What can I change to improve performance from this mod setup?

[Corwin1971]

None of your mods are dependent on an ENB, except those that make your ENB play nice with other mods (like that flora patch). True, you won't get parallax without ENB, but none of those mods require that you be using parallax.

There are other ways to do post-processing effects that are less resource intensive than ENBs. I'd recommend taking a look at the FXAA Injector/Sweet FX. There aren't nearly as many presets around as there are for ENBs, but there are some, and you can use one as a baseline for your own tweaks (like if you want more saturation, less sharpness, etc.) That's my recommendation: install that, remove the ENB for now, re-activate your grass mod, and see how that looks and performs for you.

 

You might also try a different grass mod. I didn't get very good performance with Verdant either, and it didn't seem to scale very well with iMinGrassSize. There are dozens of grass mods on the Nexus. Some of them do much the same thing that Verdant does (which is pretty much hand pick grass textures from other mods and combine them; there's no unique content in Verdant that I'm aware of.)

[FluxerCry]

Oh, really? I thought Climates of Tamriel was, but I've looked at it and it actually doesn't say anything like that... I know there were one or two mods I had to download an "ENB version" or patch for, so I assume that I'll have to reinstall those. So should I reinstall everything else then in the correct order?

 

As for grass mods, any good recommendations? I'll take any "free" performance I can, as I really do love the dense grass. Enough to live with 30fps.

[Corwin1971]

If you're just looking for dense grass, you could just try "Grass on Steriods." There won't be any new grasses or anything, but thicker vanilla grasses. Unlike Verdant, GOS doesn't increase the grasses per texture, and seems (at least to me), to have a lesser performance impact.

 

If you want to try something more similar in purpose to Verdant, you could look at:

 

Unique Grasses & Groundcovers. Does not use the GOS tweak, and says its incompatible with it. You would set your iMinGrassSize to around 20 and your iMinGrassTypesPerTexure to 8. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/42370/?

 

Or Unbelievable Grass 2, which DOES use the tweak (so your iMinGrassSize would be 50+) and a iMinGrassTypesPerTexure of 10. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67478/?

 

I would recommended using the console COC command to bop around to a few different areas like the Rift, Whiterun tundra, etc both to see how performance differs and to see if you like the look.

Full disclosure: I spent 3 days doing this myself and ultimately decided that no one mod looked good to me in every area, and the wild, unkempt, waist high grass everywhere doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather have the frame rate. But that's the beauty of modded Skyrim: to each his own. Good luck!

[fiewiel]

40fps drops for grass mods are not normal. How about you post your skyrim inis here as spoiler?