Skyrim Graphics Overhaul 2015 - The Best Performance Optimized Visual Mods

So, you've decided to play Skyrim again. Or perhaps this is the first time. Either way, you've installed the game, played a few minutes, and realized something: wow, this is pretty ugly.

Skyrim isn't exactly a game that has visually aged well. It's more than three years old, was already a bit dated when it came out (Bethesda's four-year development cycle shows), and with gorgeous games like The Witcher 3 having been released this year, Skyrim doesn't really have much to offer on the visual front.

It is, however, a gun that runs on Creation Engine, and it has a development kit with an active community. We have the technology. We can rebuild it.

This article is an update of the March 2012 mod list, and most of the mods on this original list are still valid and usable. Some mods, like Dragonbone weapons, have since then been covered by DLC, but it's all in order and functioning.

On top of presenting worthwhile mods that were either updated recently or not mentioned in the 2012 article, this will also be a guide to help everyone upgrade their game's visuals quickly and easily. The mods are all listed in the order they should be installed and the use of Mod Organizer is highly recommended for reasons explained in detail further.

This Skyrim 2015 Graphics Overhaul keeps a consistent aesthetic while modding the graphics quality by using high resolution textures, added flora, improved lighting, and more. The point of this article's approach is to sustain playability with high framerates while simultaneously bolstering visuals, so we're not going for the best graphics possible; we're aiming for an overall improvement while retaining consistent aesthetics and performance.

Before we begin, there are some utilities that need to be installed for mods to function properly. While SKSE and SkyUI are mandatory (most mods simply won't work to their full extent without them), LOOT and Mod Organizer are optional but very strongly recommended, for various reasons explained below. If you want to have as much fun modding the game as you have playing it, consider downloading all of these tools.

Utilities:

SKSE

http://skse.silverlock.org/

Skyrim Script Extender is necessary to run nearly every single complex mod out there, including SkyUI.

SkyUI

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3863/

SkyUI, along with the nifty interface changes, adds a Mod Configuration Menu which is used by a ton of mods to allow the player to easily set options from a dedicated panel.

LOOT

https://loot.github.io/

Put simply, LOOT is a godsend. This utility will detect any issues with load order and fix them automatically, solving a lot of potential issues right away without the usual sweat and frustration. Mod Organizer already has LOOT, so if you're using MO, you won't have to bother downloading this separately.

Mod Organizer

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1334/

Mod Organizer is by far the safest mod manager to use with Skyrim. Rather than fill the game's folder with mod files that are difficult to keep track of, MO puts them all in a separate folder entirely which prevents conflicts or overwriting files. MO also allows for separate profiles which use their own mod and can even run separate save files. It takes a bit longer to get used to than other managers and may seem quite needy in some aspects, but it's all worth it in the end – especially for modding the graphical contents of the game.

I cannot recommend the use of Mod Organizer enough. It can be a bit difficult to use early on, but the profile system and the smart overwrite system allows for easy combination of mods that would otherwise conflict. An extensive guide to the use of Mod Organizer can be found right here. Note that MO comes natively with LOOT in its latest version.

One of the reasons Mod Organizer is also great for editing visuals in a game is due to its priority system. On top of the normal load order – which handles .esm and .esp files – MO handles priorities of all the isolated mods installed, allowing for intricate modifications without having to delete or overwrite files. Simply make sure the left panel is sorted by priorities, and then move the mod up or down depending on whether it should “take over” other mods or not. The lower a mod is on the list, the higher its priority. Place it higher on the list to allow other mods to take control. This is particularly handy for handling large texture overhauls as you can drop all the main packs on the top of your list, then put the smaller mods on the bottom to overwrite specific textures and parts to personalize the final result.

Getting Started Modding Skyrim

The guide below is dedicated to establishing a quick-and-easy upgrade to Skyrim's visuals with no significant performance loss and no significant alteration to the game's art direction or general art style. These mods will increase the texture resolution of most objects in the game, alter the colors to be much more vibrant, and revamp the flora to be more lush and higher quality. Modded Skyrim performance benchmarks post-install are performed below, with FPS measured on various video cards.

The mods are all listed in the optimal order of installation on Mod Organizer, meaning the mods installed last will be prioritized over the mods installed first. Note that swapping the priorities around will not result in any conflict and can be done to obtain different results.

Also important is the fact the mods changing the weather, lighting and color correction of the game are generally prioritized over texture changes. On top of being less impactful on performance, these mods offer much more visible improvements and will often help drastically more than just swapping textures for higher definition ones. To clarify, here are three screenshots of the game. The first is the vanilla experience, the second has modified textures and flora, and the third has modified lighting and flora. See for yourself:

Continue to page 2 for the essentials.

The Essentials

This section contains what's needed to drastically improve the game's visuals. Items of note include color correction, weather and lighting changes, and some changes to the flora of the game.

Climates of Tamriel

CoT brings an extensive overhaul to the weather and lighting of Skyrim, with optional sound additions for ambiance. This is highly customizable via the installation menu and can later be altered as well. It's recommended to pick one of the two dungeon lighting mods in the list (hazardous or hardcore), mostly because they're simple .esp files that can easily be deactivated and reactivated to your liking.

