TES Skyrim 0.241

[--JawZ--]

Boris;

He might refer to the Embershard Mine

Interior coc - EmbershardMine01
Exterior coc - EmbershardMineExterior01/02/03

http://www.uesp.net/maps/srmap/srmap.sh ... shard+Mine


And thanks for the input on the SSAO.

[ENBSeries]

Okay, i don't have any performance loss there, so nothing to fix. Back to modding.

[DigitalPrinceX]

That place is kind of a choke point. Everyone lags there. Depending on machine the severity of lag changes.
Depending on mods, that point loads a lot of objects, entities, and being starting questline some scripts, mods add more script, weather mods, + whatever more stuff = GG lag

[FiftyTifty]

Riverwood is pretty intensive. Shadows are a big performance drag there.

[Oyama]

Thanx for the input about SSAO, Boris.
I can rest assured, my eyes are still working correctly.

BTW...

...When complex ambient occlusion enabled, twice more samples for ambient occlusion only, not for indirect lighting (for performance reasons).

Hmmm, I'd love to test an IL with twice more samples....

[ENBSeries]

Ssil with greater number of samples is not much noticed.

[Oyama]

All right, pointless then.

BTW, latest improvements / additions about water and its displacements are working like a breeze.

[Darkstorne]

Thanks for the SSAO breakdown. With so many different variables it's great to read exactly what they do in depth.

Also, those water shadow optimizations are fantastic. I've definitely got smoother frame rates now

(2GB GTX 560 Ti)

[jrista]

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.

What kind of display? I use a 30" screen myself, with native 2560x1600 resolution. I can see fairly small changes (although I am not downsampling, so maybe not as small). I am not saying there is zero difference, there is indeed a difference. What I am trying to offer is that if you want high frame rates, with a minimal loss in quality, you can jack up SSAO scaling as high as it will go, then drop the precision and quality for gameplay, then crank them back up (without exiting the game) for maximal quality for screenarchery. So far, I was always exiting the game, editing SSAO scaling, then starting the game back up to switch between "gaming" mode and "screenarchery" mode. Was a real PITA. This, at the very least, gets me even HIGHER frame rates for gameplay, and I don't have to do anything more than bring up the ENB editor in game, bump quality and precision back up to extreme, save/apply, and I'm able to do screenarchery right away.

I just thought that was a convenient little happy consequence of using quality and precision, rather than SSAO scaling, in order to improve frame rates for gameplay. I also feel, on my own huge screen, that the difference in quality, especially while you are moving about, battling, interacting with NPCs, etc. that the loss in AO quality and precision is unnoticable, unless you intentionally start looking for the difference. I am hoping that this gives users who were dropping their SSAO scaling to 12% in order to get playable frame rates another option, and potentially the option to INCREASE their gameplay quality while concurrently increasing their frame rates for even smoother play.

[jrista]

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).

Thanks! That's very helpful. It also explains pretty well why there is about a 4x improvement in performance when you use low quality than extreme quality (24/6 = 4).

I have one more question, if you don't mind. The SourceTexturesScale setting. When I set that to over 1.0 in my enbseries.ini, it always seems to show up as 1.0 in the game. Is that value limited to 1.0, or do higher settings actually take affect, even though they don't show up in the UI? I am also not sure increasing the size of the source texture would do any good, which is why I suspect its maximum value is 1.0. Anyway, just a curiosity...I couldn't really tell if higher values improved anything or not (sometimes it seems like it does, but other times not.)