TES Skyrim 0.241

[ENBSeries]

Version updated, download again
Increased performance of water displacement. Fixed bug with flickering water when player enter water (two water surfaces drawed without clipping each other by stencil). Added volumetric shadow parameter for water category, so previous EnableShadow now act only for single shadow on water surface, this greatly increase performance.

PS: Merry Xmas.

[dunan]

Thanks for the update Boris, great work as always. Will test now.

[OhKay]

jrista
i have noticed that you had
SizeScale 1.18
SourceTexturesScale 1.00

i always had mine set at 0.45 for both. what performance if whether it was lower or higher? i haven't notice anything different adjusting those values.

[jrista]

Version updated, download again
Increased performance of water displacement. Fixed bug with flickering water when player enter water (two water surfaces drawed without clipping each other by stencil). Added volumetric shadow parameter for water category, so previous EnableShadow now act only for single shadow on water surface, this greatly increase performance.

PS: Merry Xmas.

Merry Xmas, Boris! Thanks for all the hard work!

jrista
i have noticed that you had
SizeScale 1.18
SourceTexturesScale 1.00

i always had mine set at 0.45 for both. what performance if whether it was lower or higher? i haven't notice anything different adjusting those values.

SourceTexturesScale shows clamped to 1.0 in the UI if you set it higher, but it still seems to take affect if you set it higher. Setting both values higher results in improved SSAO quality. At 0.45, the size of the image used to blend SSAO into the final render is 20% the original size of the frame. If you set it to 1.0, it is 100% the original size of the frame. If you set it higher, such as 1.183, the SSAO target is larger than the original size of the frame (in my case, 140% larger). The larger you set the SSAO render target, the higher the quality will be (it's roughly the same concept as rendering the whole game at a higher resolution and downsampling for better quality.)

You SHOULD notice a difference if you increase the SSAO scaling. Especially if you increase it beyond 1.0 (100%). At highest quality and precision, you can see that my frame rate was only 10fps with 140% scaling at 1600p. I used to run it at 60% scaling at 1080p, and was barely able to get 30fps with extreme quality and precision.

The trick that I'm trying to share is that you can get both extreme quality, and lesser quality, for SSAO without having to exit the game to change it. You can have eminently playable frame rates by say keeping SSAO scaling at 100% (1.0), and set SamplingQuality and SamplingPrecision to 2 (Low) (frame rates should be VERY high, especially if you use SSAO scaling below 1.0). If you want to do some screenarchery, you can simply crank SamplingQuality and SamplingPrecision back up to -1 (Extreme), and get the best 100% scaling possible. If you have some processing power to spare, you can set SSAO scaling to more than 100%, 125%, 150%, maybe even higher, and play the game at quality/precision 2 with good frame rates, and crank it up to -1 for amazing screenarchery.

[Oyama]

The trick that I'm trying to share is that you can get both extreme quality, and lesser quality, for SSAO without having to exit the game to change it. You can have eminently playable frame rates by say keeping SSAO scaling at 100% (1.0), and set SamplingQuality and SamplingPrecision to 2 (Low) (frame rates should be VERY high, especially if you use SSAO scaling below 1.0). If you want to do some screenarchery, you can simply crank SamplingQuality and SamplingPrecision back up to -1 (Extreme), and get the best 100% scaling possible. If you have some processing power to spare, you can set SSAO scaling to more than 100%, 125%, 150%, maybe even higher, and play the game at quality/precision 2 with good frame rates, and crank it up to -1 for amazing screenarchery.

Let's ask Boris : is it pointless or not setting 0 or -1 qualities when using 1.0 or much higher than 1.0 scales ?

I have my own feeling, but it's "feeling", not "knowing".
What I'm seeing is much sharper and accurate AO when qualities are set to 0 or -1, especially at close range (0.3 and such). I also notice some changes in SSIL behaviour.
What differs in my case is I'm playing / tweaking upon a huge display, so I really spot minimal changes when they happen to be. I'm lucky about that.
As you stated, for actual *gameplay*, pointless pushing it too far, but as always, all depends on the rig and personal ability to sacrifice FPS for image quality.
I guess it's balance related, and to each his own Thus said, Skyrim is not BF4, FPS are not THAT required to enjoy and play the game IMHO. I'm personally plainly satisfied within the 30-40 range for actual gameplay.

[CruNcher]

@FiftyTifty

Thats a pretty aggressive LOD system on ULTRA

http://www14.zippyshare.com/v/17664325/file.html

Also what happens with the Tree lod above is totally crazy why the heck is it changing into it's sprite lod from a before stable mesh lod ?

it feels almost like the lod gets reversed in the opposite direction

[Gabber]

If you want to see difference between SSAO qualities set to -1 and 2, i suggest increasing AO intensities to 2.0 then changing and applying the new quality settings. all qualities and filters on -1 makes a huge difference to how precisely AO renders.

Happy holidays to all!

edit:

While I'm at it - I can't use Skylighting as I get linings on the screen (it's as if the screen has thin lines). Doesn't seem to matter which settings I have. Am I alone with this?

Lines disappear if you set SL FilterQuality to 0.

[Arkngt]

Personally, I see a noticeable difference between -1 and 2 for precision and quality in SSAO/SSIL. True, it hits performance, but I'd rather have -1 on those and sacrifice scaling somewhat rather than the other way around.

While I'm at it - I can't use Skylighting as I get linings on the screen (it's as if the screen has thin lines). Doesn't seem to matter which settings I have. Am I alone with this?

Oh, and Merry X-mas!

[ENBSeries]

Ssao quality vs sizescale act very different by performance and by visuals. Quality is parameter of smaples count per pixel, greater number cover more nearest points, so less noise in linear dependency (x2 more samples - twice less noise), also small or thin objects around have more chances to be computed, that's why face details looks better with higher quality set. SizeScale is the size of ssao render target scaled to screen size, performance depends non linear as factor of pixel count, while quality scales linear as vertical or horizontal size, so noise also. This means, that decreasing parameter you have much better performance and minimal quality loss and on the contrary, high value highly decrease fps, but quality do not increase much. The reason to use big scaling values is only in making sharper ssao, where every small stone looks separated. Of course noise also reduced with bigger scaling, because later ssao downsampled to screen size and this process reduce noise, but it's not look the same as higher ssao quality. I thought many times about disabling ssao filter to make ssao sharp like with high sizescale, but it's noise require much higher quality as samples count factor. At this moment extreme quality is 24 samples, high quality is 18, middle is 12, low is 6. When complex ambient occlusion enabled, twice more samples for ambient occlusion only, not for indirect lighting (for performance reasons).


One person e-mailed that 0.240 to 0.241 update reduced fps to 10 when moving outiside of some cavern near Riverwood. I don't see the reason for that and unable to test as don't know where is that place. Any ideas?

[FiftyTifty]

The place is either the cave exit from Helgen or Embershard Mine.

Map: http://srmap.uesp.net/?centeron=Helgen+Keep