SKYRIMLE Guide to run SRLE + REGS + ENB on Medium Systems

[Nearox]

Some may call this junk, me I call them necessary evils...

 

This is a collection of tweaks that I use to run SRLE + REGS + Vividian ENB on my system. Decided to share the knowledge upon multiple requests for those with similar PC configurations. It is designed to max out at 2GB VRAM and to run at 32FPS minimum in the most taxing situations. 

 

Mod/guide/ENB authors please don't hate me for reducing the quality of your beautiful work 

 

To all the poor scrubs with medium-end game systems (like me), I hope you find use for it.

 

TL;DR: Guide to Run SRLE + REGS + ENB on Medium Systems

[redirishlord]

I don't consider my specs to be particularly low, but this advice is very helpful to achieving a smooth and stable game, thanks!

 

I was pretty much spot on with the skyrim/skyrimprefs.ini tweaks, good looking out on the skse.ini - I think I'll be just fine with 1k lips now that you point it out.

 

Question re- STEP Extended Patch: Is the SMIM Lite w/ DB dlc going to play nice with the STEP PAtch as the patch incorporates SMIM plugins/assets?

Edited July 16, 2014 by redirishlord

[CJ2311]

I like how the REGS part is still empty, obviously that means REGS is perfect and can not possibly be improved, right? RIGHT? :POn the serious side though, I'm not sure I'd activate the FPS limiter on the ENB if I were you, more FPS wouldn't hurt, and in my experience (as well as z's IIRC), that can cause quite the input lag.EDIT: Also, for REGS (and even for the vanilla game) I would recommend installing some textures such as Real Wood Textures for the fences (and the optional SMIM-compatibility file, which just restores the vanilla fences). You would not believe how much that helps with all the city mods that add fences.

Edited July 16, 2014 by CJ2311

[Nearox]

I don't consider my specs to be particularly low, but this advice is very helpful to achieving a smooth and stable game, thanks!

 

I was pretty much spot on with the skyrim/skyrimprefs.ini tweaks, good looking out on the skse.ini - I think I'll be just fine with 1k lips now that you point it out.

 

Question re- STEP Extended Patch: Is the SMIM Lite w/ DB dlc going to play nice with the STEP PAtch as the patch incorporates SMIM plugins/assets?

Glad some of it helps! As for SMIM  Lite and the STEP patch, I honestly wouldn't know, it's been a long time since I used STEP. You'd best ask in the SMIM mod thread.

 

Also I will add a note to SMIM that it is best not to install the Lite version until everything else in the guide has beent tried. The light version doesn't have a merged ESP I think (I'm using 1.72 so idk if 1.73 has it) and the FPS difference between the light and full version is like 2-4 in the bigger towns.

 

I like how the REGS part is still empty, obviously that means REGS is perfect and can not possibly be improved, right? RIGHT? :POn the serious side though, I'm not sure I'd activate the FPS limiter on the ENB if I were you, more FPS wouldn't hurt, and in my experience (as well as z's IIRC), that can cause quite the input lag.EDIT: Also, for REGS (and even for the vanilla game) I would recommend installing some textures such as Real Wood Textures for the fences (and the optional SMIM-compatibility file, which just restores the vanilla fences). You would not believe how much that helps with all the city mods that add fences.

Hehe, it's a WIP so REGS is still to be included :) That said most REGS mods don't have a lot of textures (if any) with them so there's less room for optimization there. In truth I haven't actually optimized any REGS mod before except ETaC's new textures :)

 

I can remember the thread about the FPS Limiter - which I think was mainly about using VSync in combination with FPS limiter that'd give the input lag issues, no? In my experience at least, the FPS limiter actually reduces input lag. Or at least that's what I perceive because now the presumed lag is constant and doesn't fluctuate. 

 

The SMIM fences have been a major annoyance for me for a long time. Actually I always remove the SMIM meshes/textures for that in my game because 1) they have ridiculous polygon count and 2) they have very bad aliasing unless one uses temporal AA or SSAA. Thanks for the suggestion about Real Wood, I'll have a look at that, though at the moment adding new mods to the guide is not a priority.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Nearox

[thaiusmle]

Do you have recommendation on Official HRDLC?

[redirishlord]

That's covered in the Guide to DDSopt. If you're asking about DDSopt instructions, I don't install the HRDLC myself as it gets overwritten by my other texture replacers.

Edited July 17, 2014 by redirishlord

[thaiusmle]

You can use 1K version of Beard, Brows, Hair.

[Kelmych]

With my installation that includes STEP Extended plus the REGS and most of the SR:LE mods I find that roughly half of the High Res Texture Pack 01 and 03 textures are not overwritten by other mods, and High Res Texture Pack 02 has a very large set of terrain textures (~8000) that overwrite other vanilla textures.

[redirishlord]

You can use 1K version of Beard, Brows, Hair.

Are you saying I should trim my beard?

 

 

With my installation that includes STEP Extended plus the REGS and most of the SR:LE mods I find that roughly half of the High Res Texture Pack 01 and 03 textures are not overwritten by other mods, and High Res Texture Pack 02 has a very large set of terrain textures (~8000) that overwrite other vanilla textures.

