Can ENB force games to 16bit fullscreen ?

[Manany]

Hi

Can ENB forces Skyrim to render in 16 bit ?

I have a particular setup, I'm running externally a desktop graphic card with my laptop. But such setup are bottlenecked by the bandwidth circulating between laptop and graphic card.

If you want to know why my setup would highly benefit from 16 bit rendering you will have to read the boring and stuff I explained on this image from imgur : http://i.imgur.com/WPvB2DV.jpg

I couldn't write it and below because the forum wouldn't allow such message, which looked way too spamy for it...

Thanks

[ENBSeries]

Hmm, the most perverted request i ever seen. I don't know what you mean by hardware, is it something like this:

connected to USB? Or it's another connector, native for external videocards?
And don't understand how frame buffer format may affect peformance if it's not crappy prehistoric videocard, except case when you recieve image back to laptop instead of external display. Do you ask about this case? Then depends from port, usb is very slow, but if it's native pci, then it should be fast enough, because 32 bit 60 hz 1080p is just 480 mb per second. 16 bit mode natively unsupported by almost all modern games, i can do it only by making extra swap chain and copy data to it, but not earlier than will do supersampling the same way, because it's almost the same code. Explain if i'm wrong.

[Manany]

Indeed it's a kind of weird request lol.
I'm sorry but I may not explain very well and won't be accurate since I don't have much knowledges in technical stuff like this.
It's not USB, it is a mini-HDMI wire that connects the hwtools PE4H 2.4 or 2.0a to the expresscard 34mm (=mPCIe which is equivalent to PCI express X1).
I no longer use PE4H 2.4 but a PE4L 2.1b PM060A from hwtools and I use a Xbox PSU to power my gpu.

My setup :


I use an mPCI-e port but it's a gen 2 (5GT/s per lane so 500MB/s according to wiki) which has been introduced for laptop with sandy bridge.
eGPU users like me would get a nice performance increase on 16bit only when running on internal monitor (doesn't affect performance on external monitor) which is done by NVIDIA Optimus driver which provides a transparent internal LCD cloning mode as long as you have an intel iGPU.

So I can play with my laptop LCD but at a cost of some performances, since the GPU is not physically connected to the laptop calculated images has to go back to the laptop, thus it also consume a huge amount of bandwidth which is normally only dedicated to "data" that goes to the GPU for image calculations.

On an external LCD performance is very good I easily have 70-75% of the performance expected on a desktop with similar component.
On the internal LCD we have to deal with a performance loss in general and a FPS cap, which on my setup is of 50 in 1920 1080 and 32bit mode. If I set 1600x900 I get 72fps at max which is 44% more than 50fps in full HD because full HD has 44% more pixels. But in 16bit in 1920 1080 I believe the FPS cap would be at least 85fps since I had 45fps in MSI Kombustor benchmark in 32bit but in 16bit it was 85fps.
An other guy from the eGPU community had 72% FPS increase in resident evil 4 and and 25% in devilmaycry 5 DX10 and nearly 40% in unigine heaven DX11.

He also said that "I think that 24 bit color would be ideal. This would have the same color spectrum of 32bit, but knock off the rarely used transparency bits that 32bit has, which really just waste bandwidth."

If you are interested in DIY eGPU for notebook, you can visit the techinferno forum, and look for "DIY eGPU experiences [version 2.0]" thread, there are tons of information and is much better explained.

24bit would be the best of both world for most game, better performance for no visual hit. But in Skyrim, I honestly see no difference when looking at my screenshots in 16 bit mode.

As you say most recent game doesn't natively support 16 bit, and if you could it do it for skyrim the same way you will be doing for supersampling that would be so super great

[ENBSeries]

So what should i do? Skyrim only version or generic?

[Manany]

Hi, sorry for my late reply,

If it is possible to make it as a generic feature that can be use in any game, it would be really awesome, I would not be the only one to appreciate it but I guess there's a lot of eGPU users who would be glad to have it too.
But if the "Skyrim only" is easier and the other complicated, the skyrim only would be already awesome since skyrim and tribes ascend are the game I play 90% of the time.

Thank you very much !

[FiftyTifty]

I don't have such a setup, but it certainly cannot hurt; I support this feature.

[jacobsson]

So what should i do? Skyrim only version or generic?

Hi sir.
I heard about the ENB from eGPU forum, really great stuff!
I use a similar setup like Manany do and it seems like this could help boost performance a lot. If I may, my suggestion would be something generic for any game with a choice between running 16/18/24-bit, since Skyrim seems to look very good in 16-bit and other games might not.
If you decide to do this many people would appreciate this, especially from the eGPU forum.
Thanks a lot!

EDIT: Even 18-bit would be interesting to see since most monitors are native 18-bit.

[ENBSeries]

Ok

[Manany]

Thank you

Do you think 18bit would be possible too? We are not so sure that 24bit would provide better performance, Nando4 the eGPU thread author, suggested "There's also the question of whether NVidia are already doing a 32-bit -> 24-bit conversion when their x1 "pcie compression" engages in their driver. An obvious way for them to maximize the limited x1 bandwidth without any loss of detail."

[ENBSeries]

24 bit modes existed only for few very old drivers in early 2000 and they can't be forced, because unsupported by drivers (transfer any type of data to cpu will be slower). 18 bit mode not exist as any other like that.