Pretty darn impressed.

[KiloWatts]

After sleepless nights of constant fiddling, I finally decided to go through the STEP guide in its entirety, and I'm seriously impressed.  Major thanks to everyone involved in doing this.  This sort of standardized model is exactly what I needed.  I have the majority of the mods running (237 of 'em [including the patches]), and it looks and feels incredible.  I used Wrye Bash, and everything is all ordered and nice and tidy.  It took a long, long, time, but it's clearly worth it.

 

The only non-STEP mods I've added are:

 

Climates Of Tamriel

Project ENB Realistic

Enhanced Lights & FX

Dawn of Whiterun

Sexy Riften

Sexy Winterhold

Sexy Solitude

Skybirds

Fantasy Music Overhaul

 

No conflicts anywhere. 

 

I have a couple questions regarding performance.  I'm running 4-cores and a GTX 680 2GB.  I'm able to run everything at medium-to-high resolution, but I opted closer to the medium for performance sake.  I still bop down to ~35FPS here and there, so I'm wondering about optimization.

 

Specifically optimizing BSAs.  If I run Optimizer Textures to knock everything (textures and BSAs) back to 2048, will it make much of a difference?  My only gripe at this point are the stutters here and there.

[torminater]

Better use DDSopt per the Wiki guide to reduce your normals (*_n.dds) to 1k size. Everything is explained in full detail in the guide.

[KiloWatts]

Got it running. If I manually use DDSopt for my main BSAs, do I need to skip the HRDLC Optimized mod in section 2.F.?

[Kelmych]

Got it running. If I manually use DDSopt for my main BSAs do I need to skip the HRDLC Optimized mod in section 2.F.?

No, you should be fine following the instructions for the HRDLC Optimized mod. In some cases depending upon your system you won't use actually the optimized HRDLC when using this mod, but even then you will use all of the rest of the optimized textures from the vanilla BSAs.

[AtomicTim]

I had the same issues with a similar mod setup (except I have lot more actually...just can't stop adding them :/) the 2 things I added which made the game run so much smoother were:

1) https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/15123/?tab=1&navtag=%2Fajax%2Fmoddescription%2F%3Fid%3D15123%26preview%3D&pUp=1

2) The antifreeze patch here: https://www.enbdev.com/download_patch_skyrim.htm (You will have to add the d3d9.dll file it adds as a proxy in HiAlgoBoost.ini (instructions are on the HiAlgo page)to run both of them)

 

HiAlgo boost does noticeably reduce resolution whilst moving, but it makes turning, and especially combat feel much smoother.

[KiloWatts]

Hmm, I dunno. I'm wary of using 'performance boosters' of any kind. Especially since I've finally gotten it to be mostly stable by optimizing my main textures.

 

The ENB antifreeze patch intrigues me. Are ENBs known for causing a lot of freezes?

[AtomicTim]

Th Antifreeze patch is designed to make the whole game run smoother, with or without an ENB installed.

I dont have an ENB installed and it has reduced stuttering by a lot for my game

[torminater]

anti-freeze patch is very dated and likely to cause problems on some systems. boris is currently working on a 1.92 version of his ENB, which features a memory translocation of all textures to the VRAM instead of the RAM. Currently it's pretty much alpha stage.

[KiloWatts]

Moving everything from RAM to VRAM? What advantage would that have? (my first reaction is "nooo, no more of my precious vram!")

[torminater]

The anti-freeze patch was an attempt by Boris to get rid of a bottleneck in engine. Since this didn't bode that well (caused unfixable issues for some people) he abandoned it, but kept the download available for those who wanted to try it out.

I included the reference for 1.92 because that's the next bottleneck Boris tries to circumvent. He's currently still changing things in it, but it seems to do as it is supposed to - unfortunately until now with some negative sideeffects.