Mounted combat and extra kill moves was 1.6. And also the navmesh fix. Which is another huge one that people miss. By sticking to 1.5 or earlier, no navmesh will ever function correctly that was added by a mod, which leads to all manner of problems with NPC logic.

There's a reason I make it explicitly clear the unofficial patches won't support anything other than the current runtime version. It's just too much of a headache to try and do otherwise.

Plus, I wouldn't consider ENB functionality to be at all important even if I were using it for something. Core game stability and improvements are far more valuable to me and each patch has made steady progress in this area. Anyone who argues it as the game being incompatible with an old ENB is going about things all wrong. Mods always need to conform to game updates, not the other way around.

To say the truth, I didn't tried the game without ENB Antifreeze latelly. I know I tried with 1.6 and was a disaster, but maybe 1.7 or 1.8 had fixed some issue. Going to try 1.8 without ENB (crossing fingers )

EDIT: Not yet. Overal the looks goes worse (the most notizeable change is I can't see the fire or the water) but the fluently of the movement compensate it.The horrible shadow movements I get when I approach a montain or a building though gets me dizzy pretty fast. Not sure about CTDs but I'm not sure I could play more than ten minutes without throwing up.

I think things have improved, maybe I'll be able to play the game once they release 1.9 . Meanwhile I'll continue with ENB Antifreeze, using the game only for brief playtests.

Interesting. It appears that the way object LOD textures are created has been changed once again- in early versions of Skyrim, it was limited to a 1024x1024 texture, with excess textures being put in a separate atlas file. Then they upped the limit to 2048x2048, with the CK creating a texture of that size no matter how many objects you had, with black filling up the extra space. Since 1.8, it simply creates a texture only as large as it needs to be, with no unnecessary black space, which means the game doesn't have to load an unnecessarily large texture.

Yay for optimization!

So that must be one of those "general memory optimizations" we keep seeing in the changelogs