can you refer me to this "lod fix"

Ultra looks pretty sad....... just a fyi... it's not so ultra as just in some cases like shadows.. looks worse than high setting

Have you tried iBlurDeferredShadowMask=8? Makes all the shadows nice and fuzzy/natural, even the ones in that first dungeon you enter with the 3 cages.

This. I noticed that too. What changing that seems to do is increase distant details drawn. I wouldn't say it increases texture quality, but it does increase visual/graphics in the far distance - like instead of a blocky, low-res distant river shoreline you'll see more definition, or instead of just farmhouses you'll see the farmhouse, their farm field, and rock fence around it. It's possible they did a little mucking about with some shadow settings too.

Even without changing that ugridstoload variable, I see nothing special about these screenshots either. I can get shots pretty much like that.

That's exactly what uGridsToLoad does. The engine uses LOD textures for far off items. Basically it is a really low res texture that you can't tell too much far from off. This allows the game to run smooth even while showing stuff way off in the distance. When you crank up uGrids, what happens is the area in which "real" details are loaded around you is expanded. The higher you crank it up, the further away from you "real" textures, items, effects, animations are loaded.

So for me uGrids is the setting that makes most the difference in the game. Add to it Tree and Grass draw distance that will exceed your uGrids and now you have a much better looking game.

Can someone give me the best settings for shadows? I am a bit confused on them. I hate them. All I know is that setting from Ultra to High in the gfx config, yields 10-15 more FPS and doesn't even look much different.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/62/screenshot38865.png/

thats becasue the settings should be;

time = 0
and thresh = .5 or less (to your taste)

Whoever posted the "-" or negative numbers threw many people off...

This does fix the flicker the sun movement creates.

I tried mess with the ugrids setting based on several posts/articles I read, but it didn't appear to do anything at all. It made a bit of a mess when I reverted back, which I managed to fix. Would be nice to get the draw distance increased without any headaches.

My game looked like that right out of the box. Not sure what everyone's problem is. Get a new PC.

It affects the far distance the most. If you're just running the road through the forest, you won't notice it so much. And if the area you're in has nothing more to draw in the far distance but more trees, you won't notice much either, I'd guess.

Example:
Default: http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/126/skyrim-grassdraw7000.jpg
ugrids set to 9 and uExterior Cell Buffer set to 72: http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/126/skyrim-drawdist.jpg
The ugrids is permanently saved into a savegame file, I understand, so if you later remove it those save games wont load or other issues. Thus don't save the game before you decide whether you want to use it/what number you want to use. At least, that's how I understood it.

Edit: sorry, links fixed

That is a complete lie. Unless your version of the game just magically happened to come with all the missing ini file entries, corrected ini file entries, and a 4GB version of the executable.

Don't troll.

Right.



Great shot, that's the same location I used to setup uGrid..as there is a lot of far off detail. Buildings, rocks, terrain, also to the right are waterfalls which look amazing with uGrid up..otherwise you get LOD texture waterfalls.


Unfortunately I have a lot of after shots, but no before comparisons. Tonight I am going to revert all my settings to default Ultra, then add one thing at a time and take shots for comparison. For now this is a shot I took before I went to bed:

http://getcapturedbymisha.com/distant.jpg

This is using the uGrids at 7, Grass/Tree draw set to 300,000. LODTreeFade is set to I think 75,000 (makes the far off trees textured rather than LOD), the SkyFade set far off which makes clouds show far off where they normally wouldn't.

Can't remember offhand what other settings I set up..and this shot doesn't show ALL of the above stuff..but still..you can see how pretty the game can be. This is 60 FPS I think this shot might be using FXAA Injector also, so everything is slightly Sharper...while still using AA/AF to make it smooth also.


And, just for fun, this is one of my favorite shots:

http://getcapturedbymisha.com/mountainawe.jpg
I wish I had a before shot of this but I wasn't tweaking at the time..so not sure if any of my settings makes this shot any better or not.

Yeah, ugrids at 7 seemed like a good compromise between draw distance and fps. At 9 my fps would drop by half, lol.

Is FXA injector a separate program? Sharper would be nice. And I wish I knew how to get rid of the lighting that makes so many areas look washed out. Dark/grey from weather is fine, but I mean that strange color hue like in your last shot. It's too blueish for me. Probably a color filter setting. I'm waiting for weather/color filter mods. heheh

My Skyrim install does look like that. I did a few ini tweaks far as increasing water shader detail, but nothing massive far as uGridstoLoad and what not like I've had to do with previous gamesas games, and no FXAA post processing injection.

