ENB Recommendations and Framerate Suggestions

[phazer11]

Alright so I think I have all of my freeze's taken care of, now I just need to get FPS up so it's more playable. Currently with an ENB (doesn't really matter which) I drop to ~18-23 FPS with a max of 25 (32 if I'm lucky and disabled DOF).

 

I'm using the Skyrim Revisited recommended ENB (Realvision) at the moment with DOF off but it seems lacking for my tastes. I don't care terribly much if I have DOF on or not (if it's on it needs to be fast) and any DOF probably needs to be pretty light on resources/frame rate.

 

 

I've looked at the ENB guide and while I have not followed it completely configuration wise I have done things such as put steam in offline mode. I've used Razor Game Booster before but would prefer not to use it. I currently have it setup to load Skyrim Performance Monitor which is set to load Mod Organizer.

 

I used to use Pineapple Vision ENB (customized so it was less dark) and liked that but it was also similarly heavy on resources (about 50% Framerate loss) and Fimbulwinter is good but too washed out and would need a palette change among other things. Skyrealism looks promising as does Project ENB but I need to get the settings right. I also have seen some amazing pictures using an ENB and mods (a fair number from STEP) here not a fan of all that grass from lush grass and trees however. But I'm looking into the ENB he says he has customized to see how it is.

 

I've enclosed my .ini files from Mod Organizer's Editor.

 

If there was a way to make Skyrim open in a borderless window at 1600x900 and fill the screen I'd try that but reducing the resolution from 1920x1080 (for everything) to 1600x900 looks really screwy on my monitor and Borderless window does seem to help with fps a bit.

 

 

Ideas?

Also I know Skyrim.ini says it's missing something but I can't find the Warning file to see what.

Skyrim.ini

SkyrimPrefs.ini

[Luinithil]

Hmm. I'm currently running a full SR install without an ENB, with most textures at 1k-2k max and game resolution of 1600x900, and MemInfo reports framerates running around the woods in Falkreath and in Riverwood to be around 8-15 FPS. I'm guessing this means an ENB is a very bad idea? I'm looking for a darker experience with nights (and maybe dungeons) though since SR's default CoT install settings without any of the night levels leaves Skyrim's nights too bright.

[Aiyen]

Well darker nights are fairly simple to get. Just increase the night darkness level in CoT. For dungeons then most interior lighting mods make the dungeons darker to some extent.

 

You could just use an ENB without any of the performance heavy features activated, and then just use the color correction parts. That should have almost no performance hit.

 

Performance varies depending on enb settings. But if you are having below 10 FPS then you are most likely very limited at what you can activate.

[Luinithil]

I just took a run around Embershard Mine-- guess RLO without ENB is good enough, since the darkness isn't too dark. Darker nights are still on the wishlist however. Will SR's recommended ENB (SkyRealism) with just color correction do the trick, or should I look to somewhere else? I don't care about DoF or anything of the sort, but something to fix shadow striping would be great as well. I'm not sure why my shadows are striped even...

[phazer11]

Have you tried using the darker settings for Climates of Tamriel? Also what are your system specs?

[Luinithil]

CPU: i7260QM @ 2.2 GHz

8GB DDR3 RAM

GPU: Nvidia GT 540 M

 

I'm running on a laptop (Dell XPS L502X; same as torminater's mobile setup except I think he's got a better graphics card, IIRC). Using a screen res of 1600x900, native screen resolution is 1920x1080. Generally indoors without ENB I get around 15-20 FPS, minimum of 8 FPS outdoors in wooded areas like that just outside Riverwood. I've been monitoring everything through Elys MemInfo.

 

Just tried RealVision ENB with everything except shadows disabled, and I think I can safely say my system is NOT going to be running with an ENB, so I had better look into CoT's darker settings. The game with ENB was unplayable-- 7 FPS or even less indoors, with outdoor wood areas dropping even lower up to 2 FPS and lots of stuttering, and started getting some really nasty freezes on the road to Falkreath outside Riverwood at a certain spot. Even with ENB disabled via ENB manager and just about every texture pack off except the original Hi-Res and the HDDLC optimised the problem (stuttering) persists. Considering I managed to run on the road from Helgen to Riverwood at the start of the game before and went along the same path without an issue, this is rather unexpected. I'm going to try removing everything to do with ENB, refresh INIs and see what happens.

