Boris Vorontsov has released the first version of his ENBSeries mod for Skyrim: Special Edition and ENBSeries member ‘Ewi‘ has shared some really beautiful screenshots. The modded version of Skyrim: Special Edition looks great and it will be interesting to see whether modders will create even more new mods for it. After all, almost all mods for the original Skyrim (at least when it comes to the mods that improve its visuals) are compatible with this new version of the game. Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Looks okay, but I prefer Sweetfx/reshade over a whole ENB, especially since each time I’ve used an ENB in the past, I’ve always met performance issues, with the former options I haven’t.
Playstation what??? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4f922dcbc40bf2ad3880d8c722933a5ba2a6d7f6f3bdb8f1a072ec0ca02d9fab.jpg
Insecure PC Master Race Peasants cannot comprehend how a PC gamer can have an i7 6700K @ 4.8Ghz + GTX1070 SLI/ 1080 SLI / Titan XP and still have the PS4 Pro for the great exclusives. True gamers do not play only consoles or only PCs. They play both.
You cant afford proper gaming. So you peasantry bend… Pony… your master demand it
Granted, while the Special Edition’s visual upgrades were near-completely superfluous on the PC considering both the official Bethesda-supplied High-Resolution Texture Pack, & the various visual mods available since 2011, I really do have to say;
Thank f*ck for that 64-bit executable……
P.S. Since it’s officially after midnight here, & we’re talking about SHAINY GRAFEEX, I find myself unable to resist the temptation to throw in the following;
In celebration of 9 years of Crysis; November 13, 2007 – November 13, 2016.
I wouldn’t call the visual upgrades superfluous though. Besides, Mods are just an extra step, it’s always better to have direct integration into the base game. A lot of the features they added in Skyrim SE were very clumsily implemented by mods and/or took too much performance in Oldrim so the Special Edition is a welcome upgrade. all around Besides, Mods are just an extra step, it’s always better to have direct integration into the base game.
For example, the volumetric lighting they added wasn’t implemented properly by ENB and the Rain/Snow Occlusion had to be implemented using a mod that manually placed blocking volumes underneath roofs. The Screen Space Reflections that ENB added were WAY too performance intensive (especially outdoors).
All of these features are now in Skyrim SE and they take barely any performance (given that you set volumetric lighting to low quality, which still looks great) and are implemented directly into the engine. On top of that, the new water and snow shaders weren’t implemented by mods and these are a welcome addition as well.
So all in all, i’d say that only the HD texture pack was superfluous to an extent because it just upscaled the original HD texture pack.
90% of the Special Edition is the 2011 Skyrim PC version with some extra grass slapped on top (in specific places, there’s some extra vegetation to be noted, or whatnot), & a bunch of new effects (water, snow, lighting, etc.) scattered throughout.
Sure, the textures are now at a higher resolution, bla bla bla, bla bla bla, but in the end it’s still basically the 2011 PC version with a few new bells & whistles slapped on top.
Otherwise, agreed, it’s nice to have so many…. “Oldrim” mods now integrated directly into the engine, instead, &, of course, the 64-bit executable.
Depends on what you were expecting. It was never claimed to be a complete remake, rather a “remaster” for the PS4 and Xbox One. Furthermore, once all the mods start hitting the Special Edition with the release of the new Creation Kit, it will easily surpass the modded 2011 Skyrim.
I wasn’t expecting a remake, of course, but it is amusing to point out that Bethesda simply took the same graphics the PC has had since 2011, added in some extra vegetation & a few effects, & brought it over to new-gen consoles at a semi-stable 30 FPS experience.
Agreed on the second part, which once again brings me back to saying “thank f*ck for the 64-bit executable, though.”
That’s basically what a remaster is, isn’t it? A few extra bells and whistles when compared to modded 2011 Skyrim. But the base PC version does not match the Special Edition in any way at all. It’s just that so many of us use mods that we tend to forget how vanilla 2011 Skyrim looks.
I can’t blame them, Crytek are skint and the needn’t to chase that console money to stay afloat, sadly. Cryengine is the engine that produces the most impressive visuals, in my opinion
They went skint chasing that console money, though, ironically.
I mean, think about it; Crysis & Warhead did “well” even though they weren’t goldmines, whereas Crysis 2, which wh*red itself out in a dozen different ways across all 3 platforms, made jack, & Crysis 3 in turn made even less, largely because of how badly Crysis 2 was received.
