1981

Those Project ENB + CoT screens look really off. Here’s my attempt from a while ago - http://imgur.com/a/34zCb#0 . The only thing I didn’t do is lower the brightness, everything else was installed according to instructions from Project ENB mod page. One thing I don’t remember is which preset I used, I think it was Cinematic but I’m not 100% sure. It’s worth giving a try.

I think your RLOH still looks a bit too dark, as if the contrast is cranked up too high.

1982

I used the realism preset. I think I followed the directions step by step. There really isn’t too much to screw up. I was using the newer ENB dll, which was approved for use.

1983

Hmm, I think I’m adding too many textures and stuff. When I’m walking around I sometimes hear my hard drive periodically churn and get some stuttering movement.

1984

Other than the weather, I didn’t really notice any changes when using Climates of Tamriel over vanilla. Well, I think I notices a little foliage difference too. I only visited a handful of locations though. I was using the default dungeons and towns. The town lighting seemed a little different too. I didn’t like the warm interiors when I tried them. What is the big draw of CoT other than the weather, anything?

Edit: I partially take that back. The daytime lighting seems less harsh. The lower clouds and the mountains stand out more. I tried the darker dungeons and it might be a nice change and not as drastic as Realistic Lighting Overhaul. The town lighting was warmer too and not as blue at night. Not huge huge differences, but noticeable.

1985

After my complete reinstall and readdition of the mods, my weird problems went away and now I have a tough choice to make.

CoT + Project ENB, along with some other non-drastic mods. I don;t have any complaints about how this looks. Colors look vibrant and the weather looks nice. Towns and interiors look nice too.

Realistic Lighting Overhaul: Many outdoor places look just as good or almost as good as the above, but I get 60 FPS instead of 30-40. That means I could add some more mods, like Skyrim Flora Overhaul. I’m not sure what my indoor preference would be. I could also turn on anti aliasing within Skyrim which would be a lot better than ENB’s.

If I’m happy with the colors in both cases, what would I be missing out on if I went without Project ENB? Are there some effects I might not have noticed in the handful of locations I was doing my comparisons at?
Anyone have any recommendations. I don;t know if I will even make it through 1 playthrough of Skyrim since I failed on my prior attempts, so I really want to make the best choice.

I could maybe try 2 characters, 1 with each choice and play for several hours to decide on the mods and what character I want to play.

1986

Here’s what STEP has to say:

What is ENBoost?

ENBoost is a memory reduction feature added to the ENB Series to address the crashes and freezes of Skyrim due to hitting system memory (RAM) limit of a 32-bit application. ENBoost is included in the ENB Series graphics modification and is now a part of all up to date ENB profiles or can be used without the graphic modifications of the ENB Series. The ENBoost tab will explain using ENBoost for users that just want the to use the memory manager without the graphics modifications. ENBoost is designed to work better for more powerful computers that have more video memory (VRAM) available.

1987

I haven’t really added any graphical mods yet, but I am tempted to add the Realistic Lighting Overhaul, looks pretty good to my eyes.

1988

Gopher has a great series of Skyrim videos, including a series on moddingand ENBs.

Edit: They do go too slow much of the time, but they are definitely easy to follow. At times I do skip ahead if he is driving me crazy.

1989

Snowstorm got me hankering for more modding so I just completed step 2.2.8, fingers crossed no CTD!

1990

Basically, when you hit 3.1gb of memory allocated, Skyrim crashes. Most of that allocated memory is textures. This is especially true if you like playing a heavily modded Skyrim.

enboost more or less shoves textures into their own process, reducing the memory used by the core Skyrim process. With enboost, it’s almost impossible to hit that 3.1gb limit, so you avoid a particular sort of crash.

1991

If we’re talking enb presets, I like Phinix. It’s more “true” to the original look of the game than most ENBs, and it’s not a complete performance hog. With a modern rig you can hold at 60fps most of the time. The crappy enb AA is annoying though, and you lose a lot of enb features if you use hardware AA.

1992

You don’t really need to use ENB along with CoT because CoT was designed to be a standalone module which, among other things, overhauls lighting, just as RLOH does. So if you’re worried about performance make a straight up comparison of CoT vs RLOH and see which one you prefer.

I’ve been wondering though - is there a way to adjust AA levels in Project ENB? The last time I checked there was only an option to switch between different AA implementations, but not the multipliers. If it would save me 10-15 fps to get as close to 60 as possible I’d have no problem dropping it to 2x.

1993

You can change the AA it’s using. Most presets have SMAA toggled on, and you should be able to tweak the quality of that, or turn it off entirely. A few AA methods are also supported and toggle-able, e.g. edgeAA. Things like edgeAA only cost a couple fps in practice however, from what I’ve seen and read. You can also kick the AA back to hardware, but you’d have to turn off deferred rendering and lose a lot of ENB features.

1994

CoT, RLO and ENB are all really doing different things, although they interact with each other, and you’re probably better off not going with CoT’s darker nights plugins if you’re going to have other lighting mods/enb in play.

A number of ENB presets were designed with CoT in mind, and there’s also the CoT Weather Patch http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/39799/? to improve the experience.

1995

Could you please link some? I’m only familiar with Project ENB but since CoT is a must have mod for me I couldn’t really use any of the performance ENBs that were available at the time since they weren’t configured with CoT in mind.

1996

I use http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/24235/?

It’s updated rather often. It may be a little more performance hungry than when I last used it, as I know the author plays around with new features as Boris adds them to ENB, and some interesting stuff has been going into ENB lately, but it’s usually pretty easy to turn off whole features if you don’t care for them. I think he also bundles some more performance oriented presets.

When I was using it a month ago it was a bit washed out during the day in some weathers (entirely correctable, but still took some fiddling) but I know the author was actively looking into that.

If you want to see it in action without setting it up, Gopher has been using it for his Skyrim Let’s Play videos lately. Gopher runs it with hardware AA on and some features disabled, so it’s a little different, but you can get a sense for the overall look.

1997

Well, now the fun begins in tracking down what mod has broken my game. I am running a pure mage so I made a beeline to Winterhold. When I go into Saarthal for the first quest, I get to the round room with Tolfdir and kill the 4 Draugr. I can’t get the door to open to continue on. The quest marker shows there, but the door is not interact-able.

1998

MrPerson: thanks for the link, but it looks too bleak/washed out for my taste. I’ll see if I can squeeze more performance out of Project ENB the next time I get around to it.

1999

Project ENB was specifically made for CoT, although it can be used with any mod. It makes the colors more vibrant and lighting due to flames warmer. It definitely makes the game look better to me since I like richer colors. So far my fps is staying between 35-40 almost all the time, so I started a new game with CoT + Proj Enb. I can always turn it off or use the performance version if I really need to.

I don’t know how to adjust the AA although I do recall seeing some AA settings in the ENBSeries.ini file.

I may also start another game using RLO just to see how it is and maybe add the fauna overhaul mod too.

2000

You probably thought of this but isn’t one of the doors triggered by an amulet or casting a spell at something?