Performance tips for ENB

[Fraying9981]

Hi,

 

Just installed pi cho enb, I find it's quite beautiful in particular for skin.

I noticed a performance drop in exteriors - I'm at 40 fps most of the time now down from 60+ before.

 

Any general tips to improve performance on enb? It's the first time i use an enb.

 

I have enb helper installed to tweak settings.

Elfx

Vanilla weather

Hardware: nvidia 3060, 64gb ram, 

Intel Core i5-14600KF

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/35082

 

Thanks in advance for your tips!

Edited June 30, 2025 by Fraying9981

[Yinkle]

enb = performance hit

[Fraying9981]

7 minutes ago, Yinkle said:

enb = performance hit

 Words of wisdom

 

any ways to tweak it to improve it a bit?

[traison]

Easiest way to DIY it when you don't necessarily know what to look for: open its in-game menu, enable its fps counter and disable its features one by one by unchecking the checkboxes. As long as you don't save your changes, you can hit the load button at the top to restore what you had before.

[nilead]

 ENB is a performance hog, postprocessing usually is, and the more complex, the worse it is. You can give community shaders a shot, they do seem to have considerable lower resource hit. Also come with DLSS support, wich might help if performance is an isssue.

 In general, i wouldnt go for ELFX+ENB on 3060. Modders love their high res textures and performance is usually an afterthought.

[Fraying9981]

14 minutes ago, nilead said:

 ENB is a performance hog, postprocessing usually is, and the more complex, the worse it is. You can give community shaders a shot, they do seem to have considerable lower resource hit. Also come with DLSS support, wich might help if performance is an isssue.

 In general, i wouldnt go for ELFX+ENB on 3060. Modders love their high res textures and performance is usually an afterthought.

thanks. what are the main benefits/drawbacks of community shaders?

I'm concerned about uninstall/installing CS

[traison]

1 hour ago, Fraying9981 said:

what are the main benefits/drawbacks of community shaders?

 

Pros:

• You regain the 30 fps you lost, until you enable GI, or set the shadow resolution too high.
• With work, certain aspects of it will look better than with ENB. Like for instance, when you've seen mountain shadows being cast over the entire world during a sunrise/sunset it's difficult to go back. Having the sun shine through the mountainside in Riverwood looks really amateurish.
• While it seems most people combine CS with ReShade, its definitely possible to achieve the same (or better) results without ReShade, just by tweaking the Skyrim inis (this is what I'm doing).

Cons:

• It can be tricky to get water to look nice, but its definitely doable.
• You need to reset and rebuild your Skyrim ini files. CS is entirely bound to them, and this is not mentioned anywhere. I recommend enabling the vanilla High preset, then tweak from there. Avoid setting shadow resolution above 2048. Keep in mind that BethIni is not compatible with SE/AE; there's a new version with a different name.
• CS is modular. Which module is compatible, which has been built into base CS, and which has been deprecated is not documented anywhere. Timestamps are your friends.
• Dithered shadows. Perhaps for performance reasons. Can be alleviated somewhat with tweaking.
• It will break RTSS. Use Display Tweaks for an OSD that can show FPS.
• Less options. CS only has about 1% of the options ENB has. I kind of like this however. Having ENB mess with every aspect of the game from lights to the weather caused all kinds of issues. You could be sneaking around in a dark corner, but NPCs could see you no problem - the light was dark only for you because ENB changed it. You might want to change the colors of the clouds, only to find ENB is overriding it from 4:37 AM to 5:10 PM - debugging this is a real joy.
• Despite what it may claim and look like, CS is very much using screenspace shadows and reflections. But then again, ENB is probably doing that as well.
• The current version of CS has major performance issues for the vast majority of players, and the fixes are coming slow (or not at all?). Use 1.1.15 for now.
• FPS drops massively when you're close (like right up to the camera clipping plane) to an NPC for whatever reason.

 

Would I change back to ENB? No.

 

1 hour ago, nilead said:

i wouldnt go for ELFX+ENB on 3060

 

CS, EVLaS and Terrain Shadows on a 3060 (12 GiB, non-TI) here. FPS is 55-60 @1440p.

