Thanks to a recent Steam sale where I grabbed Dragonborn for €9.99 and thanks to being on vacation and thanks to this thread I finally managed to start my very serious attempt at playing through and actually finishing Skyrim
.
I originally wanted to settle for a few mods only but this thread has definitely served as an inspiration to strive for more (thanks Wolfgrimdark
) and now I have finally found a good balance between visuals and performance and I'm ready to go!
I'm using quite a number of mods. All of the DLCs plus their unofficial patches, Bethesda's high res texture pack, Climates of Tamriel (plus fixes), DATGRASS, Skyrim Flora Overhaul (thanks Vurt!
), Enhanced Distant Terrain, several water enhancing mods, some better snow mods, cinematic fire, moss rocks, vibrant auroras, the RLO (realistic lighting overhaul), enhanced blood, all of the better cities mods, Sky UI and a few more interface tweaks, a better world map and as for ENB I'm using version 0.200 with Real Vision.
After quite a bit of reading, installing, uninstalling, editing, crashing, troubleshooting etc. the result looks very satisfactory IMHO (see below). This combo seems to be stable at ~50fps at 2560x1440 on my i5-2500K (@4.2GHz), 32GB RAM, 2x Gigabyte WindForce nVidia GeForce GTX 770 4GB SLI and a Crucial m4 256GB SSD.
The only remaining issue is brightness. Somehow the settings from the ENB and the lighting mods (RLO) seems to be not quite ideal for my VGA/monitor settings.
In good weather in broad daylight it is almost too bright and in poor weather or early morning hours/late afternoon (forget about exploring at night... night is night = pitch black dark
) it tends to get way too dark to keep playing and exploring.
Anyway, here are the screens from the very early game near Whiterun. As one can see I have chosen to disable DoF. Yes, distant textures are real ugly this way but in the end I found the blur of DoF to be more annoying than less detail. Oh, and the screenies don't really do it justice. It looks absolutely gorgeous in motion with the particles/insects/birds and the flowing grass when the wind gently brushes through it...
Skyrim - Finally here I come to conquer you!