You'll know ENB is working right away because as soon as you see the Bethesda logo (or maybe it's on the title screen) You'll see a little message at the top left 'ENBSeries by Boris Vorontsov' and some other text. the game will use the d3d9.dll you just unzipped. You can for instance increase Vibrance for a more fantasy-like look, or use Desaturate or Sepia to give the game a more eerie feeling. At this point if you run the game, ENB will be working, but not sweetFX, because that important SWEETFXd3d9.dll file isn't being used anymore. More advanced settings include color curves and tone mapping, which can be used to change the mood of the game. Sharpening can be particularly useful in games with “muddy” textures like the Dishonored or Bioshock series. