so recently ive been looking into enb's for both skyrim and fallout New Vegas , my questions really are as follows
1 do enbs impact performance
2 are they really worth it if they do impact performance
3 seeing how im on a low end pc should i even try

specs are as follows
Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i3 2100 @ 3.10GHz 67 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM4.00GB
Single-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0F6X5P (CPU 1)
Graphics
LM742 (1280x1024@60Hz)
Intel HD Graphics (Dell)
Storage
465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000AAKX-753CA1 ATA Device (SATA) 46 °C
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GT32N ATA Device
AudioHigh Definition Audio Device

1) Yes, ENBs do impact performance, and very harshly at that, especially for low end setups, you should expect a 20-30fps impact regardless of what system you're using. For example, I'm on an Acer laptop with an i7-4500U 3.0GHz, 2GB R7 M265 and I usually have 60+fps, with an ENB that goes down to 17-20 :/

2)For me, no. For people with high end PCs, yes, seeing as you can't run Skyrim/New Vegas at over 60fps anyway. For New Vegas I would recommend you install The Imaginator as it doesn't impact performance to even close to the amount as an ENB, is fully customisable, and looks pretty damn good.

3)You can try, you'll get some nice screenshots of your character, but for normal play the impact performance will more than likely be too much and instillation can be complicated. In the end it's up to you

@"quicksilver500" thanks for a detailed response , yes that what sparked the idea , i use The IMAGINATOR as well as a texture pack just to make it aesthetically pleasing just wondered if it was worth the effort to enb it but seeing how it impacts performance to that degree im hesitant

To give you a comparison:

With ENB - ~17fps:

Without ENB - ~60fps:

Yes, the ENB looks a lot better, but take into mind that you cannot use the game's antialiasing or anisotropic filtering with an ENB, so edges and other things look a bit off in game, that and the performance hit really didn't make it worthwhile for me

@paradoxwing It all depends on what ENB you look at. With a lower end PC, i would honestly suggest using Millennia's MillENB for 0_150. It's made by the same guy that made a ton of high quality weapon mods and it is a subtle yet awesome ENB to use. I used to use it myself when i had a less powerful rig and i had almost no performance impact. In your case, you may experience some impact, but it's totally worth a shot if it makes your game look good

Here is what my game looked like when i was using the ENB a while ago.

Spoiler:

@"Grimmex" imight try rthat , that looks awesome

i use the imaninator or sweet FX and skip the ENB for fallout on skyrim however if you have the setup i'd say go for an ENB, anyone elses oppinion differ?

yea i tried a few and the one suggested above i was pushing max at 15fps lol yea not happening till i have a better rig thanks all

@"Grimmex" @"paradoxwing" So will I

There's no instillation guide though... :/

like i got it to work and look amazing but i couldn't this machine (the unique battle rifle ) with out massive frame drop and near crash , i just dragged and dropped and manually added the files to my new vegas directory and it added the enb with out issue unless i did everything wrong i won't add an enb yet

ENBs are mostly taxing on the GPU first, the better your GPU the better the game runs with an ENB.
ENBs also run better on Nvidia cards than AMD or Intel GPUs. Also ENBs are customizeable, you can turn down options to make them less taxing on your system.

@quicksilver500 It's pretty much the same with any ENB. With this one, just drop all of the contents of the ENB series file into your Fallout New Vegas directory, then drop all of the MillENB files over that and overwrite anything. If you have the 4GB launcher, you may have to put the d3d9.dll into the EXE folder in the directory.

Hope that helps

just ran a sweetFX preset your FPS will thank you.

@"Grimmex" thanks for the tips man

I have a GTX 1080, and I-7 4790 K, 120 mods+ with merge patches and I can barey maintain consistent 45 FPS. 60+ FPS all day without MODS easily. You won't know until you try.

Of course, it is worth to use the ENB. If you do not have a powerful computer is to choose an ENB that as little as possible burden the computer for the settings can be used ENB where you can also disable the most demanding settings.

@shin8651 That's rather odd. I'm running a 1070 8gb, 16gb of ram, and a 4770K at 3.5ghz and i maintain a solid 55-60 fps with slight drops in high load areas and i'm running a high end ENB with all of the usual graphics mods. I'm not running as many mods (about 50-60 at a time) but you should totally be getting more fps than that.

What types of more demanding mods are you using? maybe i can help get that framrate up a bit

I cant really recommend anything when it comes to enbs but all I know is that it's pretty complicated and I dont even know if it's worth at the end considering everything. I have New Vegas running on everything high with a few visual mods that enhance the lighting and stuff and it looks pretty good.

Just today I tried installing an enb and it reminded me why I never used enbs because I almost messed up my game files. My only advice can be if you are gonna mess with enbs just copy your all files except data folder somewhere else and copy shaders from data files so if you mess anything up you can always return.

XxAKINCIxX wrote:

Just today I tried installing an enb and it reminded me why I never used enbs because I almost messed up my game files. My only advice can be if you are gonna mess with enbs just copy your all files except data folder somewhere else and copy shaders from data files so if you mess anything up you can always return.

It's always good to have backups, especially when you are modding your game. I have multiple copies of main directory with different ENB files, original main- and data directory backed up and modded data folder backup. I have 46Gb of data just for backups....

Also, it is fairly easy to remove ENB files, just delete everything which came along with the archive.

when u use an enb and want more performance out of it, set this in enbseries.ini EnableAdaptation=false, EnableDepthOfField=false, EnableAmbientOcclusion=false, EnableDetailedShadow=false
and you´ll get like 10-20 fps, depends on your system and the enb u are using, of course it´s of cost of the look but works, you can edit enbseries.ini directly or hit shift and enter and configure it ingame.
While ingame you have to save first and then apply. You can also try reshade, it´s not that performance eating