Then they decided, “oh, let’s make a Kinect-exclusive!” Except, oh, that turned out to be the EPIC FAIL that oh-so-many people expected it to be, needless to say, & as a result they had to retool Ryse into an Xbox One release game, except, again, oh! The XONE sold like sh*t, because Microsoft f*cked themselves in the *ss yet again, so as a result, they were forced to port Ryse to PC in order to recoup some kind of a f*cking profit.
All while buying up & expanding into more & more studios & IP’s (namely Homefront) with no straight plan to do f*cking anything with half their employees, & no steady income stream, which of course resulted in their selling their engine to Amazon, their Homefront IP + Studio to whomever (I forget), & the firing/mass exodus of a bunch of other people because they weren’t getting paid (see Star Citizen snagging a bunch of CryEngine techies).
And what the f*ck does the Crytek management learn from all of that? “Oh hey, let’s sign on to make a PSVR-exclusive title!”
Talk about ironic.
Actually, I can really see that happening if they keep up like this.
Nailed it, good shout on Homefront, it was bizarre purchase, the IP was in all sorts of trouble from get go, and when it did eventually come to market it didn’t even have multiplayer player, the first had some great ideas that was poorly executed. Like you said, epic fail
The only thing they have going for them them is there engine, that’s keeping them afloat
For how much longer, though?
Granted, Amazon’s version of CryEngine (called Lumberyard) is based on an older version of CryEngine (3.8.1 to be specific) so it doesn’t have all the features that Crytek’s latest version has, but at the same time, it’s also got several major improvements over Crytek’s, especially in the tech support area.
Now obviously I’m not saying CryEngine & Crytek are about to go belly-up overnight, but Lumberyard could provide them with some serious competition if they don’t step things up.
The way Crytek has gone over the years and those who came and left, I don’t really see Crytek as being what they used to be all those years ago.
Looks alright. Kind of kills the tone of the game. There are much better endbs out there.
No there’s only one actual ENB (ENBSeries), for each game, but many ENB Presets for it.
Boris provides the basic tool, and others experiment with the variable settings of that tool to provide alternative presets, which are often misnamed as an ENB.
This is simply the first version of the tool, for Skyrim SE. With example presets, designed to show off features available, to those wanting to create presets.
There will be many presets, to choose from in time, and as this tool evolves, many more options to tweak, compare it to the first version for 32-bit Skyrim’s Presets, not the latest one.
Oh look, someone that actually knows what they’re talking about.
Actually, of all the ENBs out so far, and there are very few real ENBs (a bunch of reshades calling themselves that, but they aren’t ENBs) I think EWI has made the best one so far. It gives a really beautiful look of realism to the game. I can’t wait for Boris to give us as much of the full enbseries experience as he can for the modders to build on. It’s frankly just sad as hell that the Skyrim ‘remaster’ has already been far outdone graphically by modders giving their work to the fans for free. Not surprising though, as Bethesda pretty much counts on the modders to make their game what it should be, rather than doing it themselves.
You’re forgetting the fact that Bethesda also has to cater to the console users regarding hardware, something which modders generally don’t have to worry about. Furthermore, Bethesda also provides the Special Edition free to Legendary Edition owners. It’s easy to blame Bethesda when you conveniently ignore the fact that they’re some of the most PC-friendly devs out there regarding their support for mods and free content like HD packs and remasters.
They didn’t give it to PC owners for the owners benefit.
There would be no console mods, if PC owners had to buy this.
It was essential to console sales, to provide mods, and that was maximised by giving the mod creators, the new version.
This time it’s the PC owners doing Bethesda the favour, not the other way round.
Bethesda would get console sales even if there were no console mods. It has been that way for a very long time. Bethesda doesn’t have to rely on mods at least on console because their games are good enough on their own in that space.
Not many at $60, just for a remaster.
That price tag is only attracting sales due to the addition of console mods, and they are maximised by giving the game to the PC owners.
Most PC owners would never have bought the remaster, at any price.
So there would have been few console mods, and the price would have to drop to the $20, or less of most remastered games.
The publisher crunched the numbers, and it came out that free on PC, and full price for consoles, made more profit.
