My Skyrim can look so pretty...
This is vanilla graphics.
I am using Bethesda's HD textures. Nothing more.
Graphics settings are maxed out, except for 6 things I tweaked.
1) Screen Resolution.
Skyrim can go up to 1920x1080, right? Well, you should not do it.
The engine was certified for 1280x720. The unlocking of 1920x1080 has been a commercial move that coupled with the advent of the HD textures allowed Bethesda to coat the game under a new layer of sugar.
Truth is, if you play past 1280x720 some things begin to not work properly and others are at risk of causing a CTD. I used to find a handy list for these, but google is not retrieving it anymore. Page is gone?
I recall that playing at a screen resolution greater than 1920x1080 makes the "LEVEL UP" writing stick to your screen, never to disappear.
It is one of the many funny things that happen (or not happen) when playing beyond the 1280x720 screen size.
So I play at 1280x720 upscaled to 1920x1080 (my monitor native resolution).
All graphics effects work perfectly, especially the fogs, the smokes and the dusts... which are things that may stop displaying kind of randomly at 1920x1080 already. Most players have never played Skyrim at anything other than 1080p and ignore that in many areas and dungeons there is some dust/smoke effect meant to play at all times. Often you enter those places and the effects are simply not there.
As for the textures, I am using the High-Resolution sets from Bethesda. At 720p they work pretty well and the visual gap between Low and High definition (not all textures are sharp equal) is greatly reduced.
The overall scene presents a uniform texture grain all over the place (barring some rare exceptions).
2) Trees Receive Shadows.
In SkyrimPrefs.ini there is a setting that is OFF by default. If set ON it makes a tremendous improvement when shading full LOD trees.
The setting is found under the [Display] heading:
[Display]
bTreesReceiveShadows=0
Set it to
1 and save.
This will increase the workload for your GFX card when playing in areas with lots of trees.
3) Anisotropic Filtering.
I have disabled the in-game Anisotropic Filtering (which is lame) and forced the Anisotropic Filtering 16x from the nVidia Control Panel.
This too makes a big difference in visual quality. The rendering of water surfaces becomes especially sharper, but the screen as a whole benefits from it at all times. Priceless.
This will slightly increase the workload for your GFX card at all times.
4) FXAA filtering.
I have disabled the in-game FXAA filter and forced the FXAA filtering from the nVidia Control Panel.
They are supposed to be equivalent, to the point that this option for Skyrim was turned off in the nVidia driver at some point, years ago. But I had the good fortune to first play Skyrim with an older driver, wherein the option was still available, and that is how I knew that it could be used. You just need to force-activate it using a 3rd party tool, like the nVidia Inspector program. The FXAA filter from the driver works like a charm -- actually it works *better* than the in-game counterpart because it also applies to menus and inventory items (where the in-game FXAA is instead disabled).
This will barely increase the workload for your GFX card at all times.
5) Full Scene Anti Antialiasing (FSAA) and AntiAlias Transparency filters.
I have enabled the in-game FSAA filter. The FSAA filter is not available in the nVidia Control Panel. This too was disabled years ago. You can still enable it (through nVidia Inspector), but you will gain no improvement over the in-game counterpart, which does a much better job at filtering only what needs filtering, unlike the nVidia setting which indiscriminately applies to everything at all times.
My personal choice is 4x FSAA.
8x FSAA could be used, of course, but when playing at 1280x720 the visual improvement over 4x is nigh imperceptible. What is very perceptible, instead, is the added workload for the GFX card brought by the 8x filtering. More so when playing in areas with lots of trees or dust and smoke effects. If you are not afraid to strain your hardware, suit yourself and set FSAA to 8x.
The FSAA alone is not enough to give you a perfect picture, though.
FSAA needs to be coupled with another AA filtering type in order to give the best results: this is the AntiAlias Transparency filtering. Most people do not know it exists, let alone what it is for.
Look in your nVidia Control Panel, you should see that the AA Filtering can be set to Multisampling or SuperSampling. Multisampling is junk. SuperSampling provides the best results. Notice how the SuperSampling can be set to the same strengths of FSAA? This is because the two are meant to go hand in hand. You will get the best in visual quality (and performance!) if you match your AA Transparency filtering with your FSAA filtering. No more and no less.
In other words: if you play with 4x FSAA, you should set your AA Transparency to 4x SuperSampling as well.
The activation of the AA Transparency filter adds considerable workload to your GFX card when lots of textures with transparency are on display. In Skyrim this means everytime you see a tree, bush, grass blade, dust, fire, smoke or particle effect such as snow flakes... you get the idea.
6) Ambient Occlusion filter (AO).
Talking strictly about nVidia graphics cards now... before the advent of the 9xx series the driver used to implement a sweet Ambient Occlusion filter for Skyrim. It was fantastic. It alone would bring a terrific improvement to the visual quality and depth of the scene. If you just played with it a few minutes you would know what I mean...
Then the 9xx series came, and for some reason nVidia decided to rework all AO filters in their driver, under the banner of some non-better explained "Improved and Faster" Ambient Occlusion filtering. There were (perhaps still are) a couple huge threads full of complaints about this on the nVidia forums. Of course nVidia never gave a damn about it. They ended up waving the middle finger to the players of Skyrim. Why? Because they ruined the AO filter for the game. They fixed what was not broken, and in so doing they broke it for real. Now the Skyrim AO filter (from the nVidia Control Panel) is something best avoided.
Fortunately the nVidia Inspector program exists, and it allows you to force-select a different AO filter. It is what I did years ago. I tried pretty much every AO available until I found one that worked nicely with Skyrim: the AO filter for Fallout 3 (in hindsight, this was pretty obvious, seeing how Skyrim's engine was an evolution of the Fallout 3's engine...)
It is not as pretty and flawless as the old one for Skyrim was, but quite worth to play with. Alas, with each new nVidia driver version nVidia likes to try and break new things, and so YMMV.
Use of the AO filter will add to the workload of your GFX card at all times.
These are the tweaks I am using to make my Skyrim look pretty. My eyes are happy, my hardware is happy
There is probably more that can be done to enhance the game. ENB comes to mind, but I find its effects too heavy for my taste.
-fox