VR - High fidelity ENB by SGS

Skyrim VR - High Fidelity ENB by SGS ENB's main goals are realism, high performance and visual fidelity. The shader code is written from scratch and optimized for VR, with all processing done in a single pass to minimize fps loss. It applies proper tone mapping to Skyrim VR, as well as adjusting brightness levels for added realism

SkyRIM VR-SGS High Reliability ENB

The main goals of this ENB are photorealism, high performance and visual fidelity. The shader code is written from scratch and optimized for VR, with all processing done in a single pass to minimize fps loss. It applies appropriate color grading to sky VR, as well as adjusting light levels to increase realism.

What it does:

It solves one of the most glaring issues in Skyrim's rendering pipeline, which is the tonemapper, applying some sharpening and making the nights realistically dark. Skyrim's tone mapper is terrible, the highlights and black levels are completely blown out, and highlight saturation and coloration are turned off. I replaced Skyrim's tone mapper with the one used in Uncharted 2, which was developed by John Hable from Naughty Dog. I've been using Uncharted2's tone mapper on several projects over the years, and in my opinion it provides some of the best results and is performance friendly. You can get more information about it and tone mapping here: 6" to achieve this, or you can do it without it and increase the sharpening value in the ENB settings. The last thing about this is the Skyrim Nights. Even with the weather mode, they are unrealistically bright, this can also be fixed with other mods similar to Darker Nights, but most of them will cause other problems because Skyrim's engine design doesn't handle dark areas very well. A lot of times, dimming the lights will cause something to have incorrect light levels, like glowing water or grass. Darkening the image through post-processing will only take you so far, as it will also darken things that are supposed to be bright, like light sources. So ENB does a little bit of both, it reduces the ambient and direct lighting a little bit at night, and it also adjusts the tone mapping curve to make things darker while still keeping the lights bright. The day/night interval is optional (enabled by default), so you can disable it if you want to keep your nights super bright or you already use a mod.

What it can’t do:

This ENB doesn't add additional effects like ambient occlusion or blooms, in fact I removed the blooms and eye adaptation completely. Ambient occlusion doesn't work well in VR. Ambient occlusion requires multiple render passes and a ton of texture reads to do correctly, which makes it performance hungry and will tank your framerate. Normally, in 2d games, ambient occlusion is rendered at half or a quarter of the resolution, and the samples are dithered and then blurred. This might look fine on a monitor, but in VR, aliasing can be distracting, with jittery samples swimming over when you turn your head. If you have the performance to spare and don't mind the extra artifacts, feel free to enable surrounding occlusion. I disabled it because it's really not needed and most HMD's Fresnel lenses actually have a bit of bloom applied to them. Adding bloom also muddies the final image a bit, which is exactly the opposite of what I want in VR. Not using Bloch will also save some performance. I removed eye adaptation as it is not needed in VR. Your eyes are completely closed to surrounding light while wearing the HMD, and will naturally adjust to the level of light it emits. Not using eye adaptation also saves some performance. This ENB also doesn't fundamentally change the color. I tried to keep the light levels, color and saturation as close to vanilla as possible.

Achievements:

I wrote the shader completely from scratch to make it as performance friendly as possible. All done in one pass in a well-effected shader. The use of multiple passes is one of the reasons why most ENB tanks perform well in VR …