I'm sorry to say this, but I fear the day where I would abandon MariENB has come. I feel pretty burnt out from all this work. Maintaining 5 separate presets for 3 games is really tiresome. It just takes up so much time that I would prefer to spend on other projects.
Originally, Mari was just a small personal project, which I worked on as a hobby on my spare time while playing, but now it has grown big, and now I have other users, and those users have their own needs, and their own problems with their own hardware, and I try my best to deal with all this, but it really is too much for me to handle with how little time and resources I have.
I don't know if and when I will come back, but until then, I guess this is goodbye.
Very nice ENB, especially with all the filters. It's a shame you burnt out of developing it, I hope one day you return, but for now this is one of my favorite ENBs.
Hello OrdinaryMagician! Your description really caught my attention so I was eager to experiment with your preset. A couple of thoughts I thought I would run by you:
1. Thanks! Love the look and the sense of this being "hand crafted". 2. Interiors seemed to have much better performance than other ENB selections. 3. Been playing with the latest Revenant(w/319, no CoT), Real Vision, and Tetrachromatic 5.2, Rudy - each of these leaves an extra 10fps on the table for me, maybe even as much as 20fps (dragonbridge and lake near ladystone/riverwood were not able to maintain 19fps, normally those spots only dip as low as 35fps). 4. Unfortunately this ENB will only net me 30fps+ outdoors if I disable 4 or 5 effects, thus, relegating it to, and I'm going to use a "keyword" here: ...ScreenArchery.
I do, however, intend to keep playing around with this as well as following its future progress. It's entirely possible that your ENB requires adjustments to the enblocal.ini that I run, or perhaps something else that I have overlooked.
I would be happy to hear any suggestion for improving performance. My system is very comparable to yours performance-wise, apart from my AMD 280X 3GB over your 680 from nVidia. While under no illusion of having the most powerful hardware; this system is very competent.
Thanks again, endorsed.
Edit: Nearly Forgot! what was ypur experience like working with EnableAutomaticAmbientCalculation=true for the first time? I've been curious about how authors will implement.
At first it was a mess, but I managed to tame it (there was also the issue of it being REALLY stuttery at first).
In terms of improving performance outdoors, I'd like to know how much grass you have out there, what mods you use that affect vegetation, dyndolod settings, etc.
PS: I've also heard that AMD GPUs tend to run ENB worse.
AMD 280X cards are more powerful than the 680 variants from nVidia but skyrim ENB performance, as you mention, has not historically been a strength. I run SFO and currently do no have any LOD mods installed. Dyndolod is ready to fire but I have not yet used it. [Grass] bAllowCreateGrass=1 bAllowLoadGrass=0 iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=15 iMinGrassSize=20
These settings are intentional, there is no real harm in having types as high as 15 for stock or SFO that I'm aware of, but other grass mods will often require a setting this high. Since SFO doesn't smash me like Verdant does I can crank the mingrassize without noticeable fps impact. Been meaning to try out the new Short Grass mod but by the sounds of it the performance is pretty tough.
I feel that the difference could be in the construction or methods used in your ENB and somehow I'm conflicting or using incorrect settings. Was also thinking maybe my mod list is a source of the slowdowns - and to be fair no one else is using ALL of the latest ENB features like you are. No EnableAutomaticAmbientCalculation=true, for instance. And I've been having to turn rain off on the ENB's since .319/RainOcclusion because of some sort of graphical glitch that turns rain into translucent matrix code. Basically I'm just saying that if everyone else is getting good performance then it's probably on my part and not yours.
Tried using the same grass settings as you, and damn... This is a big drop. From 30~25 with my usual settings, to 15 FPS with this much grass.
I normally have iMinGrassSize set to 50 for this reason. Grass and other small objects in large densities can hit performance pretty hard.
Now, about performance, I'm starting to think that maybe the scope of MariENB is starting to "outgrow" the kind of hardware it was initially made for, which explains why disabling effects helps with it.
I honestly don't know where to go with this anymore, Mari has started to turn into the kind of preset I despised in the beginning. It's slow and bloated, and there are things that don't serve much of a purpose beyond helping take pretty pictures. Maybe I could just make a "compact edition" for keeping only what's essential and optimize more, but I already have trouble efficiently maintaining 5 presets at once across 3 games. I guess Mari is no longer performance-focused...
I was using Saraam Suum ENB, but got little bit tired of it, mainly due to bugs with textures and light (white mountains with no textures, same with the college and purple ice here and there). It's a very performance friendly ENB.
Then I tried Mari ENB today, I got a permanent boost of 15fps outside and ran at 60 fps with no more fps drops. Magnificent! Just with a small Pentium G4560 and a RX480. My only issue is it looks more vanilla than I'm used to. Might try a different palette.
Hoho, what does that mean in terms of a LUT? That the coloration based on brightness level can vary based on what direction the camera is facing? If so, that's pretty damn neat.
Nah, it's nothing like that. It just translates to more precision in color and less code required to work, since you no longer need interpolation gymnastics like with 2d textures where the "blue" is just sliced into a strip of squares one after another. Red, green and blue map exactly to x, y and z coordinates in the volume map.
I'll probably put up a program for converting those flat strip LUTs into 3D ones.