Interesting, I've been running on misinformation. Sounds like I should download my HRDLC and DDSopt them. Thanks.

[Nearox]

You can use 1K version of Beard, Brows, Hair.

Ah I skipped that category when writing up the guide, as it says it's still a WIP and I gladly take up suggestions/improvements. Having said that, I use 1k Beards & Brows on my install while I chose for 2k Hair because the quality difference between 1k and 2k is huge. Will include this later.

 

Do you have recommendation on Official HRDLC?

 

With my installation that includes STEP Extended plus the REGS and most of the SR:LE mods I find that roughly half of the High Res Texture Pack 01 and 03 textures are not overwritten by other mods, and High Res Texture Pack 02 has a very large set of terrain textures (~8000) that overwrite other vanilla textures.

Personally I use the STEP DDSopt guide (with the .bat files etc) instead of the SRLE DDSopt instructions for the HRDLC, because the STEP one saves me about 20MB VRAM compared to the SRLE one. Not a biggy, but it's a saver.

 

On top of that, I also use Bethesda Performance Textures - Armor Clothes Weapons and Bethese Performance Textures - Animals and Creatures. You will find that, despite the name, the quality of the textures actually improves a LOT while the size is reduced even more than the DDSopt as the author manually photoshop-edited each texture. There's a few hundred textures in each pack which don't get overwritten by anything so it's another VRAM saver. Put it after the UHRP in your MO order. I prfer Gamwich's textures instead of the STEP-choice Bethesda Hi-Res DLC Optimized. Imo Gamwich reduced the size more while the quality is better. Reason they aren't included yet is because I first need to finish some other stuff before inserting a category for new mods.

Edited July 17, 2014 by Nearox

[thaiusmle]

2. Extended weathers installer options:

• COT: Windy Clouds (Groundfogs are very performance intensive)

 

May need to select Vanilla: Windy Clouds as well.

[Nearox]

You can, of course, but SRLE doesn't do it either so I did the same and only went for CoT. There are only a few vanilla weathers anyways so you probably wouldn't notice while playing :)

[redirishlord]

Another batch of great advice Nearox, I'll pick up those textures later today. This really extends the STEP Core principal of having a stable base to mod from for me. Then I can through specific high res mods into the mix to slow things down (until I get distracted by the next shiny object). Thankfully MO makes texture swapping a plug & play affair. I just need to get all this stuff DDSopt-imized and archived.

[hellanios]

A good idea would be to add EssArrBee's recommendation about reducing SRO's normals to 512.

 

Also, do you think that is really necessary to reduce Cabal's textures for weapons and armours?

Edited July 17, 2014 by hellanios

[Nearox]

A good idea would be to add EssArrBee's recommendation about reducing SRO's normals to 512.

 

Also, do you think that is really necessary to reduce Cabal's textures for weapons and armours?

I'll try to elaborate a bit on my choices.

 

I disagree about reducing SRO's normals to 512: it takes away too much detail observable in the distance and the savings in exteriors won't be that great as the difference between 1k and .5k textures is much smaller (in file size/vram) than the difference between 2k and 1k.

 

It is, instead, a much better option, IMHO, to reduce Cabal's textures to 1k. In fact the last few mods Cabal released he included a 1k version himself. Think about it this way: A landscape, archtiecture or mountain texture can usualyl cover quite a large area on your screen. Compare the areasize of a ground texture with the area size of a piece of legs on your character or an NPC. Would it make more sense to have the landscape texture in a higher resolution than the armor texture? In am of the opinion that is the right choice to make. It is all about what you yourself notice more. If you are a huge fan of zooming in on armor and weapons, then by all means keep them at 2k. However if you would be playing the game in many situations you won't even think that it is a 1k texture, and when you do the difference between 1k and 2k is often negligible.

 

Also, a full set of default AMB armor (e.g. steel or orcish) is between 25MB and 40MB. Now you have REGS on top of SRLE which adds a lot of NPCs many wearing different armor sets. On top of that is all the 2k clothing stuff from EoTW on regular NPCs. Then there are the uncompressed normals for the head and body msn from better males (worth 30MB vram per race per gender). See where I am going?  With default SRLE option, 1 NPC generally accounts for 100MB VRAM+. If you got a more recent GPU with 3 or 4GB VRAM that is not really an issue of course. Many scenarios have NPCs that are the same and so only need to be loaded once (e.g. city guards). But many place have 10 or 20 'unique' looking NPCs, all wearing another armor set, having different racial characteristics, cloths, faces. That's 500MB VRAM at least in most city/town/village/battle scenarios for NPCs only. The DDSopt reduces that to 100 - 200MB for what I consider a minimal loss in quality and a huge gain in performance. Moreover it greatly reduced stuttering on my game. 

 

If you were to do the same to landscape/architecture/objects however, it would be much more noticeable while the reduction in VRAM would be much less. You can try it out, but I would strongly recommend against using .5k normals for landscape when gems and circlets are 1k... :)

Edited July 17, 2014 by Nearox