Is ENB truly broken for FNV?

[baronaatista]

So I've read before that ENB is essentially broken for FNV, and when reading some of the readmes of ENB's I've downloaded, there are many warnings about graphical errors and glitches caused by the New Vegas engine with ENB.  Then I installed Enhanced Shaders Neutral, which seemed like a sensible and performance-oriented preset... and while it looked quite good, within 10 minutes of playing I was seeing weird translucent edging around objects, objects getting set as never-fade so I can see the campfire in the goodsprings reservoir, through everything in the way, from chets store.  Is this just pretty much what it is?   ie. It'll work well every now and then, and not so well otherwise? or am I doing something wrong?  I've used, with success, many ENB's in the past, both for Skyrim and I swear I had played a decent amount of FNV before with ENB, without issue....

[baronaatista]

For anyone interested I seem to have solved my problem - I had 'Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration' set to multi-display performance mode in NVIDIA control panel for some reason.  Setting this to single-display performance mode seems to have eliminated my transparency issue.

[Audley]

Well the answer is yes and no. There are a lot of limitations that the engine has that make ENB have issues with certain effects. Most noticeably with ambient occlusion and detailed shadows. There are also some smaller issues that are also engine related such as water displacement acting weird. Boris has commented that nothing can really be done about this and that he has done everything he could. Personally I find that detailed shadows is broken and causes massive artifacting in the corners of the screen. However, ambient occlusion is fine about 90% of the time as long as the setting itself isn't turned up too much. As for the transparency issues you are having... make sure that AA is off in both the .ini files and is not forced through your control panel. Also double check that the Steam Overlay in-game is not enabled as that will also cause transparency problems. Most of the effects are actually fine just turn off detailed shadows. The thing that really gets me is ENBoost. Which is completely borked as far as I am concerned; trading performance for stability. So personally I turn off ENBoost and detailed shadows and everything is mostly okay. 

[MonoAccipiter]

Some ENB presets recommend turning off water displacement too (in the launcher). I personally haven't had any issues with detailed shadows, but otherwise what Audley said is on point. 

 

It's not really broken as much as having to deal with a lot of limitations because it's an old game.

[darkside]

I think ENB added a lot of beauty to this game. Detail shadow artifact can be annoying at time, but it works most of the time. AO works well IMO. I personally enable both.

Dynamic DOF works perfectly, but I disable it due to personal preference. I hate when it focus on my weapons instead of loots on the floor.

I enable native game engine DOF to get some background blurred when talking to NPCs.

Edited March 13, 2016 by darkside

[Audley]

What I said above applies to when I use ENB for screenshots and such. For normal gameplay I actually don't use an ENB as I HATE aliasing. The shimmering and jagged lines in the distance (especially with transparent objects) is SO distracting. I am extremely sensitive to such things. And due to some sort of limitation in the engine, AA doesn't work very well to begin with. SMAA can only do so much. Even MSAA (the game's native AA) has its issues. If you don't mind the aliasing then by all means at least give ENB a shot before you dismiss it. It does add a lot of cool effects and depth to a scene. 

[MonoAccipiter]

The aliasing is much more noticeable with AO enabled (which is why I've learnt to live with it, though I initially was as sensitive as you, Audley). The only thing coming close to fixing it was temporal AA, but that isn't available for the FNV ENBs and in Skyrim it had ghosting issues. 

Edited March 13, 2016 by MonoAccipiter

[baronaatista]

I've followed all the typical instructions for ENB/modding in general; AA and Anisoptric Filtering turned off in launcher.  Steam overlay is disabled.  Same things set to off/application controlled in NVidia control panel.... I am running windows 10 and I've been hearing recently about it using it's own overlay, which I know nothing about.

 

It does sound like basically... it works, provided you are willing to ignore a bunch of annoying glitches.  How do people like Michael from GamerPoets create LetsPlay's with ENB then?  or does it work better for F03?

[MonoAccipiter]

As I said I don't really have that many glitches. As for what you reported:

 

1. "weird translucent edging around objects", by this I assume you mean the problems DoF and AA has with transparency. This is pretty normal and why in most cases having detailed meshes is much better than trying to make parts of a texture transparent. You'll see this issue in FO3 too, sadly, and I know Gopher for one has pointed out that it's an issue he has with ENB (though he still uses it) in one of his Let's Plays. I have this issue too, but don't really notice it all that much except in some very awkward lighting (the most bothersome for my part is FCO's eyebrows and the sweat effect, which shows edges sometimes.)
2. "objects getting set as never-fade", this I'm more unsure about as I've never experienced it myself. Sounds like some variant of the transparency bug, and for that the ENB board is crawling with solutions, so I'd go check that out if I were you. I am not 100% sure it's that though, and someone else might be better at troubleshooting that issue.

[darkside]

I've followed all the typical instructions for ENB/modding in general; AA and Anisoptric Filtering turned off in launcher.  Steam overlay is disabled.  Same things set to off/application controlled in NVidia control panel.... I am running windows 10 and I've been hearing recently about it using it's own overlay, which I know nothing about.

 

It does sound like basically... it works, provided you are willing to ignore a bunch of annoying glitches.  How do people like Michael from GamerPoets create LetsPlay's with ENB then?  or does it work better for F03?

Minor glitches in my opinion. You will not notice it as much while playing. You will be busy killing or sneaking. Visual improvements way outweigh the glitches.

Edited March 13, 2016 by darkside

[baronaatista]

Really appreciate the feedback, I'm not at all a stickler for my game looking perfect, and there absolutely are some things ENB does that I just don't want to play my game without, such as dark shadows, nights and dungeons/vaults.  It was this "never-fade" bug or whatever the hell is happening that was really bothering me.  I thought for a second maybe to do with FNVLODGen, but as soon as I set enbseries useeffect to false, it went away so I have to assume it's the ENB.

[Audley]

Do you have the Fix Transparency setting in the enblocal.ini file set to true? If it is make sure it is FALSE. Even though it says it fixes transparency issues, it will actually cause them. That's the only thing I can think of. 

[baronaatista]

I did indeed have Fix Transparency set to true, but no change after setting to false.  I also have Fix Gamebugs to true?  I haven't touched either value previous to this, so they are either defaults or set by Enhanced Shaders?