Distance Tweaking (No uGrids Mod)

[torminater]

[torminater]

[torminater]

To make an assessment:

There are tons of tweaks possible and maybe in certain combinations all of them work together to enhance the view distance and LOD, but that would require far too much testing. As for the most obvious improvements:

 

-> shadows for land and trees

-> Grass distance 18000 is more than enough, 25000 might be overkill

-> Clouds covering distant mountains looks kinda nice (plus they seem a LOT bigger)

-> Tree distance tweaked looks pretty good, playing around with mesh values, doesn't seem to do much, if anything at all

-> Other terrain manager tweaks improve the rock textures and landscape shape by nuances, but according to many people with a fully modded (e.g. SR) install the infinite loading becomes quite the issue if using very high tweaks for them (as in my z-fighting tweak). But maybe there is a possibility to increase them slightly or only a couple of them, so at least the closer parts have improved looks.

-> Any other values are more or less gimmicks - doing neither good nor ill.

 

 

Performance?

I was able to load every savegame with a full SR install and an ENB active, getting at least 30 FPS in some of the shots - which is as much as without the tweaks...

For vanilla Skyrim I couldn't even perceive any difference, since I already maxed out at 60 FPS all the time.

[phazer11]

How did you get images 3,4,6 and 7 in post 17? They look awesome and what is the performance hit? Granted you have a beefy 680 so I'm assuming the fps is from that card? Oh AND you have a 580 for physx...

 

I just tried your useful tweaks (last one) and it actually increased my FPS a bit with ENB and o.o what sorcery is this? I was getting up to 51 FPS (25-51)outdoors (compared to my average (and max) of 35 and between 54-60 indoors. Granted I decreased my resolution from 1600x900 to 1440x810 (and decreased the grass distance to 20k, + plus shadow distance to 6k and used my normal shadow settings) but damn and that was without borderless window and there weren't that many stutters so uh O.O <- Color me confused

 

Also I noticed I was getting v tearing in dungeons and some (not much) outdoors. Just noticed vsync wasn't enabled.

[torminater]

I just jumped (tmm 1/tgm/killall) across Skyrim after running through helgen with my vanilla skyrim setup using a generic character to find some spots where the lighting was good enough and the distance was far enough.

Shot 17 is near Whiterun. Vurt's adds the plants, SkyTest the animals.

[Neovalen]

I think he's asking which settings were tweaked in those shots? Maybe I am mistaken.

[torminater]

I've Said so in the Assessment post. 3-7 are SR shots with and /wo tweaks. All tweaks are included in the ini Files.

[phazer11]

Well yes that is what I was asking but I think I figured out which it was after posting that which I posted via an edit. I used your "SR Useful Only" SkyrimPrefs.ini settings and turned some things down slightly (mainly shadows) I was getting pretty amazing performance since without those settings I couldn't see as far AND was on average running ~35 FPS (29-37) outdoors with ENB. With them I was getting between 25-51 FPS outdoors with the same ENB settings.

 

My main issue was there was no vsync so I experienced vtearing in some spots like dungeons and occasionally outdoors. What are your settings in Nvidia Inspector? I'd appreciate you posting some screenshots of them even if they are mainly from the Nvidia guide on the wiki.

 

I'd like to do some more testing but I keep getting the tearing with vsync off and less performance with it on I used Nvidia Inspector to set a 30 fps limit but it was acting weird my fps would drop suddenly from 29.9fps to 20 in some spots (like it was going to freeze) and then go back up. Using the driver enforced fps seemed to eliminate the stutters except for the fps dips which I did not get without the limit.

[torminater]

Oh, can't tell why, but I only get screen tearing whilst using Borderless window. Using Full screen mode I never got screen tearing. Heck I didn't even notice I had Vsync turned off in my skyrimprefs.ini...

I'll reenable it and retry borderless window to see, whether that was the reason... Edit: Yup, it was. Funny, I let Skyrim generate the inis freshly and it still had VSync disabled...

 

Disabling Vsync could be the reason for your performance gains.

FPS drops probably would occur, when your changing through cells and new cells have to be loaded, which are now a lot more detailed.

[Aiyen]

The newest versions of ENB come with its own Vsync now, it will overwrite the built in Skyrim one, so you need to make sure it is set to true in the enb ini file or you will get tearing. This is for version 186+ of ENB.

[Spock]

Actually more view distance does not equal better quality. If you turn your view distances way up, all the items will pop in when a new grid is loaded. Imho the optimal setting is where the items fade in near the edge of the loaded grids. This cannot always be achieved perfectly because grids are squares and the distances in the ini are circular. Sometimes I found the Skyrim engine loading grids relatively late for no apparent reason (this happens more often when moving fast). But it can be achieved most of the time for most of the angles approaching a cell.

To give you an example: I just tried to max fTreesMidLODSwitchDist by approaching a tree which is positioned right behind a grid edge. I tried to approach that tree at a 90° angle to the grid edge so the distance to the tree is shortest when the grid is loaded. At that position fTreesMidLODSwitchDist should not yet have kicked in, it should kick in if I move just slightly towards that tree. I found 14000.0000 to be the value that does that. It slightly eases tree popping on grid transitions because the MidLOD is visually closer to the far tree LOD. It comes at the price that you see MidLOD switches on trees you already fully loaded though. But still at a far distance, I think it is worth it.

