I play skyrim on a moderatley powerful 3 1/2 year old machine (E8400 @ 3Ghz, HD4850 512Mb, 4Gb Ram) and really wanted to play with the beautiful ENB shaders, but I needed more juice.

This ini tweak is my ideal compromise between performance and quality for medium spec machines which saves performance without totally destroying the image quality of the game (as that would defeat the point). I'm now happily gaming with high textures at 1920x1080 with 30fps+ and fewer stutters and I thought I'd share my files with you all.

Essentially this is a tweak to the foliage and shadows, the trees are fixed in the lower polly mode (which gets rid of the anoying pop ups as a bonus) and the shaddows are reduced to a resolution of 256. Tree shadows have been turned on and the shadow draw distance doubled to compensate for the poorer model quality, but whilst still making a net fps saving.

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Downloads:
As well as my ini file there is also a txt file (with full explanations) to help you tweak your own ini if you want to taylor your own settings or just use some of the tweaks.
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Non ENB users:
To use this ini without using the ENB shaders simply replace sD3DDevice="ENB" in the skyrimprefs.ini with your video card (you can check in your origional ini file).
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Here are some 1080p GIFs (beware low bandwidth users!) for comparision, notice the framerate in the top right.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/download.php?id=22507

I'm running HD6's Cinematic Lighting ENB (v1.3) for the beautiful shaders with Skyboost and Skyrim Performance PLUS for a few extra frames. See below for the read me.


READ ME!
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Install:

Create a backup of your skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files first.
Make sure your desired texture setting is chosen in the skyrim launcher.
Extract the ini files to C:\Users\<yourname>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim and overwrite<br><br>Open up skyrimprefs.ini and insert your desired screen resolution here:<br><br>bFull Screen=1<br>iSize H=1080<br>iSize W=1920 (for example)<br><br>---------------------------------<br>Uninstall:<br><br>Remove skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini files.<br>Restore your old files or run the skyrim launcher to redetect your card<br><br>---------------------------------<br>How it Works:<br><br>All graphics sliders set at 8 (medium)<br>All water reflections disabled<br>Distant object details set to medium<br>Object fade enabled<br>Shaddow resolution dropped to 256 (from 1024)<br>Shaddow distance increased to 4000 (from 2000)<br>Tree self shaddows enabled<br>vSync disabled (iPresentInterval=0)<br>Mouse smoothing disabled<br>FXAA disabled<br>Tree/bush wind animations are disabled<br>Trees no longer pop in with additional leaves<br>Tree distance slightly reduced<br><br>---------------------------------<br>Tweaking:<br>Change these settings to squeeze even more juice from the game if you need to.<br><br>fShadowDistance=2000.0000 (Reduces shaddow distance back to default, go lower if you want)<br>bTreesReceiveShadows=1<span class="wbbtab"></span>(Turns off tree self shaddows)<br>iMaxAnisotropy=1<span class="wbbtab"></span><span class="wbbtab"></span><span class="wbbtab"></span> (Turn off AF)<br><br>---------------------------------<br>vSync CAUTION:<br><br>If this config is running above 60fps then enable vSync to stop the date from going<br>out of sync in Skyrim. Simply change to iPresentInterval=1 in skyrimprefs.ini<br><br>---------------------------------<br>Changing your settings using the skyrim launcher:<br><br>Some of the shadow properties are changed back to defaults if you edit any settings using the skyrim launcher. You can adjust the in-game sliders to change object distances without affecting the shadows in the ini file.</yourname>