MontyMM

It's your tweaked weathers and SweetFX setup that interest me most. You seem to have sunny days looking very good through ENB, which I have found hard to achieve.

I'd say so. It's only a rough figure he's suggested, because STEP is very likely to drive your frame rate down. But of course it doesn't really matter at all - the frame rate you have when you've finished is the one to worry about. You'll have to experiment. It may be that some factor is capping out your FPS around 30FPS in all conditions, but your system might still have the power to run STEP well. That would be unusual though...

I think this is a good catch, I'd recommend this to be reworded. If it's missing from the WIP version it might have been deliberately removed. I think things will be much tidier once there is a new stable version up on the wiki.

I feast on brains.

I don't have much basis for comparison, but I haven't found it too quiet - plenty of conversation. Perhaps I scared them away

If I had to guess, I'd say those tweaks got started because they sound like they should be helpful, without them being widely tested. But, I can't say why someone else might include them. I would guess that app is designed to let people easily experiment with all possible settings.  That's great, but the point of STEP is that it tests things very thoroughly and only recommends what we can support with reproducible evidence. There are lots of tweaks on other forums that we've found inneffective or unstable. Every idea here gets questioned and criticised to make sure it passes the test, but it's not personal - friends will attack and defend ideas to make sure they stand up. EDIT: @Ggfd3FzZuyabrmSsmjun AFAIK, bfullscreen=0 just makes Skyrim start in windowed mode. Are you using the borderless window mod?

The point is, if it's not completed, then there's no recommendation on which parts of TPC to include, which is what you asked. Having a brave, seasoned brain has nothing to do with it.

Having been away for a long time, I've just discovered this. It really is top quality stuff. Well done.

I really don't think we're terrorizing anyone - my terror mode looks quite different! There's no problem at all with trying things out, that's how we move forward, but a newcomer might assume these are recommended tweaks, and when you say "It's clear STEP don't recommended it anywhere" he'd have to read every word of the site to prove that negative. We're just making it clear that it's not, and asking for evidence in case it's something we should consider. Nothing to worry about.

Welcome Unreal. Some of those screenshots are certainly interesting. If you get your mods/presets to a state you're happy with and release them, do let us know.

Definitely not proven and recommended tweaks, to my knowledge.

Excellent news. I spent a lot of time talking to Optic - he's a talented guy and a very nice one too. I'll try to get in touch and see what he's up to.

I just looked at his page. He lists most of his setup, which includes loads of stuff outside STEP, and he says which ENB he is using. For some reason he won't reveal his secret personal presets. So, I don't really see how we can help you. I'd recommend you play around with the ENB setups on the Nexus until you find something very close.Â

I don't know who told you that, but those screens show a wild selection of mods and ENB configs that have nothing to do with STEP. That can be achieved, but I couldn't possibly guess at the exact setup. You'd need to ask whoever provided those images to share their exact config. But your original complaint was that things don't look "realistic", and those screenies certainly don't provide that - the second lady looks like a Thunderbird! You should also bear in mind that many people use crazy setups and tricks for taking artistic screenshots, that wouldn't work well in-game.

Now there's a handy thing - good find! All the quality ENBs and all possible combinations of shaders and lighting in different conditions... yikes! This will really help. I'm sure the Grail lies in some combination of shader and ENB, which is what TC & Z seem to have been up to.

:P

The idea of Skyrim only using two cores, I'm fairly certain, is nonsense. Going back to what I said before, the main "bread and butter" of the game engine will most likely be running in a couple of threads (up until quite recently, most game engines would still be running mainly on a single thread, though that is improving as they learn how to separate and synchronise functions like AI and physics into independent threads.) But the engine could be running many more lightweight "occasional" threads, to keep the main threads uninterrupted. Just because the game engine is dominated by (for example) two threads, does not mean it is forced to use only two cores. So (as S4N has mentioned), the two cores running the main threads could be running flat out, but the system could give you a misleading figure; the average including the unused cores. Windows cannot slice up the threads and distribute them efficiently across all cores, as one might hope. In a non-realtime application, like a video encoder, the software could be written to chop up the task into as many chunks as there are available cores, because it doesn't matter in that case if each task completes asynchronously. But with a game engine, it's not so simple. John Carmack wrote a piece about it a few years ago - game designers would much preferred the single core to continue getting faster, rather than wrestling with multiple threads.

IMHO, they don't add much to Frihyland's installation guide, and some of it is a bit redundant. His tips on memory are bit random. 8GB RAM isn't necessarily justified - Skyrim won't use more than 4GB (and rarely makes full use of that), and Windows shouldn't hog another four. For him to say that with less than 8GB SKyrim will be a stuttering mess is misleading. He also tells people which sockets to install their DIMMs in, but that is going to vary according to motherboard, and the setup of dual or triple channel memory, etc. He also repeats the old myth about page file size. I'd personally also be a bit worried about telling people to overclock their GPU as a standard practice.