Skyrim looks gorgeous right out of the box for me. All I eventually ended up needing to do on the side was to make the executable large address aware so it would use the memory I have available, and thats it.

Frankly I think it does for most people, if they have the rig. Just some of us are picker about certain graphic details/textures and other "thingies" than others, that's all.

Ya, I don't know what everyone's deal is... one guy brings up a point of 'oh you can't say this is what it looks like absent ini settings!!!'
But uhhh ya... even the screenshots I see of 'omg i got high details to work etc!', it looks like mine on ultra etc with 2560x1600...

Perhaps it's just the lowly people using 1080p or such that get the svck-age...

Mine looks like this as well, see sig for my rig.

Setting uGrids higher does make a difference as you are very often looking out over vast distances.

The shadow settings in the ini also make a massive difference, as the default shadows, even on high, look like ass in a lot of places.

Also, things like SSAO make a HUGE difference in the visual quality and can only be enabled by using the nVidia Inspector tool.

In that situation, my game looks like that too except my resolution is 1902_1080 instead of whatever absurd resolution that is.

FXAA injector is just a dll file with some settings you drop in Skyrim folder. It's post process stuff so it doesn't have much of a FPS hit. You can make things sharper, or even change the color hues. There are a lot of settings/versions out there...takes some fiddling to get it how you like it. Some people don't like the sharpness but I think it makes things stand out and removes a lot of that haze you talk about.

That one shot, it's extra hazy because I was in the Fog..it doesn't always look like that.

Here is the injector link (well one of them).
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=131

I recommend trying this one and only change Vignette (turn it off in the settings file) and then change sharpness from .15 to .13 or .12 (.15 is overkill IMO)
Others have stated just to use 3 of the settings in this Bloom/AA/Pre-Sharpen.. but I am at work and haven't had a chance to see the difference.

I couldn't get ugridstoload to show any difference in draw distances. I read a few articles about putting entry in the ini file, but no go.

Any idea what might be wrong? What ini entry are you guys using and which ini file is it in?

Thanks!

Dude you guys should post your systems info and ini settings. I had my ini set to crazy lod sky,land,character,object, ect settings. I put my ugrids to 9 and it beat my systems buttox soooooo hard. I might be able to get it higher with just ultra settings. The point being is you would need like quad 580s or higher to play this thing on blasting details and wicked Ugrid distance.

Basically you guys be lieeeeeeeeeeeeein. I have the rig to poove it. I could easily afford two more 580s but really its just not worth it for any game on the market lol.

Skyrim.ini under [General]

It works, just don't save til you know you like, because if you save it, then remove the uGrid line, your save won't work. Make a backup save and keep it somewhere in case.


I have a lesser system than you and I can use many of these settings and pull 60 FPS.

i5 2500k
HD6970
8 Gb Corsair Vengence
23" Samsung 1920x1080

Noone can max everything and still play the game, but you can make a bit of tweaks. I use uGrid 7, draw distance on Sky, Trees, Grass to 300,000 (pretty much as far as you can see), LODTreeFade to high so that you don't see LOD trees, Shadows on Tree/Rocks. Then I use the FXAA Injector to sharpen things up, turn off AA (it actually looks worse and hits FPS hard), turn FXAA on (no FPS hit, and looks better than AA when using FXAA injector)

nailed the ugridstoload functions

below is with ugridstoload at 7

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/9195/ugridtoload7.jpg

below is ugridstoload at 11 which is still playable


http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/6390/ugridtoload111.jpg

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/2490/ugridtoload112.jpg

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/5434/ugridtoload113.jpg

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2416/ugridtoload114.jpg

BTW... only using 2x FSAA in these screenshots for the moment as i wanted to test things before further fine tuning things for ugrid setup.... (start small.... don't through everything at it at once)

Oh.. and i didn't notice any significant change between 7 and 11..... odd.... although i did drop about 2-4fps going from 7 to 9... and about 5fps going from the default 5 to 7....

How? http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1273164-how-to-make-skyrim-looks-wonderful/ is how.

http://i28.lulzimg.com/4a22f86b9e.jpg
http://i28.lulzimg.com/7a67c31d96.jpg
http://i28.lulzimg.com/1705ec583e.jpg