I recommend avoiding the cold and warm options as color correction is already covered by IMAGINATOR. Again, these are simple .esp files and can easily be deactivated without reinstalling the mods, so feel free to experiment.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul

SFO drastically increases the quality of the flora around Skyrim without impacting performance or being invasive. It comes in several versions which yield different results depending on whether you want a vanilla-compliant experience or something more unique.

Grass on Steroids

Complementary to SFO, Grass on Steroids – alongside .ini tweaks (indicated on the mod's main page) – will increase the density of the grass in the world while also visibly increasing performance. If you plan on playing with denser grass (which you definitely should if using SFO), this is essential to avoid FPS drops. Using Mod Organizer, just make sure to modify the .ini files via MO as well.

Enhanced Lights and FX

Compatible with CoT's lighting changes, ELFX pumps-up the values of all light sources while moving and removing some of them. ELFX adds some nifty effects (like candle smoke) to bolster the general ambiance.

This mods comes with an additional plugin to make the indoors darker by default. Unlike CoT's plugin (which only covers dungeons and caves), this covers all indoors (including houses, inns, etc). The darkness level of ELFX's plugin is somewhere between CoT's two plugins, so opt-in for this one if you want an overall darker experience, even in places that would normally be well-lit. Great to give the game a gloomier, more personal experience.

Imaginator

Small, but powerful. This tool adds a panel to the Mod Configuration Menu which allows you to alter the game's color correction to your exact liking. Along with some good presets, this comes with a ton of options that help massively with obtaining the exact result desired. On top of the usual saturation, contrast, and brightness options, one can find a tint-er and options to increase bloom and the light coming from the sun. It doesn't conflict with anything and works on top of all other mods that alter colors.

Pure Waters

Part of the Purity line of mods, Pure Waters greatly increases the quality of all water sources in the game and works in conjunction with any weather mod. While the author has come up with other mods related to weather and part of the Purity line, I only use Pure Waters as the other aspects are already covered by the mods mentioned above. It is, however, entirely possible to replace Climates of Tamriel with Pure Weathers, or to use Purity for the added textures – just make sure to download the compatibility patches to avoid conflicts (notably with True Storms, mentioned below).

True Storms

This is for those who've ever felt the rain in Skyrim to be a bit underwhelming. Snowstorms are impressive in their own right, the rain in Skyrim is rarely more than a small drizzle with unimpressive sound effects and no real impact to the experience. True Storms revamps this by turning these few drops of rain into a proper torrential downpour. The base rain drop texture is a little bit too opaque, but this issue was taken care of by Gamwich, who's listen in the Texture and Models section later on.

Supreme and Volumetric Fog

This does exactly what the title sounds like – it makes the fog volumetric and imposing. This helps increase the atmosphere of Skyrim tremendously, especially in conjunction with Imaginator. Make sure to pick up the Climates of Tamriel compatible version in the files list.

The mod author's other addition, Morning Fogs, is also good to throw-in.

Splash of Rain

In conjunction with True Storms, this will make Rain feel lively and impactful to the world by simply adding little splashes to objects around the world in reaction to the rain. This is customizable via MCM and comes with interior sounds (which should be deactivated if you use True Storms, as it comes with its own sounds that are more fitting for the downpour added).

Continue to the third page for the texture overhaul.

Textures and Models

Although also important, Model and Texture replacers are secondary and should only be used to fine-tune and tweak what was already accomplished by the essential mods indicated above. Limiting yourself to the mods indicated above will not impact performance while still yielding impressive results, but if your computer can handle it, you should also use the texture replacers below. We've benchmarked the impact of all mods enabled later on in this article.

It's also worth noting that using textures above 2K is rarely a fruitful idea; 4K textures will visibly clash with other mods that only offer 2K textures and will hog performance for no real benefit. Most mods are optimized for 2K resolutions.

Skyrim HD

Quite simple and sometimes hard to notice, Skyrim HD is essentially the bedrock of the rest of other texture mods. If other texture replacers don't replace certain aspects of the world, this will surely take care of it. Make sure to download all the “FULL” versions (Towns, Dungeons, Landscape, and Misc).

Immersive Roads

This highly customizable mod will change all the roads in the game with high quality versions. It also comes with a parallax version for ENB, adding depth to the roads. Make sure to pick the optional roads option in the installation menu to be able to pick what type of road (dark, regular, white) you want for each location in the world.

Improved NPC Clothing

This is straightforward: Improved NPC Clothing pumps-up the texture quality of all standard clothing items in the game, excluding only some (like the roughspun tunic for prisoners).

aMidianBorn's Textures

aMidianBorn has mostly worked on armor texture improvements, for vanilla armor as well as some specific mods. While it can be a lengthy process, I recommend downloading all of his non-mod related texture replacers and placing them all in a single archive for easy MO installation.

Gawmwich's Textures

Similarly to aMidianBorn, Gamwich's mods are all separate and downloadable independently. These replacers are all about small objects and clutter, which is great if you're using high-definition mods for everything else (there's nothing uglier than a 512x512 texture of a compressed rug on top of a 2K high definition wood floor). Note that this is also great to use on its own against otherwise low-quality textures as it will hide the low resolution textures underneath high-definition rugs, furs, and clutter.

