About ENB Performance

[moody132]

Soo, after 10 years my GTX 650 1GB died. RIP

I bought 3060Ti, wanted to try ENB, but i have immidietly drop from 60 to 30 fps in Riverwood, Riften and some other places. Even without any present, just enb binaries and default inis fps drops to 40 in those places. but on roads i had mosttly 60 fps.

I know that ENB kills like half of your FPS, but i thought that this GPU will be enough for comfortable playing.

I am running fresh Skyrim install, 2K textures, Bijin, SMIM, some basic graphics mods, configs are BethINI High, 1080p. 

rest spec is i5-2500k running on 4.7, SSE system are running from sata ssd, i have also 8gb ddr3. I have SSE Engine Tweaks, Display tweaks, basicaly whole stable modlist from a long time.

Besides gpu and ssd this hardware is about 10 years old, i ll be buying new one in few months. But i wonder if this in fact case of hardware, or just engine thing. temps are fine, cpu ang gpu usage are way below 100%.

 

I know that even without enb riverwood with JK or Riften are fps hungry, so maybe this is just engine thing.

[yorpers]

I get steady 50-60 fps in skyrim with tons of 4k and even some 8k textures, over 1000 plugins, and I have a worse gpu than you now have. You just need modern hardware all around. Getting a nvme ssd, a more recent cpu, and especially some decent speed ram will all help you a ton.

 

EDIT: Do note that a nvme wouldn't help with fps, but loading times. Still a good upgrade to have though.

 

EDIT2: here is some advice other than just telling you to go get a new computer.

 

You can try these settings in skyrimperfs for lod. You will gain performance but you may see more objects popping in and out of lod.

 

[LOD]
fLODFadeOutMultSkyCell=1.0000
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=12.0000
fLODFadeOutMultItems=6.0000
fLODFadeOutMultActors=10.0000

 

and a few mods that help with fps...I would wait to use them when you start a new game.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/54907

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/54061

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/14084

Edited July 13, 2022 by yorpers

[xXDeliteXx]

I have the same GPU
I personally use this
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/38438
and this
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50129

I use Reshade and ENB together
I'll only average 50-60fps indoors 
around 40-50 outdoors (never 60)

[27X]

Turn off AO and Cloud shadows.

 

While it doesn't matter near as much in Skyrim as it does FO4, ram speed and bandwidth are still a huge deal in beth games, and in fact matter as much as Vram speed and bandwidth or more. Your SSD is also probably not utilizing full bandwidth esp if you not on a full pcie or nvme lane.

[sativa]

3080 / Ryzen 5950x here and yes,it's only the dx9 enb,Dosent matter if I play in FHD or 4K,enb off I have 100-140 fps outdoor,enb on  the half.

I disabled Cloud shadows and Reflections and use Deph of Field only for screenshots.

[Demonwolf218]

Skyrim is a very CPU hungry game because your GPU has to wait for the CPU to finish processing Papyrus scripts, shadows, Havok physics, and NPC AI before each frame. A 3060TI should have no problem running Skyrim with ENB on or off. According to this source, you could be losing up to half of your GPU performance from your CPU bottleneck. The best way to tell if you are CPU bound or not is to go into a city and start another program on you pc that hogs system resources (like sorting with LOOT) and look for a noticeable FPS drop. You can also use this in-game to see how fast the scripting engine is running. Lower is better but 60-100 is good! 

 

My GPU mostly runs at 99% and that's how I know I'm not bottlenecked by the CPU. When I do have a CPU bottleneck my GPU drops to around 70% but my CPU never goes above 80%. This is because Skyrim can use all your CPU cores but the scripting engine seems to only use 1. So my system will never report 100% CPU usage because only one core is maxed out. Towns and cities are very script heavy, and Sexlab mods can add even more scripts to those areas. 

 

If you are buying a new pc soon and want max Skyrim performance here are my recommendations.

Spoiler

CPU: you want a high single-threaded performance CPU, any newer Intel should work.

RAM: 16gb or more. Speed doesn't matter much

GPU: if you can use your 3060ti in your next pc I would do so, or buy a GPU with 12gb of Vram

Storage: Any PCIe NVMe will work! Do NOT get caught up with Read and Write speeds! Those do NOT translate into better load times in the real world. only compare "random read speeds"