I just installed Phinix Natural ENB in my game. I followed the directions carefully, and loaded the game.

First off, it takes about 3 or 4 minutes for the game to load, where pre-PNENB, it took about 30-40 seconds. Is this typical?

Second, pre-PNENB, I usually capped out my FPS around 60. Now, I'm getting < 20. Is this typical?

My GPU specs are:

ATI AMD Radeon HD 7700 with 1024 MB.

I checked for the proper enblocal.ini settings using the suggested utility at http://www.iparadigm.org/pages/pnenb/ENBoost.html

The graphics look spectacular, but the fps drop is unacceptable.

I'd love to keep PNENB loaded.

Anyone have any tweaks or suggestions to recover some FPS?

Sounds like its just too much for your system. ENBs are not without performance hits like some like to claim.

Try lowering various eye-candy settings like 4xAA and 8xAF.

1. Yes, loading times are much longer with ENB than without. See in my sig my PC which is quite good, but I have the same experience.

2. Yes, the performance hit is quite significant. And your GFX card is not the strongest plus its VRAM is not very big. What screen resoulution are you playing at? You can reduce that. But yeah, probably your PC is just not quite strong enough. There is only so much you can gain for out of tweaking. I know it svcks because PNENB is stupendous.

With regard to scale down for better FPS, do follow Phinix install instructions to the letter, he gives some tips there as well, aalso with regard to settings in the SK Launcher. Also, you can check the ENB website of Boris Voronzov for some troubleshooting.

Install the newest ATI drivers for the card. I think Catalyst is at v13.12 right now, but not sure. In the 3D Catalyst settings turn off AA and AF (set it to "Application controlled").

My game pre-ENB had 60 FPS even outside in the wilderness with Ultra settings and HD textures and so on (at resolution 1680x1050), while the card was running at about 35% at most, IIRC. Now, with ENB I get around 42 - 45 FPS outside, still get 60 FPS inside. But the card is running at +90% all the time. Therefore I set the FPS limiter in enblocal.ini to 40 FPS and this has helped GPU usage% and temperatures. But yeah, the hit is enormous...

Phinix is active on the forums, so he's the best one to ask. There should be a thread within the first few pages.

I don't have a recent config handy, but here are a few things to look for.

For your hardware, set "VideoMemorySizeMb=1024" in your enblocal.ini file (Skyrim directory, use a text editor). If you left that value at the default setting (used to be 3072 I think), then I would ONLY make this change, and try playing the game. If you didn't get much of a change, try these options below, starting with Ambient Occlusion.

And some settings to consider turning off in enbseries.ini (though this will effect how it looks):

EnableAmbientOcclusion=false (probably the biggest performance hit)

EnableSkyLighting=false

EnableImageBasedLighting=false

EnableSubSurfaceScattering=false

Turning these off might make you unhappy with the results, though. I'm not sure how much impact the Particle settings would have, but probably not much compared to these. The best option would be to start by turning off Ambient Occlusion, to see how much that helps.