So hi fellow Skyrimmers!

I have this pc:

AMD FX8320 (overclocked at 4ghz)

4gb RAM ddr3 1333mhz. (planning on upgrading to 8gb at 1866mhz soon)

AMD HD 6850 Vapor-X (overclocked at 850/1200)

Windows 7 64bit

Without any mods,I can play Skyrim vanilla with all settings on ultra,with the official texture pack included,at 1080,with constant 60fps,and no stuttering at all. I actually have to use vSync to not get screen tearing,because my graphics card can output more frames than that.

So I decided to upgrade the visuals of my Skyrim (i've been doing it for the last years actually) but right now my mind changed,and I thought that perhaps I weren't doing the best thing all that time.

So here is what I am thinking:

I can get to install a large number of high res texture mods,but mostly the 'lite' packs,usually those at 1024 resolution,not the crazy 2048,4096 or the... 8k packs.

or

I can use only the official texture pack,and crank up the draw distances so the world a few meters ahead of me isn't empty and barren.

or

I can add ENB which provides better lighting,sun rays,bloom,and other effects...

The thing is,I can only do ONE of these 3 options and have a good enough experience,and there are compromises that need to be done.

If I only add enb,I get all the effects it comes with,but my frame rate drops to an average between 35 and 48 frames per second. It definitely feels different and noticeable from constant 60. Movement is kind of choppy.

If I don't use ENB but I start adding texture packs,I have this problem: while the general frame rate stays high (lets say 60fps) the game freezes every time I turn the camera in a round of my character,or when parts of the world load.

Going from 60fps to 5fps for a second,to go back at 60fps. That's quite annoying.

If I crank up the view distances, I get some frame drops when the game loads assets in outside areas,but not so much as its dropped when I have high res textures installed. Sometimes Skyrim runs out of memory.

So... which of these 3 options you think is best ?

Get the enb effects and get used to choppy movement of 30s and 40s on my frame rate,get texture mods and get used on the sudden freezes whenever the game has to render more objects on screen,or being able to see things further,but get random crashes ?

I recently uninstalled ALL of the mods I had,to remind myself how smooth the game was running without any mods at all. Right now I can't decide what to do next.

Please,share your opinions and suggest me an option.

I'd love to try enb but seems SO bloody complicated lol.

i'd use it all and put some work into balancing it.

start with the official HD texture pack and add a few select texture mods (SMIM, ruins clutter improvement, evtl. one of those 1024 packs you mentioned)

then add a light enb, best one without too much visual effect. search for a pretty vanilla setup with minimal performance impact. there are nice performance improves to be found from the memory management features of enb and the detailed shadows.

the last point brings us to fiddling with you ini settings. see, the vanilla shadows are ugly and performance intense. if you drop the shadow resolution a bit, but add enbs improved shadow algorythm, you may be able to improve shadow visuals (don't ask me about specifics though. no idea) and improve performance at the same time. (of course you can also improve shadows up to a point where it kills your performance, it's up to you )

anyway after that give a look to this mod:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/19446/?

and all the mods linked under "additional information"

this should get your LOD improved without much of a performance impact.

after that your game will look noticably better, but you still rock that 60 fps.

now you can start the things like ini tweaking for draw distance or adding more enb features.

but at that point your baseline will already be so much better, that it doesn't matter that much any more

The 6850 gfx card is definitely somewhat weak nowadays. You did not mention its VRAM size.

I personally can do without super-big super Hi-res textures blanket-the-whole-game-wide. They eat a lot of VRAM and the visual benefit is somewhat marginal. I recommend to just use the official hi-res DLC together with Unofficial Hi-res patch. I definitely second the mention of SMIM. It's limited in scope but the visual impact is quite notiecable, you will like it a lot.

I think the lighting of the game, particulary the interplay of shadowed and lit areas adds much more to actual atmosphere and depth than any super-res textures. This is best achieved by installing an ENB. There are of course many ENBs and you have to find the one you are happy with. I personally find the Phinix Natural ENB very nicely done and would recommend you give it a try. Plus the installation instructions are fail-safe. The author also provides excellent support and continues to work on his mod.

If below 60 FPS are an absolute no-go for you, well you will will get only so far. If it was not, I would recommend to enable an FPS limiter (it is included in enblocal.ini and set it to 40 FPS. This smoothes out the 40 frames over the whole time so it will normally avoid the issue of getting 60-30-50-25-55 frames over 5 seconds which you will notice as stutter and choppy. A smooth 40 FPS works very well, in my opinion. You can even install ENB but use the "ENBoost" portion only (in order to profit from memory managment / Sheson fix and FPS limiter) by disabling all ENB effects in enbseries.ini.

I recommend not to increase uGridsToLoad to greater than 5. It can be stable but it eats performance.

c'mon man. you didn't even try.

its harder to navigate and download the enbseries from Boris' website than it is to install it.

Download enbseries for skyrim.

Extract and copy contents into your Skyrim folder (not your data folder!!)

Then find a Preset you like, if you aren't using a lighting mod, go with Phinix Enb preset. probably the best one.

I use RLO, so i use their ENB preset.

And that's it. You can also tweak some cool things in your enblocal.ini which is found in your skyrim dir.