r/skyrim•
Sneezes

How I made Skyrim look beautiful without performance loss

Here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/wqOuQ

I have a mid-range pc (Ati radeon 5770, intel i7 8gb ram). I was exited when I first saw screenshots of skyrim with the ENB shaders.. however, they all dropped my performance to 20-30 fps. It was a shame, so I had to resort to using FXAA post-process injectors and tweaking my monitor color to make skyrim more colorful, but it never looked right to me.

I finally found two mods that work well toguether and dont affect my performance, here they are:

Stakado Cinemascope ENB

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/15425

and Realistic Lighting With Customization

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/7654

The first one is the ENB shader, be sure to remove the grain effect on the optional install and install the "Classic version". Also remove the letterbox, removing it will also bring the contrast to more acceptable levels somehow.

The second one makes lightning much better as it removes artificial lightning and makes the game look more natural. Also, caves and dungeons are much darker as the only sources of light are torches, fires and openings. Having a torch or magelight is a must if you want to explore.. its fantastic, they feel much more threatening. Be sure to install the default version. Of this addon, no additional tweaking needed.

Thats it, I run Skyrim at 1600 x 900, no AA and at high settings. It looks spectacular and I run at mostly 50 fps, 40s in heavy action. never thought a game could look this gorgeous and run so smoothly!

Posted Jul 10, 2012, 4:43 AM UTC · edited

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