TES Skyrim 0.241

[Tywele]

jristas's sig:

@ 1600p (20-30fps)/1080p (40-60fps)

No wonder that you get worse performance if you play with 1600p ...

[rwillia157]

jristas's sig:

@ 1600p (20-30fps)/1080p (40-60fps)

No wonder that you get worse performance if you play with 1600p ...

no duh then. If I played at 1660 p I would drop performance too. Some people want the moon for pennies.

[Aiyen]

Yeah I was a bit late to the party jrista. If you play at 1600p and you do not have above 30 FPS with those cards even at SLI then it is because they where never designed for that resolution with the amount of effects ENB provides. For that you would need only the top line models. In this case there is only lowering of quality and disabling of features left if you want to maintain the resolution and playablity.

[jrista]

He's right though, there's definitely something else going on there. I have worse specs than you, but get better performance:

2GB GTX 560 Ti x2 in SLI
i7 2600k @3.8ghz
16GB 1600mhz RAM

I cap my framerate at 40fps with the ENB limiter (it could go higher, up to 60fps at times, but I hate games with fluctuating frame rates. I prefer to cap it at 40fps so it's consistent), and in high-stress areas it can drop as low as 30fps. I've never seen it drop into the 20's.

Which ENB effects do you use? I've learned that the frame rate killers are Depth of Field, Reflections, and the Displacement setting under Water effects. Disable those effects and see if that helps. Make sure none of the quality levels (for any effect) are lower than 1. Set some of them to 2 for better performance (with shadows, you can increase the blur radius to compensate for blockier details). Also, make sure SourceScale and SizeTextureScale of SSAO are fairly low (Try lowering them to 0.35 each).

I'll have to give the displacement thing a try. I like the displacement, but I could do without it if necessary. At the moment, I have all ENB features except DOF and reflection enabled. My quality settings on most things are either -1 or 0. I can try tweaking the shadow settings...honestly, I prefer softer and blurrier shadows anyway, rather than sharp and harsh shadows, so it might be an improvement to use 2 rather than 0. As I said, these settings haven't changed, and going from the .23x series to the 0.24x series is the only change I've made recently.

If you have your SSAO scaling to 0.35, that means SSAO scaling is actualy a mere 12%! I have mine set to 0.774596669241483, which is 60% scaling. I don't really like anything below that. I used to run at 0.894427190999915, or 80% scaling (and when I did, I usually got about 15-20fps , hence the reason I pulled back to 60%), and I prefer to run it at 1.224744871391589 (150% scaling) for screenarchery (which, ironically, also seems to run at about 15-20fps...)

Well, let me give some of these changes a whirl, see how they do. I really don't want to have to lower SSAO more, but with DOF already off, it is the single most significant thing in the render pipeline (the ENB profiler usually shows most timings at 0.00xyz, where as SSOA is usually 0.0300+!)

[jrista]

Yeah I was a bit late to the party jrista. If you play at 1600p and you do not have above 30 FPS with those cards even at SLI then it is because they where never designed for that resolution with the amount of effects ENB provides. For that you would need only the top line models. In this case there is only lowering of quality and disabling of features left if you want to maintain the resolution and playablity.

Actually, this is 1200p (1920x1200). When I wrote my sig, I think we were still back in the 0.199 days. I updated the version I use once (to 0.231), but I didn't bother to update my FPS rates. I only use 1600p for screenarchery, which lately I've been doing rather infrequently. With 0.23x and greater, I don't really get more than 30fps at 1600p, and usually around 20fps. That's fine though, I don't really care about frame rate at my max res. Until recently, I was getting 30fps+ at 1200p, 60% SSAO scaling, DOF disabled, and most quality settings at -1 (extreme) or 0 (high). (Most of the settings are actually default Kountervibe Extensive...the majority of my changes were to the lighting to make it more CoT friendly, and the SSAO scaling, all the rest is still Oyama's default quality settings and the like.)

I am going to try lowering some of the quality settings and disable displacement. Disabling the volumetrics did not seem to have any impact (still 20fps v-synced)...but I am not sure if was actually enabled or staying enabled in the first place, so that might just be smoke and mirrors at this point.

[jrista]

Reduced my resolution to true 1080p from 1200p. That seems to have done the trick. Guess those extra 230,400 pixels just really weren't worth it.

Also reduced SSAO quality level from -1 to 0, and bumped SSAO scaling to 1.0 (and reduced shadow quality to 2 with a larger blur). Still seems to stay at 30fps, so I'm pretty happy.

[Oyama]

There is NO common rule.

Fact is Boris didn't optimize for multi-GPUs, so we have to figure out by ourselves.
I'm currently using scales I wouldn't even mention, since they fit my rig / inis / game and nothing would be adviceable in case of another configuration.
I can tell one thing : the SSAO-SSIL is pure diamonds once you dive into it. We've just been scratching the surface.
As an example, a lot of us were used to "pair" our Size and SourceTextures on same values as a common rule. I was as well.
But experimenting with MUCH higher SourceTextures than Size, while pushing Size *far* over 1.0 resulted in fantastic results on my side, especially coupled with downsampling.
BUT : you'll then have to tweak pre (if included in prepass) and post (if using) sharpening methods, as well as control the naturally generated noise. But even noise can be interesting in final rendering since it can "dry" the image, what +1.0 scales naturally tend to do.
I came to a point I prefer 1080p a/o 1440p rendering coupled with high scales FAR over 1620p or 1800p coupled with 0.707 a/o 0.5xxxx ones...
When it comes to screenarchery, no compromises : 2160p all the way *AND* crazy scales. I know why fans do exist

Just take a look at this shot, the clouds are from Dramatic Clouds, and the weather is Alduin's matter. No weather a/o lighting mods.
See the sharpening on the clouds and the lighting.
All that is SSAO / SSIL related. Crazy.
Full size here



And look at that pillar...



We could discuss about all this for hours indeed.

[Eu4orick]

The idea Sli/Crossfire is built for it to run your games in HD 720p and beyond, just pigs me off that it's taken up until DX11+ to sort of work properly, seeing as if we were all on Glide we would probably be in the Matrix right about now and didn't realize we were eating digital sweet rolls.

Fallout engine/Creation engine has always been rather ugly for not working quiet right. I'm dreading ESO. Best engines I've seen to date would be still Source (anticipating Source 2 ), Whatever Squire Enix keep faffing with and another company which should of moved into the game technology. With what they had where pollys were replaced with points and to compare it was the million millions on the fly stuff that most 4> year old GPU might cope with. I mean for gods sake it had actual dirt and the microbes to go with it if they zoomed in close enough to the floor all the way up to trees with proper leaves.

[WoodsOfYpres]

Oyama
Amazing quality! Thanks for the tips, i'm trying to dive a bit deeper into SSAO atm
I have a small noob question regarding SSAO: Will the SSAO fade faster or slower using high FadeFogRange values?

[FiftyTifty]

About the whole FPS thing, do note that the longer you play, the more scripts that are being run and the like. You're going to get worse framerates regardless of your settings.

It's the nature of Bethesda's bastard red-headed child that is their engine.