Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at Skyrim again it's been quite a while we've published several graphics mod overhauls and general game overhauls in the past few years I think our most recent was 2012 or 2013 so it's been a while Skyrim of course came out in 2011 and what we're doing here today is updating the graphics so that it looks a little bit more modern but we're trying to do this with two key elements in mind one is we would like to retain the original aesthetic of the game a lot of mod overhauls to sort of throw that out the window and two we're looking to do this graphics update without nuking performance and this is pretty critical because it's very easy to go overboard with Skyrim modding and just sort of destroy your performance we're doing this in a few ways one of them is by avoiding 4k textures we're opting instead for 2k textures and this will also help avoid mod conflicts where optimization is done on most mods for 2k textures so this helps prevent flickering tearing and anomalies where you have textures that are lower resolution than everything around them so that's that's one thing and then we're also just sticking more heavily to color correction and lighting effects because a huge amount can be accomplished by using these two features with things like bloom depth of field and color correction and then we'll sort of pad the rest of it with textures and texture resolution mods the full list of mods can be found on the website and you'll need to go there to find the links for them and the order of installation installation does matter in this case and we strongly recommend using mod organizer it's effectively required at this point it's a free program you can download the mod straight into it from the Skyrim mod Nexus and then sort them accordingly based on conflicts and things like that we've done the hard work for you the correct installation order is listed on the website in the order of appearance in the article so we're starting with essentials here once you have the Skyrim script extender skse that enables a lot of other mods to do what they do and things like sky UI which is very strongly encouraged but not as is really required you can move on to other essential like climates of Tamriel which helps bring weather and lighting overhauls into Skyrim it has optional sound add-ons for better ambience and the mod is highly customizable it uses an installation menu that can be changed directly through Skyrim you don't have to do it thread and organize or anything like that and you can throw in a few dungeon lighting mods and things like that to tweak the game to your liking we recommend avoiding the cold and warm options for this as color correction we'll be covering this through the imaginator which is a very good mod that I'll be talking about momentarily and this is all basically ESP files I can very easily be activated and deactivated next is the Skyrim flora overhaul and we're just covering the key mods here and you can see the rest in the article but key mods we've got climates of Tamriel Skyrim flora overhaul and this very drastically increases the quality of the plant life and the foliage and things like that all around Skyrim without necessarily destroying your performance adding things like grass foliage and plant life is very performance intensive but the way Skyrim flora overhaul implements it it really doesn't show up too much for really any modern video cards and this is something we'll look at later in the quick benchmarks that I performed we're skipping a few mods here in the list and jumping down to enhanced lights and effects this is a pretty important mod e.l.f ex pumps up the values of all the light sources in the game and it moves and removes some of them so if there are light sources that are maybe a little bit too violent or too overexposing with the new settings the mod will move those and remove some of that negative side effect of the exposure imaginator is a key item to talk about you'll see some of the settings being applied through imaginator in this footage imaginator is something that installs straight to the mod configuration menu in Skyrim in the game and you can tune color correction to your own liking it's very easy to do you just slide sliders around save exit the menu and see how it looks and then you go from there you can also use the depth of field modifications in the same menu system which we'll get to through Dynavision momentarily imaginator though one of the key mods that we highly recommend once you've got these installed it's time to look at textures and for really most users on our channel I would imagine you probably have hardware that is of the grade of a gtx 750ti or better in that case you can install all this stuff and expect above 60fps performance at 1080p for sure anything lower than that 250 X it starts struggling but 750 Ti and better you can install these mods to Skyrim HD is a blanket texture mod this basically overhauls all the textures in the game but it just mostly helps cover gaps because what we're gonna do is install this first and then we install the other texture mods on top of it and that will force the mod organizer to defer to the higher level mods that are installed on top of it and then fallback only on Skyrim HD when the other better mods are not available for a certain texture in the game so if we have special road textures which we will then the Skyrim HD roads will be overwritten by the immersive roads textures so that's where we start Skyrim HD can be thought of as a bedrock make sure you download the full versions of all these towns dungeons landscape and miscellaneous then there's improved NPC clothing just very simply at overhauls the clothing of Barkeeper's guards things like that to be a higher resolution we also recommend installing several of the a Midian Bourne textures and gamma CH textures which are all very fine-tuned for different items so gommage will focus on clutter and things like that Midian Bourne will focus on weapons and armor and that will sort of cover your items in the game and objects and then once these are all installed it's important to use the static mesh improvement mod this one's been around forever and a lot of people are pretty familiar with it at this point the modification takes all the statics in the world that were low poly and low resolution and upgrades them so this is necessary for some replacers to function well like the Clawd textures and it primarily works by just fixing the poly count and smoothing objects out around the edges you can see the testing methodology in the article it's in-depth enough to get accurate results for Skyrim but it's certainly not anywhere near as in-depth as our video card reviews because it doesn't have to be with Skyrim a very important note is that the game is forced to vertical sync and this actually proves to be pretty important we disable it for testing so that we can determine the absolute performance of each card in a vacuum and see which one's better against the next but when you're playing the game you'll probably want to enable vsync or at least cap the FPS to something like 85 really at a max because Skyrim has some physics issues when the frame rate exceeds those it is tied to the frame rate for its physics effects so for 4k really the performance is pretty surprising this is the best performing 4k game I've ever tested but that's because I've been testing 4k as far back as 2011 when this came out so you see even though 285 is almost able to handle it at average FPS but the 0.1% low is a little bit too low for playability so we have to jump up a bit we jump up to the GTX 980 and there are nine 290x are fairly playable r9 290x struggles a bit with the 0.1% and 1% lows but it's really not that bad moving into 1440 you see that we're starting to hit the bottleneck that will be more revealed at 1080 the bottleneck is 112 fps that's either my guess would be a software layer thing that could also be an API thing or it may be a CPU but I really sincerely doubt that I feel like the bottleneck is more software or API bound for Skyrim you can see here every card handles the game just fine at 1440 the exceptions being the very low end the 962 gigabytes struggles a bit with 0.1% low you can actually see quite a gap between the 0.1% lows with two gig and four gigabyte GTX 960 s and this feeds into the Skyrim massive vram modded discussion that's had commonly and then the gtx 750ti struggles a bit with point some lows to the point that it's really starting to look better to downgrade to 1080p so let's do that going down to 1080p we see the benchmark is throttling again at 112 fps across the board really for almost everything and that is probably software API is something like that but you're gonna be playing at 60fps on average anyway because of the way the game locks the framerate in the physics so anything about 60 is good here what we're looking at more is the point one percent lows and really at this point everything is very playable the only downside is the 250x which is a pretty cheap card and only gigabyte of VRAM so nothing to complain about here in the 750ti for $148 card does very well with these mods installed so this is the benchmark with all the mods installed well they can have very high performance for pretty much any modern video card and I would say just go ahead and play install these things for any modern rig and you'll be just fine you may run it to some two gigabyte four gigabyte issues at the point one percent lows but this testing was performed in a very geometrically complex alleyway in solitude the city so this is sort of a worst case scenario for the benchmark and for the most part you'll be seeing better performance depending on where you are in the game so that's all for the mod overhaul check out the article for other worthwhile mods and for help installing an installation order things like that if you like this kind of coverage and you like our other articles or the videos please consider checking out our patreon page it helps us out a lot and I hope that you get some value out of the content here today I will see you all next time