Explain like i'm 5, What is enb? ( Not how to )

[Zaidrockso]

So i've ran hundreds of enbs for several games that people uploaded, and they all work fine, and i like some of them, now, what i'm trying to understand is, what is enb? How can it form such a drastic difference? Enb files are all like 300kb with tthe main 30mb in size but some actually cause drastic differences, how does it do so? Is it a placebo effect where because the performance decreases substantially ? Does it actually change that much? How does it cause such drops in performance ( Relatively ) ?

 

Bottom line : What does enb do.

[Oubliette]

It's a bunch of pretty filters (pretty much exactly like the kind people use on cellphones) that eat your games performance in exchange for questionably better looking images. Best used not in general play (as with most any filter, they can only do so much well. So you can have one that makes people look great but makes landscapes look like plastic, or one that makes armor look great but makes people look like plastic etc.) but when you're very interested in taking pictures and not interested in applying any of those effects yourself.

 

Filter: as in a colored screen you apply over an image that can change the appearance of an image. Like a magnifying filter, or smearing your lens with vaseline to give a soft light filter. Yes, that's really all it is.

 

How it causes that drop in FPS I don't know. There are other programs like SweetFX that don't have that problem so I don't know why Boris chooses to eat FX with his but he's made it very clear that he likes eating FPS with his program so don't expect it to change. Ever.

Edited November 5, 2015 by Oubliette

[JimboUK]

It's like Instagram for video games.

[Vagrant0]

How it causes that drop in FPS I don't know. There are other programs like SweetFX that don't have that problem so I don't know why Boris chooses to eat FX with his but he's made it very clear that he likes eating FPS with his program so don't expect it to change. Ever.

It drops fps because enb is usually a grouping of post-process filters.

 

Basically, the game's engine talks to your graphics card to describe a frame. This description is comprised of UI elements, meshes, textures, and internal shaders or filter effects.

 

Enb then decides to take that frame before it makes it to your display and tells your videocard that it needs to be improved with extra smoothing, contrast, edge detection, lens flares, and other pointless crap. As this takes extra processing and memory it takes away from the ability of the game's engine to maintain its original rate of rendering frames.

[Moksha8088]

I think ENBs are to make your game look like blurred cinema filmed in 8mm. If you had one of those old CTR monitors, you could probably achieve the same effect with a light coat of Vaseline. It looks a bit odd, but if you slap labels on it like post processing and "immersive" the people will use it, especially if it reduces frames per second. A light coating of Vaseline would give you a zero performance hit, but that is low tech.

 

Hope that helps.

[Moksha8088]

However, ENB boost is a very positive item to use in your game, whether you actually use an ENB or not - just match it to the correct amount of memory on your video card. Think of it as super immersive and lore friendly,