It’s not a remaster on PS4 and Xbox One, but a completely new game. Bethesda’s target with this release was to bring in a new audience, not convert an existing one. PS3 and 360 owners wouldn’t double dip even if the game was priced lower because they’d rather just get the game later on PC. PC itself was the exception since it got both versions. So in many ways the platform got preferential treatment.
Of course if’s a remaster/rerelease, it originally released on PS3/XB360.
Just like most games rereleased on those consoles, if you played the original, there’s little incentive to rebuy it on the new console, if it’s a full priced game.
Make no mistake, new players alone wouldn’t make enough profit to justify that pricetag.
However the addition of mods will attract many, who did play it on the last gen.
They are not interested in the limited, multi-platform owning market, if they have PC, and one, or more consoles, modding on PC is much better.
The vast majority, of gamers choose only one platform, these are the market, that are being targeted.
Don’t confuse the devs of BGS (Bethesda Game Studios), with the Publisher BS (Bethesda Softworks), I’m a fan of the dev, but the publisher is not your friend, they are one of the worst in gaming, and make there desicions based on profit, like all other AAA publishers.
“Of course if’s a remaster/rerelease, it originally released on The vast majority, of gamers choose only one platform, these are the market, that are being targeted.PS3/XB360.”
— Different platforms. Different game. There is no guarantee that PS3 and X360 owners will change their platform to play the “remaster”. Only PC owners get that privilege because the platform doesn’t change for us. See my aforementioned comment for the reason why console users from the previous gen will most likely not switch.
‘Just like most games rereleased on those consoles, if you played the original, there’s little incentive to rebuy it on the new console, if
it’s a full priced game.
— Exactly. Which is why Bethesda didn’t target the game at PS3/X360 owners just as I mentioned in my previous comment.
“Make no mistake, new players alone wouldn’t make enough profit to justify that pricetag.”
— Bethesda will turn a profit on the Special Edition from selling to new customers on PS4/Xbox One at 60$ flat. I guarantee it. Especially since Bethesda didn’t have to make a large additional investment to get the Special Edition going, thanks to the architecture of the new consoles.
“They are not interested in the limited, multi-platform owning market”
— Correct, they are only interested in new customers on PS4/Xbox One. The PC gets a free ride as a result.
“The vast majority, of gamers choose only one platform, these are the market, that are being targeted.”
— Correct. You seem to agree with my previous comment then. Bethesda does not expect PC players to double dip. Hence 60$ targeted squarely at PS4/Xbox One owners who haven’t played Skyrim before, thereby justifying the price for them.
“Don’t confuse the devs of BGS (Bethesda Game Studios), with the Publisher BS (Bethesda Softworks)”
— Don’t worry, I won’t. BGS is an internal studio of BS and always has been since the beginning. There never would have been BGS without Bethesda Softworks.
“they are one of the worst in gaming, and make there desicions based on profit, like all other AAA publishers.”
— Lol alright, sure. I mean it’s not like businesses operate for the sake of profit or anything, amirite? Skyrim’s development must’ve been funded on Kickstarter or something /sarcasm. If you enjoy self-published homebrew indie games, good for you I suppose. I for one am very glad AAA exists because I like immersive gameplay that also doesn’t look like something out of the early 90’s. if I didn’t I’d just go play on my NES instead of on PC. It’s a matter of choice and both types of markets should exist regardless of personal preferences.
The only advantage for PC, is it’s DX11, and 64-bit.
That’s more stable, than the DX9, 32-bit version.
On top of which, most don’t realise, Windows 10 restricts all DX9 games to 4GB.
That negates the ENBoost memory expansion abilities, and is a major factor in the issues for modded Skyrim, with that OS.
To run a stable, heavily modded DX9 Skyrim, Windows 7 is required (Maybe W8.1, but I never used that).
W10 users are seeing huge stability gains, due to increased memory available.
“Windows 10 restricts all DX9 games to 4GB.”
Thanks for this fascinating little tidbit, I had no idea ^^
He’s mistaken. Check my response.
“On top of which, most don’t realise, Windows 10 restricts all DX9 games to 4GB.”
Not DX9, but 32-bit. The API doesn’t determine the maximum memory usage. Win10 has little to do with it because 32-bit applications cannot use more than 4GB to begin with. It’s the inherent limitation of 32-bit applications. It so happens the majority of DX9 games are also 32-bit.
