295.51 Beta Drivers + Official 1.4 Patch = EPIC AO

[eltucu]

I havent gotten the jan 31st beta drivers yet but with a 2500k/560ti I found the nvidia AO too much of a fps hit, went from 55-60fps to 45-50fps. Views did look really moody and beautiful but i found the grass around me to be weird looking- kinda fuzzy, its difficult to describe. I will try it again tonight with these new drivers.

Exactly the same setup here. But i really like AO, on quality so it doesnt flickers or whatever it does with movement. As long as it doesnt drops below 35ish, im ok.

anisotropic- Nvidia control panel is much better than inside the game?

Yes, a lot. Turn ingame anisotropic off, force 12x on Inspector and you're good to go.

[Rennn]

Exactly the same setup here. But i really like AO, on quality so it doesnt flickers or whatever it does with movement. As long as it doesnt drops below 35ish, im ok.

 

Same here. Most places I hover around 35-40 fps. In the Solitude swamp area, and in the Fall Forest near Riften I fall from 35-40 to 20-30 though. :(

I don't want to lower my settings, since it's capped so smoothly everywhere else aside from those two relatively small areas. Maybe I can get a mod to lower the grass density of those areas or something.

 

Btw, Nvidia's Anisotropic Filtering is much better than Skyrim's. AF doesn't really damage framerates on decent cards either, so enable it if you can.

[thesapien]

What do you recommend for a sizescale that balances performance and quality?

 

Here's an excellent rundown with pictures to demonstrate much of the settings

http://www.overclock.net/t/1208261/xxbenignxxs-quick-and-dirty-rundown-of-the-enbseries-config-file-for-skyrim-w-pictures-for-most-things

 

From the above site to your exact question:

"SizeScale=0.50 <--- Size of ssao texture at which this effect is rendered, relative to screen resolution. Values above 1.0 are not recommended, because that means size bigger than screen resolution. Speed is affected non linear, for example ssao with SizeScale=1.0 is four times slower than 0.5"

 

For me, I never set it below 0.25 because, well, set it to 0.1 and you'll see what really happens. Currently, I'm running at 0.5.

 

But read the above linked to article and see how complicated that little section about AO can get. You have a lot of options for improving performance there, but what you settle on will depend a lot on your system, your resolution, and just your own eyes.

[Staind716]

What do you recommend for a sizescale that balances performance and quality?

I was having trouble running the ENB ssao and contacted the mod author. His advice was to set UserIndirectLighting to "false" in the enbseries.ini which will enable "fast mode". For even more performance he recommended to set SamplingQuality and FilterQuality to 2 ( 0 is highest quality, 2 is lowest) and SizeScale and SourceTextureScale to 0.5 which I did on my game. After making these changes I can now run the ENB ssao and it still looks really good. Hope this helps.

[FlankerDFR]

I'm DLing the patch now (Steam+Central Iraq=slowwww), and I saw the 295.51s at nvidia this am....................I'll have to start the DL when I go to bed tonight and let it run due to the file size, and my connection speed (or lack thereof!). SS do look nice though! Looking forward to the updates and CK!

[Biggus2209]

For some reason, the beta drivers stopped Skyrim from launching. Kept getting a code 51 error on Steam until I rolled it back to the older driver.

[a7x5631]

For some reason, the beta drivers stopped Skyrim from launching. Kept getting a code 51 error on Steam until I rolled it back to the older driver.

 

Did you restart?

[thesapien]

What do you recommend for a sizescale that balances performance and quality?

I was having trouble running the ENB ssao and contacted the mod author. His advice was to set UserIndirectLighting to "false" in the enbseries.ini which will enable "fast mode". For even more performance he recommended to set SamplingQuality and FilterQuality to 2 ( 0 is highest quality, 2 is lowest) and SizeScale and SourceTextureScale to 0.5 which I did on my game. After making these changes I can now run the ENB ssao and it still looks really good. Hope this helps.

 

That whole "slow mode" message was annoying when it popped up for the first few second of every load (made me feel slower) and turning off use of indirect lighting still looks really good, like you said. So thanks for that.

 

I, too, have both scalings at 0.5 but both quality settings at 1.

 

One more thing I've noticed, that getting better quality doesn't always help in Skyrim. If my AO settings are fined tuned too high, then I notice things like triangles in the landscape mesh way too much because their edges have AO. You start to see the landscape for what it really is, that is; a low polycount mesh. So it's funny that less quality and better performance actually looks better.

Edited February 3, 2012 by thesapien

[Biggus2209]

For some reason, the beta drivers stopped Skyrim from launching. Kept getting a code 51 error on Steam until I rolled it back to the older driver.

Yes. Even tried deleting inis. No luck. I haven't read anyone else on the nexus with this issue, but there are a few on the steam forums.

[Fisrion]

What I don´t like about any AO solution for Skyrim is that in foggy areas of the dungeons the AO is always visible through the fog which really destroys the atmosphere for me...I hope there will be a solution to this one day but I am not quite sure wether it is possible (since the fog there seems to be meshes/particle systems you would have to filter transperent meshes out but that would require you to have access to the source code I guess..but I haven´t looked into the stuff too much so i actually have no idea XD)

 

If you use the enbseries AO, this can be adjusted. The distance fade value is for AO as seen through fog, precisely.

 

Yes, that works for the distance fog in the exteriors but it doesn´t seem to work for the fog in the caves...