Looking around I see this obsession related to ENB. But I think it is good only for screenshots. Is it only me having this idea? It can't be xD

Pretty much only you. ENB's can bring a dull world to life. I personally like downloading some ENB's. They are very taxing on your system. Although, I have not been able to get any ENB's to work on GTA III (which includes VC) and GTA IV. Installing mods for those two games are annoyingly difficult.

I'm not that big on it either. It's like one of those garden sculptures that looks good in other people's gardens, but I wouldn't want to live with it myself. It also seems to cripple performance to the point that I get nasty headaches, which is another reason I'm less than keen...

I only use the ENBoost in Skyrim and the San Andreas version. Nice to see the downtown skyscraqers from Grove Street. I tried using the graphic ENBs for Skyrim but they never end up looking like the screens shown.

I've enjoyed it in Skyrim - of course, the trick is finding a preset that has the effects you like. A great many of the ENB's that show up on the Nexus, I'd never want to use.

And I'm okay with the performance hit. The one I use in Skyrim dropped me, on my old card, from ~50fps to ~30, and it was fine. I gained some fps with my new GPU, so it's even better now. (But, then, I've never had an uber system, so I'm used to lower framerates.)

edit: it's not working quite as well with Fallout3 / Fallout:NV, I may go back to Dynavision/Imaginator there.

well but Enboost isn't technically just a patch to make you able to use all your videocard's memory? I don't think it's an ENB per-se..

I don't use ENB's. Reason, game graphics are not that important to me. Sure, I want a game that looks good, and I do change texture mods to make games look a certain way in that regard. But, messing around with Shaders and other post game processing is to me just gilding the lily. As someone has pointed out, most ENB's have a huge overhead and can tax the system to the point that the game is not as enjoyable due to stutters and hitches.

Also, it seems that no one calibrates their monitors properly, and that includes people who make lighting/shader mods. My monitor is adjusted down from Torch Mode so things are mostly properly dark where they need to be.

So, I leave things alone in this regard.

Yeah, the "super dark Realism!" shadows is one of the things that makes me avoid a lot of the Skyrim ENB presets. The other being 300% color saturation (I mean, I like a good saturated color palette, but some of those just take it really far.)

A whodamawhat now?

It's a series of post-processing mods that add all sorts of visual effects to games. Everything from better forms of anti-aliasing, to godrays, to color-shifting, to depth-of-field, to lighting & shadow changes, etc.

There's one main guy who programs the general mod, but then various people will add their own tweaks and publish the "preset" for others to use. There's lots of different presets for Skyrim, for example.

Nah, personally I find it pretty worthless since I don't really care for graphics that much. The most I'll do is change character models/textures in a game.

Not to mention a crapton of those presets makes some games look godawful instead of "prettier." (Skyrim's the first thing that comes to mind)

It depends. Some of the effects can be nice and can add immersion to the game while others can take away from it.

The major issue is the performance hit it can have and since I am on a laptop it can be a heavy performance hit as well as heat if it puts too much work on the graphics card.

I do like it on some of the older games but on the newer games it is just too demanding. I like the ones that do more minor tweaks and that do not go over the top with super god rays and such.

For Fallout and Skyrim Gopher and MGE made some good moods that adds some of the features of an ENB without a performance hit. Dynavision, Imaginator.

I think "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" fits here.

But, yeah - a lot of the ENB's I see, aren't attractive to me. But, that's a matter of taste. I can say the same thing about many of the "improved texture" mods*, for instance - some of the most popular ones for Oblivion & Fallout 3 just leave me scratching my head. Way too much "noise" in the textures. But that's the great thing about mods.... there's all sorts of them out there, so look long enough and you might find one you like. And the ones you don't like are easy to avoid. )

*(and face mods, and hair mods, and armor mods, and gameplay mods......)

I don't like ENB either. I mean it was good for GTA 3/VC/SA and other older games that did not have modern features like Bloom, SSAO, etc. But on games that already have these things ENB is just a blurry, performance hogging mess.