A Comparison of Water Mods

[whocares7]

''Pure Waters'' gets some uplift and another update in on the way. The new modified normals adds amazing parallax effects via ENB.

[Neovalen]

All 3 of the water mods now have enb parallax (or at least a test version of). :)

[Quitch]

I personally always thought that Pure Waters spanked W.A.T.E.R. pretty hard bringing that sense of clear, calm, glassy water that I'd expect to see in Skyrim. This Realistic Water 2 mod looks interesting though (and indeed, I believe it's the guy who did the first one which W.A.T.E.R. took over from), so hopefully this one won't get bogged down in testing forever. Unfortunately it does look like it needs cell edits for maximum effectiveness, which I presume a big no no for STEP.

 

By the way it would be helpful to add a note to the OP that the video has been changed to compare a different mod, since I was confused as hell for a while there.

[DanielCoffey]

From what I have read on the RWT instructions, it appears that you need a "real" ENB to take advantage of the parallax. The ENBoost tool does not have the required enbseries.ini. Is this correct?

[TechAngel85]

@Quitch

RWT has already been accepted to replace WATER in STEP.

 

@DC

I would assume that is correct.

[Aiyen]

Yes water parallax requires ENB version 236 or higher to function. As well as a parallax texture in the folder.

[DanielCoffey]

Thanks for the confirmation. A bit of a shame but I understand why now.

[gurugeorge]

I think all of them have their plusses and minuses, vanilla even looks pretty good in some of the comparisons (it actually seems less "repeaty looking" to me than the others sometimes - WATER in particular can look very "repeaty" sometimes). But overall, WATER and RW2 do seem to be the best at moving waters, and Pure Waters is very good at clear still deep water and stagnant water.

 

I wish I had the brains and experience to combine the "best bits" :)

[Spock]

Something I found: Make sure to test how much displacement quality your system can effort (displacement is required for RWT ENB textures). I had to set mine to low and still sometimes drop below 30 fps in water heavy areas. The rest of the settings had almost no effect on my fps.

[Aiyen]

Displacement and parallax are the most costly ones. But only in very watery areas. But pretty much a no go for anything but top end cards atm. Especially if you are also running about with everything else on!