Skyrim Graphics and Performance Tweaks [No Spoilers]

[SpartanGrug]

Some of you may not have seen the early access to the Skyrim tweak guide. It is hosted on the Geforce tweaks website. Originally gained this link from the Bethesda forums. The link was working when I posted this but apparently it's been up/down as they edit it prior to official release.

It's a pretty good guide and steps through all the stuff one would need to know.

In-depth Skyrim Tweaks
Includes performance graphs and screenshots for comparisons. In-game settings as well as .ini tweaks.

I also used a few tips included in the Skyrim Total Enhancement Project. Primarily the Skyrim 4GB memory enhancer and the NVIDIA video card tweaks. (Using NVIDIA Inspector)

Main ones I'm using are:

/Documents/My Games/Skyrim/SkyrimPrefs.ini

[Display]
bTreesReceiveShadows=1
bDrawLandShadows=1
[Controls]
bMouseAcceleration=0

NVIDIA Tweaks outlined in the Skyrim Total Enhancement Project under "Step 3".
(Mainly forcing 16x Anistropic Filters and High Quality Texture rendering)

My Ambient Occlusion Settings
In the NVIDIA Inspector (v1.9.5.5) and the "Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim" profile. I've found the best setting for me with Ambient Occlusion is the following settings:
Ambient Occlusion compatibility: (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare)
Ambient Occlusion setting: "Performance"
Ambient Occlusion usage: "Enabled"

Don't forget to hit the "Apply Changes" button up the top right.
The Fallout 3 AO setting was a bit too dark for me. The COD setting is a nice subtle AO with minimal performance hit.

Thought I'd post it here to make it easier to see. Have got Skyrim looking very pretty for me.

Note: I'm using the NVIDIA 285.79 beta drivers as the 290.36 beta was unstable on my system. So you can get AO working on the older drivers using the NVIDIA Inspector tool.

[Drac]

AO is actually baked into the vertex colors of most static meshes in this this game, adding extra screen space AO makes most city areas look like they were colored in by a 2 year old who only had black crayons left.

[SpartanGrug]

Yeah that's why I use the CoD4 shader. The fallout one is too dark but the COD one adds a nice light tough to everything.

[SpartanGrug]

Hmm think I agree with you in the end Drac. It wasn't too bad in the towns etc where shadows seem natural but once I started exploring some ice caves the AO darkens distant corners over the top of the fog. So I switched AO off and it looked 100x better.

So now running without the AO.

I'm finding the game a bit too bright though. I loved the darkness mods of Oblivion so I have the ingame darkness setting turned down to about 1/4 of the way to help make it darker. But I think the biggest culprite is their implementation of Bloom / HDR. Half the time my horse is just pitch black compared to the snow scape around me which seems a bit silly.

Hopefully once they release the editor some more modders will be able to fine tune the settings.

[Spectre8]

Yeah the HDR is over the top for sure - but I'm still ok with most of it on standard settings. Will keep my eyes open for promising mods

[svenkil]

will give this a shot, thanks.