 

One thing I notice running from Riverwood to Falkreath outdoors is that the amount of RAM and pagefile space taken up balloons fairly rapidly until the game freezes or CTDs at roughly around the infamous 3.1GB mark. Pagefile peaks momentarily at around 40xx MB, as does RAM.

[phazer11]

Well with a 540M I think it was maybe marginally better or slightly slower than my old one a 460M and to play with reasonable rate I had to play at 1366x768 and I think I was able to use an ENB.

[torminater]

I have the same gfx as you have and I play at 1366x768 native resolution plus I only have 4 GB RAM. sorry, but I don't think that you'll be able to use any post-processing. If you search for my performance thread on this forum you can look there for further information, how to gain a stable gameplay experience.

Your GFX is most likely your limiting factor as it is for me. Playing on higher resolutions will make it hard for you to use any texture mods, and on a lower resolution better textures won't make as much of a difference than on a higher screen resolution, so you might as well skip them and focus on mods adding things to the world space or enhancing the gameplay. The 3.1 GB RAM level won't be an issue for you at all - I had RAM issues, but that's due to my RAM limitation.

[Luinithil]

The game was looking mostly stable for me with all SR textures used before I ventured into experimenting with ENB, so I'm going to revert my INIs and Nvidia Inspector settings to pre ENB and see.

[phazer11]

The game was looking mostly stable for me with all SR textures used before I ventured into experimenting with ENB' date=' so I'm going to revert my INIs and Nvidia Inspector settings to pre ENB and see.[/quote']

Decrease your Resolution(please; it'll help immensely with and without ENB)!

[Luinithil]

Was already playing at 1600x900-- maybe I'll drop to where torminater has his at. Meanwhile I read in the comments that Nvidia Optimus doesn't like d3d9.dll, and the injector version of ENB is recommended for those machines with it. Wondering if it works with ENB Manager?

[Aiyen]

The only reason to use ENB manager is if you continuously want to try out multiple presets. If you just need one preset then get rid of it and just copy in the files manually. It is faster, and there have been reported some issues with ENB manager... strange as that might even be considering what it does.

 

And yes all post process injections (More technically hooks) do not really work well with other programs that access the same ressources. Hence why you should not run with various monitor and OC software at the same time as playing.

 

Also as it has been said, then resolution is the limiting factor on mobile cards. They just cannot handle higher resolutions due to limitations on the chip.

[Luinithil]

Currently running at 1366x768. Bit smoother than 1600x900, but not by much.

 

Sadly one can't get rid of Optimus. I tried the injector version with a fairly lightweight ENB (RealLike ENB) with everything except shadows off; the results FPS-wise weren't bad-- less of a hit than with RealVision ENB, though the colours were strangely desaturated, which wasn't supposed to happen. Might it be the lack of bloom?

 

Unfortunately the freezes/CTDs outside Riverwood happened again, and kept happening with any ENB enabled, along with HUGE spikes in memory usage and pagefile that did not automatically clear themselves resulting in what looks to be the ~3.1GB RAM limit crash within 5 minutes of loading up the game. Whereas if no ENB or related files are present at all the game runs okay, with 13-27 FPS in all areas and combats I've been in so far (Falkreath woods, interiors and Riverwood exteriors on the main road through town, road up to Bleak Falls Barrow,), playtime about 30-60 minutes. I can only surmise something about the ENB use is causing the RAM use to mount without naturally clearing on its own; never seen Skyrim go up to 21111xxx K memory used in Task Manager until now.

[Aiyen]

Sounds strange. ENB should only take up a bit of VRAM if you use AO and reflection.

Also only use version 0.168 and not the above versions since those are still in the testing phases.

In general for performance then disable.

AmbientOcclusion

DoF

Reflection

Skylighting

 

Bloom should be possible to have on, if you do not then you will most likely get very dark an desaturated looks since bloom color amounts for quite a bit in most presets. The same goes for imagebasedlighting which will also darken the scenes (normally) but does not require vast amounts of performance.

 

If you want some detailed information on how to setup your ENB just throw me a pm and I will be happy to help out in any way I can.

[Luinithil]

I"m using 0.113 since that's the version required for RealLike; wonder if that could be an issue? I'd use 0.168 with it except that the results aren't good, judging from user comments. What other ENBs could I look at that are really lightweight? I only really need the color correction and shadow fixes, everything else is secondary. The other thing I didn't like about RealVision ENB was that there seemed to be a hazy quality about everything indoors.

[phazer11]

This one should be more along the lines of what you're looking for. Link: