ENB presets completely change how you see the game and nobody talks about it enough

[WhiterunModder]

I just switched from playing vanilla lighting for like 200 hours to actually installing an ENB preset and man, I feel like I've been playing a different game the whole time. Not even talking about the FPS hit (yeah it sucks on my 1070 but whatever), it's that suddenly Skyrim looks like an actual place instead of a PS3 game with good textures.

The thing that got me is how much it affects how you play. Like I was doing the same Thieves Guild radiant jobs in Riften but with proper shadows and ambient occlusion and the whole city suddenly felt claustrophobic in a way that made sneaking feel actually tense. Before it was just "walk behind this NPC for 30 seconds" but now I'm actually thinking about light sources and sightlines because they actually matter visually.

I know there's like a million presets out there and half of them tank your framerate for marginal gains, but if you're on decent hardware and haven't tried it, you're missing something. Even a lighter preset makes a huge difference. The game was designed with this stuff in mind and vanilla lighting is just... flat.

What presets are people actually using these days? I'm on Community Shaders which helped a ton but I'm curious if there's something that doesn't murder performance as bad as some of the older ones did.

 

[DragonbornVet]

yeah the lighting thing is huge and I don't think enough people realize how much it changes the vibe. vanilla skyrim's lighting is genuinely bad - everything's washed out and flat like you said. once you see it with proper shadows it's hard to go back.

community shaders is solid for what it is, especially if you're trying to keep performance reasonable. if you want something a bit more impactful without going full ENB overhead, a lot of people seem to be doing the lighter preset route now instead of the heavy hitters from like 5 years ago. performance has gotten better on both the mod and hardware side so the tradeoff isn't as brutal as it used to be.

the sneaking thing you mentioned is real though - I noticed the same thing on my current playthrough. when the shadows actually matter visually instead of just being a mechanic stat, stealth feels way different. you're not just checking the detection meter, you're actually thinking about whether you're in a shadow or standing in lamplight. makes those Thieves Guild jobs actually feel like jobs instead of just going through motions.

what's your hardware like? if a 1070 is handling community shaders okay there's probably a couple other things worth trying without tanking your fps too hard.