Edited June 30, 2025 by traison

[danna233]

You can disable particularly gluttonous ENB functions. I have a RTX 2060 video card. There were no significant FPS drops, but the video card itself heated up a lot, up to 83 degrees, this happened even with ENB disabled, so I think there are very heavy shredders there. This can be disabled without much loss of quality, everything else will ruin your ENB.

EnableLens

EnableProceduralSun

EnableSunRays

EnableDepthOfField
EnableDistantShadow

EnableNormalMappingShadows
EnableImageBasedLighting
EnableSkinSpecular
EnableDirectionalSkyLighting
EnableComplexFireLights

EnableVolumetricRays
EnableSunGlare

[anjenthedog]

The only real con for the  CS-Shaders "suite" that I've seen so far is the somewhat long preprocessing time when installing for the first time or when updating.  (on my system it takes anywhere from around 10 to 15 minutes to complete its preprocessing) 

 

Works great for me on my crappy little 1060 card.  I don't just use CS. I also have Real clouds (Awesome mods imo), Realistic Water, Realistic lighting overhaul and a few other visual augmentations.

[Grey Cloud]

20 hours ago, traison said:

Keep in mind that BethIni is not compatible with SE/AE; there's a new version with a different name.

Bethini Pie

 

Just out of interest, how is Bethini not compatible?

 

Totally agree about the lack of documentation for CS.

[traison]

41 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Just out of interest, how is Bethini not compatible?

• Its missing values.
• It has values that have been deprecated.
• It places values in the wrong files.

I made my own ini editor when I discovered this. It was difficult to find a list of all values, but I eventually got a list made out of crossreferencing multiple sources. This has been reliable so far. It was only after this that I discovered Bethini Pie. I assume it works better than Bethini.

[Grey Cloud]

7 minutes ago, traison said:

Bethini Pie. I assume it works better than Bethini.

Thanks.

I more or less stopped using Bethini due to problems I suspected were caused by it. Never got around to trying Bethini Pie before I gave up on Skyrim a couple months ago.

[nilead]

22 hours ago, traison said:

CS, EVLaS and Terrain Shadows on a 3060 (12 GiB, non-TI) here. FPS is 55-60 @1440p.

I guess it comes down to how much you can/willing to tweak and compromise vs how much you want to cram into the game.

I do run alot of stuff. CS. ENB light for stuff not covered by CS, parallax textures, owl+NPC clothing replacer to distribute a ton of modded armor, including alot of SMP pieces (fSMP CUDA), full LUX and other heavy stuff like double markarth outskirts mod. You get the idea. 

 I do use a laptop, but it is a 4090 laptop.  Had to switch display down to 1080p, because 4k occasionally dipped uncomfortably. And thats without accounting for local voice generation for CHIM, that eats quite a bit of frames. In the end, i did get everything i wanted to cram into it, but i do run 1080p.

Its certainly possible to get it working with much less. I had an LE build with RealVision ENB way back when, it ran on 970. Not particularly well, but it was playable. 

 There are just alot of cool stuff that is such a performance killers. XTTS is damn sweet, but thats 4gb VRAM gone just then and there, COCO Joan SMP coat used to cut my FPS almost in half down to uplayable back then, but boy does that flowing skirt look good.... Its hard to give up some things. 3060 is a capable piece, but modded skyrim is a bottomless pit ready to swallow any amount of compute horsepower. And as far as i remember my days of torturing that old rig, ELFX was ruthess to it, i had to switch to RLO. It was a comprimise i made myself way back when, and it is one i suggested therefore.

[traison]

5 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

I more or less stopped using Bethini due to problems I suspected were caused by it.

 

When making my ini editor I started off having it generate the skyrimcustom.ini file with my changes. I figured it would be a convenient way to create a nice delta file and keep the originals clean from edits. In my testing this was not reliable, so I changed it to just overwrite the skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files instead. I didn't look into it any more than that. Could be skyrimcustom.ini is only intended for skyrim.ini edits (not skyrimprefs.ini) and my understanding of it was incorrect from the start; or maybe there was some other issue.

 

TL;DR: If you're having issues where it seems ini edits aren't respected by the game, try *not* using the skyrimcustom.ini file.

 

Edit: I guess the line I quoted doesn't really fit my response. Bethini like I said has other issues since it was made for LE most likely. I also don't know if it writes anything in the skyrimcustom.ini file. I guess my point here is that there's potentially other pitfalls too.

Edited July 1, 2025 by traison