Set Godrays To Low. Thank Me Later.

[countercruel]

Just like Fallout 4, godrays in this engine suck frankly. they fixed every performance issue with the original game such as cities and everywhere else. But having godrays on high, somehow in certain wooded areas my fps tanks down to 52. When i set them to low "like Fallout 4", the fps jumps to constant 60.

 

TLDR: Set godrays to low to never have performance fluctuations in Skyrim SE.

[LordNyron]

Is there a quality difference between low and high? Or does it just affect the number of god rays? I'm running a GTX 980ti but even I get the rare stutter outdoors and I'm wondering if it's the god rays. Someone had a performance fix up for them, but it's down now.

[HeavyDude]

There is a quality difference but you won't (can't?) notice it. You can safely set it to its lowest setting.

 

To judge for yourself reddit Fallout 4 godrays thread

[Darkstorne]

my fps tanks down to 52.

lol

 

But thanks, I'll try this out. High godrays are definitely MUCH more performance friendly than they were in Fallout 4, but that was simply because Nvidia wanted to cripple AMD performance in the benchmarks. You can easily have ultra quality godrays in Fallout 4 with the right ini tweaks.

[EveningTide]

You're complaining about an FPS loss of about 8, when I run the game at at least 30-35 on high settings. I wish I had 52 :P

[SMB92]

Drama with low god rays is usually pixelated looking light/blur around objects, particularly your character. Haven't tested in SSE but in F4 it's either Ultra, or no god rays at all...

[Darkstorne]

Drama with low god rays is usually pixelated looking light/blur around objects, particularly your character. Haven't tested in SSE but in F4 it's either Ultra, or no god rays at all...

I was worried about that as well, but just tested on low and it's actually really impressive. There's zero pixellation, no blur, but the accuracy of the light shafts suffer. So, for example, if you were in the Rift, looking up through the leaves of an Aspen tree, on ultra you'd see perfectly cut light shafts around every individual leaf. On low, the light shafts are more... rounded (?) at their base, with gaps between the leaves and when the light shafts start. Those gaps are blended though, so it's still a really nice effect.

 

Basically it probably looks more realistic in foggy weather (when you're more likely to see godrays as well), but less realistic in strong daylight. Kind of like how super crisp shadow resolutions might look impressive technically, but blurry shadows are much more realistic. It'll come down to personal preference in the end, but at least there's no pixellation here. Just less accuracy.

[SMB92]

Good to know, glad they sorted it out :).

[BlueGunk]

Countercruel - I did what you suggested and I am here to thank you! I also dropped shadows back to medium like in the old Skyrim. I can't see much difference but play-wise it is much better. My rig scored Ultra on everything but I'd rather have mods and performance.

Good call!

[Aragingmonk]

Countercruel - I did what you suggested and I am here to thank you! I also dropped shadows back to medium like in the old Skyrim. I can't see much difference but play-wise it is much better. My rig scored Ultra on everything but I'd rather have mods and performance.

Good call!

My performance issue was related to the Vsync which I disabled in the ini file. Added another line in the main ini that caps fps at like 90. Currently I run between 90 and 46 FPS which I feel is a sweet spot for this game. I turned god rays off, not because of performance nut because it looks like crap. Turned off 64 bit target and could not tell any difference other then the game was stable (for skyrim). I added a line iMinGrassSize=20 to the ini because I did not like the size of vanilla grass. Everything else is on Ultra and the game looks great, plays smooth.

 

I do not know your system specs and you may need to adjust accordingly + or-. Mine are: FX8300, R9 380x Nitro, 16 gb RAM (game only uses about 4.5 max). Hope that helps.