Typical FPS with GTX680 and ENB

[Duredhel]

I realize this is just another "how long is a piece of string" question but I just need a quick pulse check here. I just upgraded my GPU to a GTX680 and wanted to check to see of my current FPS is on par with what I should be expecting or if I've got something direly wrong.

 

Here are the specifics...

 

• Hardware: GTX680@1150Mhz w/4GB vram, Intel Quadcore@4Ghz, 8GB ram@1480Mhz
  
• Resolution: 2560x1440
  
• Launcher display settings max'd out
  
• Injector ENB w/SkyRealism (SSAO, DetailedShadows, Sunrays enabled. Bloom, DOF, SkyLighting disabled)
  
• Noteworthy mods that *might* impact FPS: Bethsoft HQ textures, Climates of Tamriel, a handful of other texture replacers
  

 

With this I typically get anywhere from 32-42 FPS wandering around Solitude (38-48FPS most places outside the cities) and 40-50 FPS in interiors. Without ENB I get between 45-55 in Solitude and 60+ everywhere else (Vsync is enabled so I'm not sure what the max FPS would be).

 

So, does this performance sound nominal for my current config?

 

Thanks!

[IanEG]

ENB is a performance heavy lighting mod even for a high end rig. You seem to have most or all the fancy stuff on and it will impact your fps badly. So your fps is normal. Detailed shadows is particularly heavy drain on resources so I would switch it off unless the shadows really bug you. I don't use enb anymore but it can run between 45-60 fps if you play around with its features and sacrifice some of its flashy features. By the way I have a GTX680 myself so I speak from experience.

[TactlessNinja]

Just switch off vsync and be done with it.

[Duredhel]

Detailed shadows is particularly heavy drain on resources so I would switch it off unless the shadows really bug you.

 

The shadows was one of the main reason I decided to run it. The tiger stripes that I see, especially from firelight, seems to be corrected by ENB (not to mention smoothing out the jaggedness). The AO is a really nice touch too and the sunrays are just eye-candy. I'm not a fan of DoF or Bloom and I honestly couldn't see any difference between SkyLighting on or off (and, yes, I did enable the 3 extra shadow options in skyrim pref ini file) so left those disabled.

 

If there was a way to make the shadows smoother or simply blur them without ENB then I'd probably just do that. I'm running with the vanilla colors, saturation, and intensity anyways so ENB isn't buying me anything there. I also don't like having to run the Injector continually as it swallows up 10-15% CPU and the wrapper version was about 5-10 fps worse and caused mouse lag.

 

I couldn't find the Vsync option in any of the Skyrim files so I turned it off on the game profile in the nVidia CP. Hopefully this does the trick but I won't have time to check it out for a day or two.

[sa547]

My ENB settings had small tweaks, with the quality lowered to 2 for increased performance.

 

Some resource-intensive ENB features -- SSAO/DOF/bloom/detailed shadows/skylighting -- can be enabled if you want more fancy photographic screenshots; in my case I disabled shadows, bloom and skylighting so that gameplay doesn't slow down.

 

Yes, you have to disable vsync on the CP.

 

It seems that the use of Realistic Lighting and ENB did eliminated that notorious zebra-striping which annoyed me months earlier.