Skyrim - configuring enb from the ground up

[Yanazake]

Hi there, guys, i'm new here and since i didn't find an "introduction" topic, i'm getting down to business first.

My specs [that probably matter] are 8gb ram, AMD radeon HD black 6850 XFX [1gb vram] and intel i7 [not sure which generation. If i can check without turning off my pc and looking at its insides, do tell]

I can run skyrim with maxed settings very well, and wouldn't mind turning down a few things if necessary for what i want to achieve.
- Basically, more than anything, parallax and refraction.
As a good extra, sunrays, depth of field and maybe something else. What I -don't- want by any means is the gray film that appears in some enb settings. Oh, and if i can use ENBoost, then even better!

I tried tweaking both the enb ini files AND the configurations of my graphics card and i kept switching back between a clear and fully functional skyrim with a bunch of HD textures running at 40fps in riverwood and around 120 in a very small closed cell, in contrast to a skyrim with the ugly gray film, no sunlight/shadows, and running at 1 fps. ONE. I never experienced something like that before.

My enb version is 0.245 and my settings started primarily with ENBoost settings - when i tried to tweak it more, i kept swapping between the smooth speed and the f*cked up 1 fps speed. Skyrim is up to date... I can't think of anything else to add. Gonna try the fully zeroed settings from project parallax at Skyrim Nexus while i wait for someone to discuss this with..

[ENBSeries]

Very low fps could be because antialiasing enabled in game or drivers (i'm not testing any more new versions for AA compatibility), bad drivers. But the most reasonable is memory manager enabled, but not configured for your videocard, try ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=false in enblocal.ini, if performance will be much better, then tweak memory manager as described in docs for ENBoost.

[Yanazake]

Thanks, the enboost ini files really were messing things up, but now i can better modifiy values with the truly blank one i got.

What you said was true, Anti Aliasing was really turned on [not sure when it happened. Probably during testing] and i turned off reducememoryusage and will try to edit the settings for more memory optimization later. I'm starting to think my GFX card is getting old fast, tho...

Either way, i'm still not sure how i can enable refraction on some items that were supposed to have one. As in, gemstones and soulgems, thanks to two mods - gems of skyrim and immersive soulgems. Some seem transparent, others just opaque and with a bad metallic shine that's usually addressed with a black texture [at least for bodies, but i'm talking about gems].

[ENBSeries]

Can't say anything regarding refractions, never saw them

[Yanazake]

THe refraction is quite a trick, it's achieved specifically by using two layers of normal maps, one of them with alpha [actually, one mesh using two normal maps, and a second mesh having a specular texture with alpha and normal map].

When these are rendered in some very specific enb settings, they simulate refraction. Immersive soulgems says it's tweaked for Bleak ENB, but gems of skyrim doesn't say anything about ENB. Still there are some surprising screenshots.