Vividian - Weather & Lighting enhancement - CoT - RCRN and Pure Weather

[Whitestar127]

Ah, good to know. Excellent! :)

Edited March 31, 2014 by Whitestar127

[oqhansoloqo]

I liked the way ENB looked, and Vividian ran relatively nicely for an ENB... but when it came down to it, it was just too chunky for my tastes at about 40-50 FPS on average.  I don't like playing Skyrim at less than 50-60 FPS.  The sun rays and water effects were nice and all, but when it comes down to it, I'd rather have the smooth motion because the gameplay is better that way.  So I'm going back to ELFX interiors and RLO exteriors - doing what I can to get better lighting without ENB and speed loss.

BTW - I'm still trying to keep CoT installed, because I like some of the effects like the fog.  I'd rather do Pure Weather, but it's not yet as compatible with other mods yet.

[Mangaclub]

Just released the Extended Weathers 2.0. Those now create a bridge between CoT and Pure weathers, so you can use them both at the same time!

 

@oqha

hm yes enb drains a bit...but 40-50 FPS with enb ? wheew. that i dream of! :D

i have constant 30 FPS here with my gtx 670 but thats perfectly playable for me..well ok if i get used to 60 FPS i might think different ;)

[Whitestar127]

I'm running GTX 670 4GB SLI. I get 60-70 with Vividian and 70-80 <edit>a couple of more frames</edit> with Phinix, which I just tried. But Phinix is a little too cool/cold looking. It adds a light blue / greenish hue on top of vanilla, which actually makes it look even colder than vanilla.

I found that I actually prefer the warmer brown/red-ish hue of Vividian, although I would prefer it to look just a little bit cooler/colder in clear sky weather, but that may be nitpicking. :)

The sky and snow sometimes has a slight pinkish hue to them, which looks absolutely beautiful, especially in the evenings. I think it just needs to get a bit brighter during the day in some places, especially in fog, like in Riften and Falkreath, but also on clear sky. Anyway, that's just my opinion.

With the Pale & Cold you get sort of a sepia effect which can be stunning in screenshots!

 

Manga, I forgot to say that I'm not running CoT, which you say in the description is needed for best effect. So I'm installing that tonight to see how it is. :)

Edited April 3, 2014 by Whitestar127

[Neovalen]

I have the same video cards as you WhiteStar but unless I'm indoors I don't get anywhere near your fps... guessing your disabling some stuff?

[Whitestar127]

Hmmm, well I disabled the DoF, which stole about 5-8 fps, depending on situation. I also turned off AA and AF in the launcher, but I suppose you did too, since it's in your guide.

I also have Shadows in the launcher set to High instead of Ultra. Other than that I can't think of anything. What FPS do you get?

 

Edit: This is with CoT and those weather patches you mention in your guide. The fps sometimes fluctuates down into the 50s, but mostly stays somewhere between 60 and 70.

Edit2: And this is even with ugrids at 7! Which is quite surprising actually.

Edit3: I followed your Sk:Re guide regarding ENB ini settings and stuff, except DoF=false and removing the lens flare effect (which I guess that sunGlare=false does?). But if you are getting much lower fps then maybe I should investigate further to see if I'm missing some effects. I want all the effects.

Edited April 2, 2014 by Whitestar127

[DanielCoffey]

A little info from my latest round of overclocking to squeeze more out of Vividian...

 

With Vividian 5.10 (full) and the 0.252 dll, I am able to get 50+ fps on my single 780ti at 1440p even in places like Riverwood and Whiterun looking down the steps over the town. To date, every indoor location has been a rock steady capped 60fps with the GPU utilized at about 75%. The only change from the stock preset is that I have turned off DoF.

 

The reason I was seeing if I could push this further was because I ran into a bad spot last night where my FPS was about half what I was expecting and I created some test saves at spots to evaluate the Vividian performance vs full versions. It turned out that a simple power reset on the PC solved the issue. I don't know what caused the frame rate to halve but I will be watching for it reoccurring. Quitting Skyrim was not enough to restore the performance - it needed a power reset.

 

Once I had reset the PC and the performance was back, I decided to see if I could push the card even further. I seem to have been very lucky indeed with the card I have been sent since it is only specced to boost to 928MHz at 0.950V. I got it to 1248MHz at 0.975V and today I pushed it to 1300MHz at 1.000V before artefacts crept in. Temperatures under water-cooling are a steady 46C.

 

I don't think there is any point in raising the OC on the processor since the GPU is just about 100% utilised outdoors.