Oh yeah also, said volume textures can have any arbitrary resolution, and even 32-bit floating point precision, which allows values above 1.0 and below 0.0, because DDS is just that awesome.
Learned recently that Skyrim ENB had the technique limit raised from 8 to 128. I guess that means I can re-add a crapton of filters I removed long ago to "make space" for new ones.
I'm using the newest ENB 0.315 version and, wowsers, this is probably the most beautifully realistic ENB I've run across so far. Colors look spot-on, sharp enough to make skin look excellent but no noticeable artifacting, shadows don't seem unnaturally dark or light, sunny days look bright but not washed out, with appropriate reflectiveness on things like roads and clouds, and in spaces like inns it feels atmospheric but not artificially so. And I love that Night Eye works!
I'm going to have a hell of a time choosing between the more subtle but realistic setting here and the dramatic visuals of my other fave, Antique Dragon. Sigh. Life is hard.
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Originally, Mari was just a small personal project, which I worked on as a hobby on my spare time while playing, but now it has grown big, and now I have other users, and those users have their own needs, and their own problems with their own hardware, and I try my best to deal with all this, but it really is too much for me to handle with how little time and resources I have.
I don't know if and when I will come back, but until then, I guess this is goodbye.
well done homie.
Your description really caught my attention so I was eager to experiment with your preset. A couple of thoughts I thought I would run by you:
1. Thanks! Love the look and the sense of this being "hand crafted".
2. Interiors seemed to have much better performance than other ENB selections.
3. Been playing with the latest Revenant(w/319, no CoT), Real Vision, and Tetrachromatic 5.2, Rudy - each of these leaves an extra 10fps on the table for me, maybe even as much as 20fps (dragonbridge and lake near ladystone/riverwood were not able to maintain 19fps, normally those spots only dip as low as 35fps).
4. Unfortunately this ENB will only net me 30fps+ outdoors if I disable 4 or 5 effects, thus, relegating it to, and I'm going to use a "keyword" here: ...ScreenArchery.
I do, however, intend to keep playing around with this as well as following its future progress. It's entirely possible that your ENB requires adjustments to the enblocal.ini that I run, or perhaps something else that I have overlooked.
I would be happy to hear any suggestion for improving performance. My system is very comparable to yours performance-wise, apart from my AMD 280X 3GB over your 680 from nVidia. While under no illusion of having the most powerful hardware; this system is very competent.
Thanks again, endorsed.
Edit: Nearly Forgot! what was ypur experience like working with EnableAutomaticAmbientCalculation=true for the first time? I've been curious about how authors will implement.
In terms of improving performance outdoors, I'd like to know how much grass you have out there, what mods you use that affect vegetation, dyndolod settings, etc.
PS: I've also heard that AMD GPUs tend to run ENB worse.
I run SFO and currently do no have any LOD mods installed. Dyndolod is ready to fire but I have not yet used it.
[Grass]
bAllowCreateGrass=1
bAllowLoadGrass=0
iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=15
iMinGrassSize=20
These settings are intentional, there is no real harm in having types as high as 15 for stock or SFO that I'm aware of, but other grass mods will often require a setting this high. Since SFO doesn't smash me like Verdant does I can crank the mingrassize without noticeable fps impact.
Been meaning to try out the new Short Grass mod but by the sounds of it the performance is pretty tough.
I feel that the difference could be in the construction or methods used in your ENB and somehow I'm conflicting or using incorrect settings. Was also thinking maybe my mod list is a source of the slowdowns - and to be fair no one else is using ALL of the latest ENB features like you are. No EnableAutomaticAmbientCalculation=true, for instance. And I've been having to turn rain off on the ENB's since .319/RainOcclusion because of some sort of graphical glitch that turns rain into translucent matrix code. Basically I'm just saying that if everyone else is getting good performance then it's probably on my part and not yours.
Cheers,
I normally have iMinGrassSize set to 50 for this reason. Grass and other small objects in large densities can hit performance pretty hard.
Now, about performance, I'm starting to think that maybe the scope of MariENB is starting to "outgrow" the kind of hardware it was initially made for, which explains why disabling effects helps with it.
I honestly don't know where to go with this anymore, Mari has started to turn into the kind of preset I despised in the beginning. It's slow and bloated, and there are things that don't serve much of a purpose beyond helping take pretty pictures. Maybe I could just make a "compact edition" for keeping only what's essential and optimize more, but I already have trouble efficiently maintaining 5 presets at once across 3 games. I guess Mari is no longer performance-focused...
Then I tried Mari ENB today, I got a permanent boost of 15fps outside and ran at 60 fps with no more fps drops. Magnificent! Just with a small Pentium G4560 and a RX480. My only issue is it looks more vanilla than I'm used to. Might try a different palette.
Interesting...
Nice update bby
I'll probably put up a program for converting those flat strip LUTs into 3D ones.
Oh yeah also, said volume textures can have any arbitrary resolution, and even 32-bit floating point precision, which allows values above 1.0 and below 0.0, because DDS is just that awesome.
I'm going to have a hell of a time choosing between the more subtle but realistic setting here and the dramatic visuals of my other fave, Antique Dragon. Sigh. Life is hard.
Thanks for your comment, anyway. I'm glad more people like my work.