SR Step 1 Complete--Some Questions!

[thunderclam]

Hi. I'm new to the community but have been half-following STEP for a while now. I noticed Neovalen's super helpful "Skyrim Revisited" guide and have learned to use new tools (MO and DDSopt for two) while following the first part of it. I am at the point where it's time to start adding mods. Thankfully, most of my favorites are covered in his guide so this post isn't about that.

 

I have a few questions about some of the instructions in Revisited:

 

-What role does ENB play?

-Why did I turn AA off?

-Why am I setting Skyrim to Windowed Mode?

 

In addition, I was hoping someone could give me some advice about Z-fighting and shimmering shadows from trees and grass. Right now I have the default .ini settings and ONLY the optimized textures (and SKSE) covered from Skyrim Revisited "basic" (as I'm calling it in my MO profiles).

 

My hardware is:

 

Intel i5-2500k @3.30 GHZ (4 CPUs)

8192 DDR3 RAM

AMD Radeon 6900M Series GPU (2gb VRAM)

 

And unfortunately, a conventional 2TB HDD.

 

I think my problem is my drivers. I am running the most up to date CCC version and had not been playing Skyrim since about last February. There has definitely been at least 1 update since then, not sure if there were more. I don't know whether the Z-fighting is Skyrim or the graphics card, but it's only been a problem since around 1.7 or so (best guess) or possible since x GPU driver.

 

Just wondering if there's a particular way I should be configuring this card or if the shadow "shimmer" bug for trees and grass can be fixed by other means.

 

Thank you very much for your help, guys.

[bitdman]

All those questions can be answered on the STEP wiki. It's a lot of reading, I know, but it will also answer questions you haven't even thought of asking yet.  :D   Have fun!

[Aiyen]

ENB is a modification that alters how the game handles memory, and what you see on the screen, and it also adds special effects to the game that it otherwise would not have.

The main reason to use it for many is that it fixes shadow rendering! Also the flickering you see.

 

Z-fighting... lean to live with it! The only solution currently will produce Infinite loading screens (ILS) with even a moderate amount of mods installed.

 

You turn off AA because ENB does not work with driver based AA. This is mainly because the extra effects it add conflicts with the AA code.

 

You do not have to set skyrim to windowed mode. In fact I advice against it unless you absolutely must be able to alt tab out of the game and back in again without any big issues. However it is also suspected that running the game in windows mode with ENB causes some conflicts that will result in game crashes or ILS.

[thunderclam]

Okay, that all helps! I always thought ENB was just for taking screenshots and never used it myself. I've always gotten by with a combo of RCRN and ELFX (since they exited, anyway).

 

To clarify your last sentence: running the game in windowed mode w/ ENB may cause conflicts, crashes, ILS?

 

Windows=Windowed?

 

Also, would I simply turn windowed mode off by running TESV.exe through Steam or is there another way you're supposed to do it because of Mod Organizer?

[Aiyen]

Windowed mode as opposite to full screen mode.

 

And yes some people experience issues with it, some do not.

 

You enable and disable the mode in the skyrimprefs.ini, also the borderless window mod needs to be disabled etc.

 

Never EVER run the game through stream except the first time around. After that you always start the game via your mod manager! It cannot be said enough times!

[thunderclam]

Okay sounds good. I did have an issue when testing the optimized textures w/ MO where I hadn't checked off the .bsa files in the archives tab. Took me a while to figure out and I tried TESV.exe once to see if it would run. Is that going to cause me problems later?