TES Skyrim 0.231

[Jafin16]

Real Clouds was very popular for awhile but, as far as I'm aware, a lot of people have stopped using it regularly because it really needs to mature more. It only really works well without ENB and using vanilla weathers (some known from experience, some from hearing from others, so take with a grain of salt). If you want to try doing the fog like that, I think it would be interesting, but it's not something I'd go crazy raving about (unlike the water!!! That work is just amazing!!!)

[SamEkinci]

Jafin

Boris already mentioned that unfortunately volumetric pseu clouds and fog arent very compatible with SSAO and that it was a nightmare for SSAO in fact.

[Jafin16]

SamEkinci

Ah, I must have missed that conversation. Well, if it can still be done without a massive headache it would be nice, but it wouldn't be anything that would drastically effect my game experience so my opinion is fairly neutral. Nice but it doesn't really matter to me.

[insomnia_jt]

I must've missed that too. If it's not possible then it's definitely not a big deal.

[ENBSeries]

I'll think about height based fog and how to elliminate it's issues.

[FiftyTifty]

'Scuse me if this is rather ignorant, but for height based fog, couldn't you just make an image that fades from 100% transparent white to 25% transparent white, then stretch it and place it at a set distance away from the player?

Though, I don't know what you're capable of with hooking into the renderer, so forgive me if it's not possible to implement.

[ENBSeries]

It's not such simple, not all places require the same height in 3d space, so first i need to make editor to place fog properties in certain positions in 3d space. THis also linked to weather and must affect sky, all filters must be modified, like for ambient occlusion. It's a lot of work summary.

[jrista]

So water and transparent objects would just be ignored without altering the appearance of water and transparent objects at all? Personally, I think that would be sufficient because, as of right now, I don't see any good AA options for use with ENB. FXAA and SMAA aren't really AA, they smudge stuff... they smudge differently, but they smudge, and FXAA is the worst. On top of it, I don't want to apply another d3d9 through the proxy... been there, done that, I'm done with it. However, EdgeAA and Subpixel AA barely touch the existing aliasing problems. I guess I could use transparencyAA but then I lose deferred rendering effects (as I understand it, it requires hardware AA as well, right?) I don't want to put you back on the anti-aliasing tracks again, you've already been down that road, but TAA has excellent quality but, because of the ghosting, it's basically useless. Almost no one is using it. If it worked even without transparent objects it would be a vast improvement over what we have (most of the aliasing I see is on fences, lamps, buildings at a distance, etc.) If it solved or even helped that, you'd be my hero.

If you really don't wanna do it, I'll stop bringing it up. It's just an effect that used to work and work quite well (v0.212 and lower that had TAA 'finished' I had no trouble, no ghosting at all. It broke at v0.213 when it no longer needed old helper mod) and now it's more or less useless except for screenshots... but that doesn't even do much as we're dealing with a still screen and it's temporal AA... Anyway, like I said, if it's not going to be done, I'll stop bringing it up. I'd just really like to see it in usable form again

Btw, water simply won't stop blowing my mind. A friend of mine just got enb for the first time and he can't stop talking about how good the water looks. It's kinda funny really. My 3d animator/modeller wife is even impressed (and it's hard to impress her with games...) Thanks Boris! I did not expect to write a novel here... but... well... there ya go. I better stop now It's really late here, I need sleep.

Every AA method has it's tradeoffs, and technically speaking most "driver" AA methods are no better than SMAA or FXAA when you factor in their tradeoffs (assuming they even work, many driver AA methods do not work at all with certain versions of DirectX.) The only way to truly and cleanly sample and anti-alias a game is with downsampling. Downsampling, if you haven't heard of it, is literally rendering each frame at a higher resolution, then scaling it down to the native (physical) screen resolution. Downsampling is a type of OGSSAA that works on the entire frame, everything in it, and the results are usually quite phenomenal. For best results, you usually apply some post-processing AA like SMAA first, to get the cleanest edges you can before you downsample. The most common way to do this is by using nVidia cards and the nVidia control panel to create a custom resolution (i.e. 4k, 3840x2160) for a screen with a native maximum resolution of 1920x1080. The driver will then scale the rendered 4k frame down to the native screen output for the cleanest, sharpest detailed output you can get. It is superior to any form of driver AA, including SSAA+SGSSAA methods (which, when used in combination to AA the entire scene including transparent textures, tend to soften a lot more than SMAA). Some games even support superresolution rendering in the game, and some gamers have resorted to downsampling from frames rendered at 7000+ or even 9000+ horizontal pixels...the results are simply mind blowing (if you have the hardware for it...you probably need at least an SLI pair of 770's, and better a pair/trio of Titans, to pull something like that off and even get a frame rate high enough to do screenarchery with.)