@MadWizard If it were hard disk-related, it would not necessarily occur at time of peak VRAM, but perhaps more likely upon cell transition, as a large amount of new data is suddenly demanded by the engine. I can say that when I experienced frequent CTDs (back when I first tried STEP a couple of months ago), then either removing large textures OR transferring to SDD would solve the problem. Once I had all textures enabled on the SSD, I tried transferring back to a different HDD, and the crashes returned. Maybe you could temporarily move Skyrim to the SSD to test this - I'd love someone to corroborate my pet theory. :D

I'm no expert - I just understand a few concepts that lead me to be sceptical of some of these claims. Hardware threads are essentially the number of processor cores available (plus virtual cores in the case of Hyper threading). That Intel post is suggesting that if your software is designed to run multiple threads, and is likely to run so many as to make use of virtual cores, then it may be better to constrain it to running only as many threads as you have physical cores. When running intensive processes, it is sometimes better to allow multiple software threads to take their turns on the physical cores, because the virtualisation is often even less efficient. Most games do not make very good use of multithreading, because of simultaneity; it is very difficult to make sure that all the disparate threads complete their tasks synchronously, to be useful for a realtime application like a game engine. Devs have been, and will be, struggling with this for years. This is why Skyrim does not appear to get much of boost from extra cores in benchmarks. But attempting to constrain the use of available cores is another matter entirely, and IMHO, we'd need a better explanation and a lot more evidence to recommend it. This is a line from the tool's description page, "The fact that Skyrim can only use 2 CPU cores, caused Windows to spread the load to all of my CPU Cores." This just doesn't make much sense to me, and adds to my doubts. EDIT: The thread that Z posted may offer a clue. When using 'Turbo' auto-overclocking, the fewer cores in use, the higher the possible overclock. Because Skyrim is likely only using a couple of threads, the clock speed boost would be well worth the price of disabling the under-utilised cores. That would at least make some sense, and that's where I'd focus the testing

I'm a bit sceptical of these tweaks. Do we have enough information to be convinced that Skyrim only uses two cores (and why would that be the case)? What does this even mean if it will "spread the load" to four cores, and why should it be constrained from doing so? If the program is multi-threaded, will it not simply make best use of the cores available? EDIT: From the Intel support forum: "On a hyper-threaded processor with N physical cores and 2N hardware threads, it is often better to limit the number of 'busy' threads to N for extremely compute intensive applications (like Skyrim). This is because hyper-threading shares the resources of a single core between two hardware threads and if both of these threads are trying to run highly compute-intensive operations they compete (sometimes inefficiently) for the resources of that single core - often ending up running more slowly than a single thread running unimpeded on that single core. So what happens to the other hardware thread if you do this? Not much - it mostly just 'sleeps', servicing the occasional interrupt in the background but consuming almost no resources (and by servicing those background interrupts, it keeps the busy thread from having to switch context to service them). So you're best off to leave things alone and let Skyrim utilize the processors the way it is designed to do..." So, it might make sense to try and prevent Skyrim from utilising hyper-threading if it were running many threads, but Skyrim doesn't appear to do that, and this is not likely to be an issue. I doubt there is anything to be gained by forcing Skyrim to ignore available physical cores. I suspect that this is one of those tweaks born from Chinese whispers of a fuzzy understanding that Skyrim only runs a couple of threads, and doesn't benefit much from several cores.

Do you run from an SSD? All I can offer is that my game is unstable in exterior cells when I run from a traditional HDD, but almost entirely stable when a carbon copy of my system is run from the SSD. My suspicion is that Skyrim loads textures from the hard disk in an ad hoc and inefficient way, that occasionally causes problematic spikes of demand.

I wasn't too keen on the versions on the early pages of this thread, but this latest one I really like. At first I thought the chevrons had a slightly too-modern feel, but now, in combination with that font, I think it works. It has a sort of Dwemer feel about it, which fits nicely the technical nature of STEP. I'll put it on the parchment title page and see how it looks. I notice that page also needs fixing, as it still shows "2.x.x" from the rough version.

It's also worth adding that ENB has its own FPS limiter (set in the ini), and this frequently causes the long load time issue too.

I'd love to be proven wrong about the MMO, and the bloke that wrote the article is not the most convincing writer I've ever read, but I do keep getting a strong whiff of marketing department. Elder Scrolls plus WoW? Kerching!!! What would be awesome is something similar to the traditional Elder Scrolls game, but designed for multiplayer, and allowing us to run private servers and play in organised groups. The STEP team storming an evil fortress? Now that might shake my credit card loose. Of course, if it included EVERY member of the community, there could be the occasional arrow to the knee.