In my opinion, of course. Yours may differ and that's fine.

I opened up Skyrim today. I started to run around (though at speedmult 500) and I never really thought about how beautiful the landscape is. I have but a few mods to enhance the graphics, like WATER, Better Dynamic Snow and HQ snow, Lush Grass plus some other minor ones but that's that when it comes to the "looks". I really don't think more needs to be enhanced. Not even the texture size. I'm fine with the default texture size (unless of course some are replaced by the mods I use) and I don't even use the 2K ones or custom ones. I stopped using SMIM because it was too resource hungry and I didn't really notice the changes it made (I'm not detail OCD).

I have my game set to medium with no grapahics mods and I still love the look of it.

I can run the game on Ultra if I have no mods.

I run it on Ultra but I don't really know why. I guess I just let "it" deice my settings. I watched a YT video once explaining the differences between the various settings and tbh it mostly seemed like draw distance

The game looks very nice in vanilla. I agree that it doesn't need graphics mods.

Still, I have loads of graphics mods, simply because I can. I think it's fun to make it look as awesome as possible.

I could too if I wanted to, to some extent, but I'd sacrifice summonability. I'd rather watch 200 Unbound Dremoras fight each other to death.

Always remember it's worth downloading the ENB binaries even if you use none of the effects, just for the ENBoost memory management.

[Also: RadeonPro or Inspector, don't forget SSAO, and the in-game settings have no transparency anti-aliasing.]

Haven't installed Enboost yet since reinstalling Skyrim but I guess I don't need to since I run the SKSE alpha which supposedly already has a memory improvement solution baked inside.

lol, I did this at the emperor's cousin's wedding.

As for the graphics thing, yea I agree, it doesn't need Ultra settings but some people like to have the "Pretty" look to their game.

That is the beauty of skyrim though, it's your game to play however you want...gotta like TES.

That is not to say I haven't tried a plethora of graphics enhancing mods but they are all too much.

I love several of the vanilla graphics features, but I'm still going to get an ENB just to change it up a bit. Although I absolutely hate face changing mods. I like the vanilla NPCs a lot better.

Does anyone know exactly how much the draw distance options affect overall performance? I just checked the graphics settings in the Skyrim launcher and at Ultra, all sliders are maxed. I'm thinking if I should drop it down a notch to high-ish levels or something.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide#10, fade distance has negligible impact if you only tweak the in-game sliders. Obviously, serious LOD mods, uGrids 7+ and ill-considered ini tweaks may wreck your performance.

I have absolutely zero interesting in "getting dirty" and tweaking Skyrim or any game for that matter.

These are my current mods. As you see, not many alter the graphics (and most are subbed from Steam)

http://puu.sh/6TAQZ.png

I might just remove the surreal lightning mod. The lightning is, well, surreal. A bit too surreal for me.

To be honest the official HD DLC seems more resource hungry than SMIM for me and unlike SMIM not only does it not improve much jack, it also introduces graphical errors which need the Unofficial patch to fix. Nice job Bethesda.

I don't use either. Don't need them.

SMIM was made by a detail OCD'er and I don't really care whether a static cheese or bowl looks a little off. Other things are more important anyway and I can't afford the extra loss in performance when using SMIM.

The two biggest things that I have the compulsive need to mod are the lighting and the water because they're both terrible in the vanilla game.

I think the vanilla water is fine. the lighting is bad though but I'm still not getting a lighting mod. I tried RLO but I hate it.

I disagree, those chains, chests and tables in SMIM look so amazing.

What are your specs?

Intel i5 3570K stock clock

MSI GeForce GTX 660 TwinFrozr 2GB OC edition

16 GB RAM

Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H mobo

A decent build.

All I did was put my game graphic setting on ultra and never looked back. And I never used QTP3 for Oblivion either, but I couldn't run Oblivion at ultra. High at best, with no shadows.

Decent build? Unless you wanna spend a massive amount of money on a couple of Titans or R90x's you got pretty amazing build right there, certainly much better than my AMD Phenom X4 955 Black Edition with 8GB RAM and an sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870

Looking at your mod list I think you should get Project optimization http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32505/? and Skyrim Performance plus http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/6387/? (if you don't already have it)

Give it time, one day it will look photorealistic.

I've seen a screenshot that does look photorealistic. I read that the game was only running at 5fps though.

I've seen some awesome landscape screenshots, but I haven't seen a good one of an npc. The character models are good enough now to be photorealistic though (unlike OB).