The perf. hit for doing OGSSAA via downsampling is high. If you literally do 4k rendering, your performance is about 1/4 what it would be rendering a 2k (1920x1080) frame (~8mp vs. ~2mp). If you are doing screenarchery, having a frame rate around 8-10fps isn't a big deal, as gameplay doesn't matter, only the visuals do. If you want the best AA you can get for taking screen shots, then you should really look into downsampling + SMAA. It'll blow your mind, and solve your AA problems.

When it comes to gameplay, you should probably use SMAA with a negative LOD bias set in your driver. SMAA does "blur", however most AA methods except OGSSAA blur (even SGSSAA blurs, and multisampling also blurs). Pushing your LOD bias negative compensates for the blurring, without eliminating the AA. I use a LOD bias of -0.125 or -0.375 depending on what resolution and how much AA I am playing at. Using a negative LOD bias can increase texture shimmer in the distance, however there are few things outside of full SSAA+SGSSAA (with a significant negative LOD bias) or downsampling that can really fix that properly, so you can either choose to live with texture shimmer during high framerate gameplay, or deal with a slow frame rate.

If you do choose to give downsampling a try, make sure you have a screen that supports a high pixel clock. Native 120Hz screens (which can actually be picked up pretty cheaply these days) will usually support the very high pixel clocks necessary for 3840x2160 or even 4096x2560 downsampling. Also, keep in mind, the game is literally being rendered at the higher frame rate. If you take a screen shot, you will usually end up with frames at the higher resolution, rather than at the screen's native resolution (which is really exactly what you want when doing screenarchery.)

[jrista]

Real Clouds was very popular for awhile but, as far as I'm aware, a lot of people have stopped using it regularly because it really needs to mature more. It only really works well without ENB and using vanilla weathers (some known from experience, some from hearing from others, so take with a grain of salt). If you want to try doing the fog like that, I think it would be interesting, but it's not something I'd go crazy raving about (unlike the water!!! That work is just amazing!!!)

Real Clouds definitely needs to mature more. I used it for a while...amazing, but it doesn't work well with CoT weathers. You almost have Real Clouds in the sky at all times, and they behave oddly.

If you want to get good fog, you should check out this mod for CoT: Climates of Tamriel - Weather Patch - Fog Rain Overcast. It adds some very nice moody weather to CoT. At the moment, the foggy weathers oscillate (pulse in and out) a bit too fast. I keep planning on asking the mod author to slow down the rate at which fog moves and pulses, however every time I try to (like right now) Nexus is:

WE'LL BE BACK VERY SOON

We have taken this Nexus website offline momentarily while we perform some maintenance. This should only take a few minutes, so please try again soon and thanks for your patience.

(This seems to happen constantly now...how in the world could the Nexus be doing maintenance every day four to six times a day? Doesn't make sense...either they have some SERIOUS problems, or this is just their default page they show when their server(s) crash. Either way...I can barely get in anymore.)

Anyway, this mod for CoT, which includes a tweaked version of Kountervibe ENB that works better with CoT, solves a lot of the horizon fog issues. They aren't 100% fixed, but definitely a lot better than without the mod.

[jrista]

Boris
Agreed with Jafin16 about all this. I'm happy enough with post AA solutions only because I'm downsampling.... I hate FXAA. I only use SMAA on top of downsampling.
Temporal AA is still the best solution, but sadly I can't use it because of SLI...
Just to clarify : why your TAA isn't SLI compatible (I understand why temporal and SLI AFR methods aren't, technically), but TXAA methods used in some games (Crysis3 f.e.) is ?....
What's the difference between them ?

The TXAA in Crysis 3, while better than all the other modes, still doesn't really solve the problem of texture shimmering over time. It mitigates it, but you still need downsampling to really nip it in the bud.