Static Mesh Improvement Mod

This massive modification takes care of all the statics in the world that were extremely low-poly and low-resolution. This is necessary for some other replacers to function well (such as Gamwich's clutter textures) and an amazing addition by itself.

Here are some comparison screenshots of the final result. IMAGINATOR was used to increase saturation and contrast while lowering brightness marginally in order to give the world a more vibrant palette.

The left picture is fully vanilla. The center picture is the game with the essential mods installed only, and the right picture is the game with all mods installed, including texture replacers.

Continue to the final page for bonus mods & the benchmark.

Skyrim Graphics Overhaul 2015 Performance Benchmarks

We tested using our updated 2015 Multi-GPU test bench, detailed in the table below. Our thanks to supporting hardware vendors for supplying some of the test components.

The latest AMD Catalyst drivers (15.7) were used for testing. NVidia's 353.3 drivers were used for testing. Game settings were manually controlled for the DUT. The game was tested with maxed-out graphics (MSAA 4x, FXAA off, object fade off) and the graphics mods enabled. Note that Skyrim basically demands V-Sync to be enabled; without V-Sync, we encounter severe tearing and physics anomalies. It is strongly recommended to play with v-sync enabled. We disabled v-sync for testing to better determine which cards have the best absolute performance.

Skyrim was tested down an alleyway in Solitude, facing (and walking toward) the keep where guards are training. We determined this location to be one of the most intensive in-town locations in the game, due to the abundant geometric complexity and varied textures. We configured the weather to "rain + storm" to place maximum load on the system. Each test was executed for 30 seconds in an identical scenario, then repeated three times for parity.

Average FPS, 1% low, and 0.1% low times are measured. We do not measure maximum or minimum FPS results as we consider these numbers to be pure outliers. Instead, we take an average of the lowest 1% of results (1% low) to show real-world, noticeable dips; we then take an average of the lowest 0.1% of results for severe spikes.

Skyrim Graphics Overhaul 2015 Benchmark Results

There's an obvious bottleneck at 112FPS -- probably something software-side or in the API -- but the charts clearly illustrate that almost all modern graphics hardware is fully capable of playing our optimized version of Skyrim. The 250X suffers and is due for a settings decrease, but the 750 Ti has no problems at all.

Other Worthwhile Mods

While these mods were neither covered nor used in the above guide and comparison shots, they're great and should be considered for further improvements in visuals.

Expanded Towns and Cities

An extensive, highly customizable mod that drastically improves the looks and contents of the various settlements of Skyrim. This means added buildings, unique textures, new vendors, and a much better feel overall. Make sure to check out the mods mentioned in the patch section as they are often excellent standalone installs.

Wet and Cold

Wet and Cold gives all surrounding NPCs rain gear and additional layers of cloth in reaction to rain and cold winds. If the Dragonborn-related expansion Wet and Cold - Ashes is installed, this will also give NPCs facemasks and goggles during ash storms on Solstheim.

Real Shelter

If you've installed True Storms, you may have noticed that torrential rain seems to go through literally everything. This isn't very noticeable in vanilla weathers due to how small the rain is, but when it starts to really pour down, suddenly there's not a single roof outside that seems to work. This mod will fix dysfunctional roofs by making any roofed area outdoors actually protect you from the rain. The reason this is not in the essentials mod is because it requires the use of a special script (make sure to follow instructions and use the mod organizer-specific version of the script) which sometimes fails to work entirely. It won't hurt your game at all, so you're welcome to try, but this is hit or miss. If it does work, however, it will massively improve the looks of your game and will allow for some great scenes.

Dynavision

A small but worthwhile addition, Dynavision will add dynamic depth of field to your game. This is customizable via MCM and allows the player to remove and alter the effect during combat, when running, or in dialogue. This means you can, for instance, make the entire world blurry except your conversational subject. This is only a mod for those of you who like Depth of Field (“bokeh effect”).

ENB Series

When you've installed all the texture mods, all the visual improvement mods, and when your game is as beautiful as the Creation Engine will possibly allow it to be, all that's left is ENB. This nifty little thing will essentially add new shaders and effects to the engine itself, thus allowing modders to alter in-depth aspects of the game that would normally not be alterable.

Consider this the icing on the cake, albeit a very expensive icing – ENB is performance-heavy and will hog your processing cycles. The Skyrim Nexus offers a wide variety of custom presets to install above ENB to improve graphics further and give the game a completely new mood and feel. Keep in mind that ENB is not necessary to make Skyrim beautiful, and it is sometimes better to settle for simpler mods that don't impact performance as much. Additionally, ENB was designed with screenshots in mind and will be a much more serviceable program to use for stills than for actual gameplay, especially if you pick one of the more intensive presets out there.

That concludes this round-up. Remember, the objective here was to improve graphics fidelity of the game without sacrificing artistic direction or performance. In the future, we may look into a more "end-all" graphics modding approach.

- Gael "Ganerumo" Mouren.