No this is different, while you are correct about 32-bit memory limits, this is about running 32-bit applications, on a 64-bit machine.
ENBoost is a memory expansion feature that allows Skyrim to use all your memory on a 64-bit system, while still using DX9.
It does this by creating as many 4GB chunks as needed, using the ENBHost application. This is separate from the ENBSeries Graphics advances, and can be used without them, by using the ENBoost preset, that switches all the graphics off, while using the memory boost.
This works fine on Windows 7, but MS half assed W10, by limiting all DX9 usage to 4GB, I don’t know of another program affected, but ENBSeries certainly is.
So at least for Skyrim, with ENB, W10 is crippled, because DX9 is restricted to 4GB of System memory (Not GPU memory, to be clear).
By RAM do you mean main memory or VRAM? I ask because the only sources I could find all mention limits on VRAM when running Skyrim on Win10. Also, I really can’t find anything that indicates whether it’s a Win10 issue or ENB issue. Will keep an eye out for this.
I said, at the end;
“… System memory (Not GPU memory, to be clear).
I was on my phone before, so not really able to find and provide souces.
See these posts as the cause was explored.
First Nvidia was suspected
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/863242/geforce-drivers/-request-remove-4gb-limit-of-vram-for-dx9-games/1/
Then it switched to W10
http://enbdev.com/enbseries/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4682
TRied replying with a link, it’s not appeared;
Yes ENBHost only affects CPU RAM, not VRAM.
Skyrim VRAM is always limited to 3.1 GB, on 32-bit, and will CDT if it goes over that, but ENBHost allows your System RAM to take the excess load, passed to RAM over the normal 32-bit limit, by running as many ENBHost.exe as required upto 128GB (As I recall).
enbdev.com/enbseries/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4682
My apologies; I must have missed the part where you mentioned GPU memory for some reason. Otherwise I wouldn’t have brought that 32-bit RAM limit up.
I went though your sources and it does seem the GPU limit is due to a bug in Win10’s code. The Visual Studio bug tracker still marks it as unresolved, so I’m assuming it’s something that hasn’t been addressed yet.
Thanks for sharing the info.
Well it’s a workaround, for every 4GB chunk, a new ENBHost.exe instance is created, and uses existing CPU ability to use RAM, when VRAM is maxed out.
3GB+ VRAM cards are a recent change, this works with W7, but W10 has hard coded a 4GB DX9 RAM limit, which broke this ENB feature, and is what I referred to.
32-bit Skyrim has it’s own Hard coded VRAM limit of 3.1 GB on both OS.
It only affects heavily modded, games, with very large textures, which run fine on W7, but not on W10.
“but W10 has hard coded a 4GB DX9 RAM limit, which broke this ENB feature, and is what I referred to.”
Could you provide a reference for this? I went through the links you provided in detail and they both refer to the bug occurring when system RAM is being used as VRAM. Not as system RAM in and of itself.
“32-bit Skyrim has it’s own Hard coded VRAM limit of 3.1 GB on both OS.”
And I believe that’s what is addressed by setting the VideoMemorySizeMb parameter. A portion of system RAM is used as VRAM.
Isn’t ENB dependent on dx9 and not each game specific. Unless the game is dx11 only or dx12 you can use generic ENB and tweak up your own presets I think.
If this a brand new version meant only to showcase new techniques and effects then that wasn’t mentioned in the article.
Boris makes game specific ENBSeries, every game has it’s own version.
Original Skyrim is DX9.
SE is DX11, so yes it’s a new ENBSeries version, and as always will improve over time, as Boris improves it.
K. Got it. Thx.
No, there aren’t. Not for Skyrim SE….
There are a few at nexus. What are those then. Also, isn’t enb just a post-processor injector. I don’t see why it can’t be used with any game unless it is dx11 only or dx12 cause he didn’t make one for it yet or something?
There is a generic version which can be used for all dx9 games. You can tweak it up for anything.
ENBSeries is mostly Game Specific, the genric one is only a very basic old one.
