Texture replacement mods

[Octopuss]

Hi there.

This is probably going to be a little unusual thread, so please bear with me.

Now, I haven't played Skyrim. YET. But I decided to finally give it a try, having time for a new game in my free time schedule :P

I immediatelly started looking into the modding business, because that's another thing (besides the base game) people praised and after digging into graphical mods I got pretty confused (and no, I won't play vanilla first, which is exacly why I am posting this).

First thing I found was SRO. It looks really awesome, and I immediatelly decided to go with it no matter what. But there are other mods I like as well, but I have no idea if they are compatible with SRO, and I don't want to pointlessly overwrite stuff and possibly bloat the installation.

Perhaps someone who saw most of the popular mods million times could give me his opinion. I am well aware this sort of stuff is extremely subjective, but you usually can't tell differences in quality until you saw that particular thing enough times. That's why I think I could benefit from someone else's opinion.

 

Anyway, this is what I also found and liked a lot:

WATER - super awesome

Vivid Lands "series" - very interesting. but it looks like SRO does all of that (maybe minus some minor things like the rocks and meshes).

aMidianBorn mods

Enhanced Light and FX

Flora Overhaul

TreesHD

(...not listing the minor ones)

 

Then comes the SMIM, which I thought was only improving meshes, but apparently does something to textures as well.

What exactly is the ultra-sized component then? The STEP guide almost makes it seem like an antichrist option that will universally kill the performance of any PC, but how bad it really is? I am getting AMD 280x card very soon, and am naturally curious what is it supposed to handle.

 

 

I guess this is all had in mind.

All comments appreciated.

[Aiyen]

Welcome I guess is in order!

 

SRO is in many cases an improved version of the vanilla textures. So anything that fits nicely with the vanilla theme will fit nicely with it.

 

The vivid series does a great job in certain regions like the volcanic area, however it also has stuff that just does not fit with vanilla like textures.

 

The same goes with aMidianborn. The armor/weapon ones are highly regarded and should be used, but in general for armor and weapons then most tend to fit. There it is more a matter of how scanty armors you want, or how much inspiration from other game series etc.

 

As for "Ultra sized" textures.. then this is mainly because it is just not possible to run with full 4k textures even with all the memory advances that have been made. So they should be used sparsely and only on objects where you really think it matters. In general the higher the resolution of a texture makes it look nicer up close, so in general stuff that is up close benefits the most. So weapons and armor, skin textures etc.

 

If you plan on getting into doing fancy screenshots you might want stuff like rocks etc. to be 4k as well, but again that is more or less the only use for them at this stage, since 4k textures on say rocks can make them look really out of place if everything around them is lower quality.

 

Hope that little rant helps somewhat! I am sure more people will chip in with opinions as well.

[Octopuss]

As for the ultra-sized textures, I was asking what that part of SMIM actually does, because if I understand it correctly, it's supposed to improve game's meshes, but not textures, so I am pretty confused.

 

Looking forward to more comments :)

[Aiyen]

What SMIM mostly do is to increase the detail of the meshes, or models of various objects. This comes at the expense of performance, since more complex models means more computation required to render then.

 

Depending on what else you put in then this will cost almost nothing in terms of performance or quite a lot.