 

The preset looks lovely and I am looking forward to following its development as you adjust it in the future.

Edited April 3, 2014 by DanielCoffey

[Whitestar127]

Man, two of those cards would absolutely destroy Skyrim with Vividan ENB, if you can live with the SLI issues we talked about. I guess you can expect between 55-95% increase when running SLI, wildly depending on location/situation. 55-65% in most outdoor locations.

 

I get 40+ fps with one of my GTX 670s in single-GPU mode, which I'm quite happy with. But that's 1080p.

[DanielCoffey]

I will be sticking with my single 780ti for the time being but spending the cash on a Caselabs S8 in white since they have a $20 discount at the moment. Once I realised my low framerate issue went away after a reset, I was seriously relieved as I was expecting to have to buy the second card and extra radiators.

[oqhansoloqo]

Manga - another issue I had while running either CoT, Pure Weather, or Vividian ENB were lots of seemingly random CTDs.  I don't know if it partly had to do with starting up saved games that were originally saved with different lighting mods installed, or not, but it did happen with new games from time to time as well.

 

Whitestar (and Manga) - CoT looked pretty and went very nicely with Vividian.  Pure Weather still needs some work I think (refinement of some of the aspects of the mod itself and also compatibility patches for other popular mods).  If I was able to get excellent framerates with ENB (above 50 minimum), I'd still be using it.  I could only get 40-50 with performance Vividian ENB.  What I didn't like about it was that it seemed to smooth out all medium-long distance textures so much (and pine needles on trees) that the textures just looked worse than without it, even if the colors were better and extra graphical effects.  One thing I could do to increase the distant texture quality was switch on the LOD bias ENB option, but that ended up dropping me an extra ~5 FPS lower.

Edited April 3, 2014 by oqhansoloqo

[DanielCoffey]

If you turn off EdgeAA in the enblocal.ini that should help with the blurring.

[Mangaclub]

whew thanks all for the performance reports.....i think i need to tickle my GTX 670 a bit more to get to the 40's FPS..although i think i overdone it with some mods and textures.

@oqhan

Well random CTD's hould not come from Vividian, but maybe some enblocal.ini configuration that did not went well on your system?

I mostly use skyrim performance monitor to take a look how filled my Vram is. Back in the old days i had plenty of CTD because all of my Vram where eaten up.

There are now many ways for stabilize this. should have a look at this guide also for more performance:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50214/?

That one could help you also with the random CTD's

About those textures: Vividian comes with extra options for sharpening (not lod bias)

those would be Luma sharpening and normal sharpening in the effects.fx shader tab.

But yes the Edge AA could also have something todo with it you are right Daniel. Maybe even also Bloom a bit, depends on the weather.

[oqhansoloqo]

I use Skyrim Performance Monitor as well when I want to review VRAM usage, CPU/GPU usage/temps, and FPS...  yet when I was reviewing ENB settings I tended to just use the ENB GUI's FPS meter instead.  Definitely wasn't a VRAM issue - I got 4GB VRAM... lol, and I don't use any 4K textures in my config (everything is DDSOptimized to 2K max).

 

Yes - it may have been some of my enb .ini file settings or even NVIDIA Inspector settings... I don't really know for sure.  I'd check on the Edge AA settings to see if that removed the blurring issue if ENB was easy for me to switch back to, but it's too much of a pain in the a** to make the switch back regarding modifying mod configuration, graphics card configuration, and ENB configuration files, so I'll just stick to non-ENB for now, unless someone comes out with some revolutionary way to make post-processing not cost any FPS.  :)

 

One thing I liked about using ENB though, was that I saw that it really put my graphics card to work.  Usage was up near 100%.  Currently, without ENB, it's usually closer to 60%.

Edited April 3, 2014 by oqhansoloqo

[anothernick]

Thanks for the thread attention on this one - I'd never noticed it before. I still have some (maybe) hardware issues to figure out though, since my framerate has tanked even in Vanilla when adding any ENB... Still, it's hard to play without, now!

[Mangaclub]

@oqhan

hmm Postprocessing that costs no FPS... hmm maybe a colored glass infront of the monitor should do:)

No seriousley that would be a great invention, a glass window that one can put on his monitor and alters brightness,saturation and color by changeing its molecular structure depending on presets...science!!!

 

@anothernick

hmm what graphicscard do you use?

also have a look at this guide:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50214/?

maybe that helps.

 

Edit's: don't type english while having breakfast...wont work...

Edited April 5, 2014 by Mangaclub