For objects this is trickier, in my testings I found objects of different sizes fade differently. I'm currently using 10.5. The difference is hard to tell, most larger objects still pop in but smaller ones fade. So you don't have the full detail popping in, an improvement imho.

For items I'd go with 10 so they don't fade in before larger objects.

This is subjective, some people would probably rather have all the detail right away. For me personally I prefer this.

[z929669]

Good points. I'd have to look in my own dame (suring normal play) to determine how 'bad' the popping is, but popping will be a problem no matter what. The best fix IMO would be to improve the LOD terrain textures to better blend with the rendered terrain flora subject to fade. This in turn requires a system powerful enough to render all of the terrain vegetation such that there is no ugly band of terrain that has neither LOD or rendered terrain vegetation:

 

'Bad' (fGrassStartFadeDistance = 7000.0000)

 

 

'Better' (fGrassStartFadeDistance = 25000.0000)

 

 

The alternative you propose is good for lower-end systems that should be ignoring distance altogether anyway.

[Spock]

Those screenshots really show the downside of lowering view distance. But higher view distances will always look better on screenshots and you really picked an unfavorable angle there. I'd have to make a comparison video to show the difference on cell transitions. But since I got no GPU able to handling Skyrim at the moment (sold my 280x and still waiting for custom 290s), I can't :(

 

Performance was not a consideration when doing those tweaks, the difference was barely noticeable. I just generally like fewer things appearing on cell transitions and more things fading then the other way round. Both have a tradeoff.

 

As you said, lod textures with better blending would help with the end-of-cell-seams, as would Distant Overhaul and ugrids (with the new memory patch).

[Kuldebar]

Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:Spock, on 27 Nov 2013 - 6:11 PM, said:

Actually more view distance does not equal better quality. If you turn your view distances way up, all the items will pop in when a new grid is loaded. Imho the optimal setting is where the items fade in near the edge of the loaded grids. This cannot always be achieved perfectly because grids are squares and the distances in the ini are circular. Sometimes I found the Skyrim engine loading grids relatively late for no apparent reason (this happens more often when moving fast). But it can be achieved most of the time for most of the angles approaching a cell.

To give you an example: I just tried to max fTreesMidLODSwitchDist by approaching a tree which is positioned right behind a grid edge. I tried to approach that tree at a 90° angle to the grid edge so the distance to the tree is shortest when the grid is loaded. At that position fTreesMidLODSwitchDist should not yet have kicked in, it should kick in if I move just slightly towards that tree. I found 14000.0000 to be the value that does that. It slightly eases tree popping on grid transitions because the MidLOD is visually closer to the far tree LOD. It comes at the price that you see MidLOD switches on trees you already fully loaded though. But still at a far distance, I think it is worth it.

For objects this is trickier, in my testings I found objects of different sizes fade differently. I'm currently using 10.5. The difference is hard to tell, most larger objects still pop in but smaller ones fade. So you don't have the full detail popping in, an improvement imho.

For items I'd go with 10 so they don't fade in before larger objects.

This is subjective, some people would probably rather have all the detail right away. For me personally I prefer this.

This...

 

I stopped trying to force LOD distance loading as a method to fight "popping" and I sure as hell never mess with uGrids. I can tell you I am getting much better (read immersive) play experience by using modest LOD settings (fade distance, etc):

 

[LOD]

fLODFadeOutMultObjects=10.5000

fLODFadeOutMultItems=9.7500

fLODFadeOutMultActors=7.0000

fLODFadeOutMultSkyCell=1.0000

 

In conjunction with those very modest settings, I am running:

 

High Quality LODs by Ethatron

 

And for those files, I am not running the "ULTRA" versions of anything: Medium Resolution Mesh, Vanilla-sized textures...and yes, I do only use HD Vanilla Landscape with Parallax. I find this eliminates the awful LOD transition you get when going from distance to custom texture. (Consider how Cabal's Keeps look in the distance until you approach as an example, the same holds true for objects like terrain and rocks)

 

So, I stick with vanilla in exteriors and go heavy custom in dungeons and caves.

 

As someone stated earlier in this thread, I'd much prefer lower quality distant views with no popping, then higher quality LOD's and crazy popping.

 

With a balanced approach based on your PC specs, the game engine will handle things much, much more smoothly, any popping that will occur will usually be at the very edge of your reasonably set range and not at random or sporadic intervals.

 

A shot from my game:

 

 

Mist, clouds and fog play nicely in keeping LOD glitches in check, my views are very nice on clear days.

 

Edited April 16, 2014 by Kuldebar

[keithinhanoi]

I also use the HQ-LOD's meshes and normals with LOD textures supplied RCRN (the weather mod, which supplies vanilla LOD landscape textures that are edited so areas with snow are not blindingly bright in sunny weather.)

 

Kuldebar -  I'm wondering why you opted for the medium resolution meshes, since Ethatron states he's not aware of any machine that can't handle the hiigh resolution meshes.

 

What's really great about the HQ-LODs is that he's got a special set of red, blue & green colored textures for testing LOD distances.