In the last six months, the Community Shaders team pushed Skyrim graphics at a blistering pace. Biggie Boss, the author of Lorerim 3, arguably the most incredible mod list ever created along with Nolvus v6, not only has CS in his Lorerim 3 performance profile, he also predicted CS will surpass ENB in 2025. And he is talking about the full SE/AE ENB, not VR ENB with half the features and hasn't been updated in many years.
Mad God Overhaul 3.5 marks the end of VR ENB support for Mad God Overhaul, barring a miraculous change of stance from Boris to update VR ENB to modern standard. With all the features below that require Community Shaders, I can no longer justify supporting VR ENB if Mad God Overhaul represents the best of the best Skyrim VR experience.
Season of Skyrim with Nature of the Wildlands 3 and Freaks Floral Fields 2
I had seasons in the very first versions of Mad God Overhaul but ultimately removed it because of the low quality seasonal foliage. Not anymore. Nature of the Wildlands and Freaks Floral Fields is the standard foliage combo for high end mod lists, and with seasons update for Freaks 2.0, you get to see them in their full glory and appreciate both author's versatility in creating different variations of trees and grasses.
Season has been set to 1 month instead of 3 months, so you will experience more seasons in a single play through.
Because Freaks Floral Grass requires Complex Grass which is only available to Community Shaders in VR, that was strike one for VR ENB.
PBR Textures, ParallaxGen, and Better Dynamic Snow 3
In the last 12 months, thanks to Leostevano and Tomato, the quality of textures went up significantly with Complex Materials, a more modern, advanced version of parallax which provides better parallax depth, shadows, and specular reflections. Unfortunately VR ENB did not support complex materials, so I had to downgrade the overall list to old school parallax for compatibility reasons.
With PBR textures, the quality of visuals went up another level. Doodlum has an excellent article on why PBR is such a big deal in modern games, and 3.5 takes full advantage of the biggest increase in texture quality in Skyrim history. Anything that is supposed to reflect light: metal, glass, marble, look absolutely stunning. Mods that were made with PBR assets from ground up, such as Exist's Ebony High Hrothgar maximizes the wow factor. 75% of 3.5's textures are now PBR, and no longer compatible with VR ENB. I have only avoided 100% vanilla conversions like PBRed Vanilla Clothes and added a few of my favorite clutters like Sothasimp's furniture's. Everything else is PBR.
What you see here is only the beginning, there are many other PBR texture packs in the works, including Nature of the Wildlands PBR and PBR skin.
3.5 also switches to Better Dynamic Snow 3 and ParallaxGen to greatly reduce the old school parallax wrap issues, and improves parallax consistency and quality. I ended up going with Tomato's Complex Material Landscape instead of PBR Landscape, as PBR landscape still has issues with LOD and Seasons.
Light Replacer & CS Light
The most revolutionary lighting mod since Lux. With CS's ability to have unlimited lights, this mod allows authors to add/replace objects and turn them into lights. I experimented with a lot of different combinations, and ended up with Lux and CS Light. This combines Lux's extensive support for interior overhauls with Light Placer's ability to turn everything that looks like a light, into a real light. Whether it is the subtle candle glow on a table, or window glow in Solitude, it looks next generation when used with PBR textures's realistic lighting reflections.
But That Is Not All
- Added Dirt and Blood, Stress and Fear and Sunhelm Survival (now enabled by default) for more layers to gameplay, feel free to turn them off any time
- Added AI Overhaul - SPID edition, now you can mix and match NPC overhaul's without re-running Synthesis
- Added MigguLuv's race menu presets for character creation
- Added Underwear.DLL to NSFW version to eliminate unwanted stick in the face when we loot armor, you can still strip them naked, just not by default
- Updated PLANCK and Dragon War, if you decide to stay on older versions, do yourself a favor and update these two mods! They will eliminate crashes with dragon fights and multiple followers using Open Composite
Known Issues
- PBR textures do cost slightly more VRAM, 8GB-10GB card users should consider installing and running VRAMr or reduce resolution
15 comments
..AMD users, it is time to upgrade your graphics card to a 5070 or better..
Seriously, this is not even funny! One of the main reasons I built my PC with a 7900XTX was Skyrim VR, lol. And in Mad Overhaul it really beats the 4080 in my fam PC (as it still does in other games like Metro: Awakening UEVR games, etc.). I definitely won't be buying a new graphics card just because of Community Shaders)In reality, even if I wanted to, my finances wouldn't allow me buy a new GPU anytime soon. Especially considering I already have a top-of-the-line GPU, even if it is from AMD.It's a real shame that due to Community Shaders, AMD users must either abandon their favorite mod lists or invest a substantial amount of money in a new GPU...Yeah, yeah, I'm waiting sarcasm)
$120 bucks x5 = $600 every 5years to use latest updated overclocked hardware seems ineveitable everyone will sign up, VR headset popularization was all livestream investors needed to see, steam posted record highs of VR users also of their VR hardware use. Portable 50series VR tech for $10 bucks coming sooner than most realize.
Its time to move on... I have seen others skyrim wabbajacks that are not released yet... Soon I hope will be a good list with ENB
Can you update the version in the modlist?
Worked with Parapets to almost entirely remove the CPU overhead from Community Shaders, boosting performance by potentially 30% on some
setups.
Removed linear composite for water, similar brightness to vanilla.
Faster PBR glint, fixed SSGI HQ Specular.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/88261
I propose it because with the very high quality parallax textures the stitches between them really ruin the quality of the environment.
I have not tested it yet. It seems it would be an awesome addition.
I have not found something similar for vegetation, most flowers/trees/shrubs seem to just stick out of the ground like glued on.
P.S. Azurite III HDR just released
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/138991