e. 1 - Download and extract the HRDLC, 2 - Download the HRDLC fix, the HighResTexturePack DLC Tweaks and the modified bat file edit the paths in the latter and run it to patch the DLC files, 3 - Optimise and recompress the Standard and DLC textures. I'm not clear if using the HRDLC Optimised versions Hybrid (1024+2048) or Hybrid + Vanilla normal maps is a simpler alternative to b) but if so perhaps that should be mentioned as some people might prefer to avoid all the mucking about with DDSopt. EDIT: Having said that, looking at the tables it doesn't look worth it to optimise the STD textures anyway, so if not using the HRDLC it's probably only necessary to Install Full 1024 (AKA Standalone). Even optimising the HRDLC only seems to save 20-30MB and the only real benefit seems to come from using hybrid 1024 + 2048 or hybrid + vanilla normal maps, so perhaps it's a waste of time using DDSopt and we should just advise people to use HRDLC Optimised, which also incorporates the HRDLC fixes.

Ah, that's a shame, guess I'll have to live with having one eyeball on my forehead and one on my chin ;) It's not like you have to do anything particularly strange to make it happen, pretty much just get in that pool of water. Maybe it doesn't happen so much where the water's deeper, so that you're not walking along the bottom (although I'm not sure I was there either).

Has anyone else encountered this bug? It's as if half my eyeballs are above the waterline and the other half below, with perfect vision of both views. Clearly IRL trying this would just give you a blurry mess but I'm hoping it can be fixed so that it either shows one or the other, not both at the same time. The third screenshot shows a slightly different problem, whereby looking down mostly the view is of the top of the water as you'd expect, but the area near the player doesn't show any water but instead shows what is underwater, as if the player had some miraculous ability to push back the water from just around him! As I turned left or right, this waterless area remained around me. I also started to drown, so it seems the game considered me to be underwater, despite the fact that I'm clearly looking down at the surface of the water.

Thanks, that's a relief then as CFM seems to have to match the Skyrim version so if I couldn't update CFM because CFM config didn't support it anymore, I'd have to choose between dumping CFM or not updating Skyrim!

What are people currently doing about Categorised Favorites Menu mod, as I was just looking at the update (v0.1.14) but Categorized Favorites Menu Config mod says it was last updated for CFM 0.1.11 and I think that's needed for various other mods that we use such as Jaysus Swords and Weapons of the Third Era?

Particularly when using Mod Organiser, when in fact Tannin42 advises not to use the console ini commands at all.

Yeah I know, but that's too much of a pain when you're playing on the couch with an Xbox360 controller ;) Well I guess I used one of those alternate methods then (basically load a savegame, edit and save the ini, open the console and type refreshini, make a new savegame) and it's been OK as far as I can tell. Certainly haven't had to make a new game.

Hi Just signed up and I wanted to chip in :) With my 2GB 6950 and full STEP it used around 1.5GB VRAM and I've been running with ugrids=9 without any crashes or long loading times. I've recently been trying ENB mods (Sharpshooters most recently) and that has made loading times extremely long, to the point that I've given up and killed it on some ocassions (other times I've been about to and it's started, or I've alt tabbed out and it's started and grabbed focus back before I've had a chance to kill it), so I dropped back to ugrids=7 to see if that would help, but it didn't. I'll probably go back to ugrids=9 as I found in the screenshots I saw that far shores and other land masses can look a bit strange on 7 and I have noticed that in game since dropping down to 7. Obviously I'll have to keep an eye on my VRAM usage and if it gets much higher with new/extra mods I might not be able to use 9 anymore. Whilst recognising that everyone has different visual tastes, I thought of an idea for sharing settings. We could have several different threads for different configs, so e.g. AMD Quadcore, 4GB, 6950/6970 GPU, SATA HDD and then give settings for that config that maximise quality whilst keeping FPS at around 60FPS, then list further tweaks that make a worthwhile difference and note what FPS drop they cause as well. Then people can decide if they're happy with e.g. 30FPS to use a number of these tweaks. I'm thinking more of groups of settings, rather than individual ones. Whilst there may be the odd setting that costs 10 FPS, if we could say e.g. "tweak 1+2+3 improve shadow distance and quality for a 10-15 FPS drop", that might be more useful to users. Obviously this is going to depend on users with different configs being willing to do the testing and post their results. I guess the starting point will be whatever's recommended in STEP and then the tweaks should make a substantial difference from there. We'd have to decide how different a config has to be before it gets it's own thread as well, so for example it might be considered that 4GB and 8GB systems don't differ that much in terms of performance, so we'd just list it as 4GB+, similarly AMD Quadcore and Hexcore might not differ much, whilst Dualcore might be slower enough to justify it's own thread. I imagine the GPUs might be harder to group, but I think there's probably some scope for doing so and certainly by VRAM as that seems quite significant for Skyrim.