Site lists
Tools
ENBInjector
VRamSizeTest
Convertors
DX8 to DX9
Patches
Deus Ex Human Revolution
Oblivion
Fallout 3 / New Vegas
Resident Evil 5
Saboteur
Silent Hill Homecoming
TES Skyrim
Graphic modifications
Generic mods (The basix DX9 one mentioned)
Aliens VS Predator 2010
Black Mesa
Blade Of Darkness
Burnout Paradise
Collapse
Dark Souls 2
Deus Ex
Deus Ex Human Revolution
Dragon Age
Dragon’s Dogma
Fallout 3 / New Vegas
Fallout 4
Far Cry 2
FlatOut 2
GTA 3
GTA 4
GTA 5
GTA San Andreas
GTA Vice City
Guilty Gear
Half Life 2
Mass Effect 3
Max Payne 2
NBA Live 08
Resident Evil 4
Richard Burns Rally
Serious Sam 2
Shadow Warrior
Stalker
TES Oblivion
TES Skyrim
TES Skyrim SE
Test Drive Unlimited 2
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines
Witcher 2
Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be awesome.
Should have called it Skyrim 64
It’s funny that “64” in a game title makes it sound so old school.
Like it was made for the N64 or Jag.
The blurry low res textures are already up there amirite?. 😛
meh. just shows off the ENB depth of field effect and a random texture pack.
I also prefer vanilla colors on PC. Remaster is unnaturally colorful IMO
Just a heads up Walikor that you are really close to being banned if you keep it
Huh, just saw this, completely by chance. Oops.
Funny thing, actually; CryEngine 3.0 was, indeed, little more than an updated version of CryEngine 2, featuring newly-added support for consoles, amongst other things, as CryEngine 2 was quite ahead of its time. The major, ehm “non-platform support additions” (read: differences) really only readily appear with versions 3.5, 3.8, & 5.0.
As for Windows NT vs Windows 10; well, I suppose it depends on how much Windows NT coding remains within the Windows OS framework, etc. I’m not an expert on the subject, so I can’t really say, but based on surface changes alone, I’d argue there’s a vast, ocean-size volume of difference between them.
Good point on Hard Reset (not familiar with Dead Island’s).
Oh? Interesting. So that we don’t get c*ckblocked by the spam filter again, I’ll just say; check out Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s comparison article, then perhaps? “Skyrim Special Edition Is An Underwhelming Upgrade On PC – But!”
Excerpt;
“I switched repeatedly between it and an unmodded Skyrim original install with Bethesda’s official high-res texture pack added in, and it didn’t take long to reach that perfect pitch of meaningless insanity that is deciding between two different shades of white to paint your bathroom. Ultimately, I came damned closed to preferring the original. Not from some Paul Weller Fan purism, but because the two were so similar, save for a inspecific sense that the balance of brightness and sharpness seemed more comfortable on the original. Bloom, particularly, seems overdone in some Special Edition scenes, resulting in a greater sense of contrast and detail in the original.”
“The major, ehm “non-platform support additions” (read: differences)
really only readily appear with versions 3.5, 3.8, & 5.0.”
— Correct. I was referring to the 3 series vs the 2 series, but yeah, should have mentioned specific versions to make the point clearer.
“As for Windows NT vs Windows 10; well, I suppose it depends on how much Windows NT coding remains within the Windows OS framework, etc.”
— Both Win10 and WinNT 3.5 use the same fundamental NT kernel, though with major differences between the capabilities of each kernel version. In fact during development, Windows 10’s kernel version number was 6.4 (ie Windows NT 6.4) before MS changed it to 10 to match with the OS name.
“check out Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s comparison article, then perhaps?”
— Yeah I read the article. I guess Alec Meer didn’t quite temper his expectations. He was approaching a free product from the point of view of a paid one. He mentions the vast changes to lighting as merely a “boost”. I suppose he was hoping for some sort of huge graphical upgrade with top-notch textures/re-written renderer and approached it from that point of view, forgetting the fact that one would have to pay for those sorts of things.
Lol’d.
Kernels – huh, interesting. Cheeky f*ckers.
Well, to be fair, the console plebeians are paying for it, but yeah, since we PC blokes got it for free, I get where you’re coming from. Other than that; you’re correct, it’s presented as an improved version of the original Skyrim, which it primarily is, even if some things have remained the same.
I suppose the main problem here is that we’ve gotten used to seeing straight-up “vast visual improvements &/or upgrades” in remasters, which Skyrim features not in texture quality (improved detailing aside), but rather more in improved lighting, effects, etc. making it an underwhelming product, by straightforward comparison, even if it really is, in fact, a considerable upgrade from “Oldrim.”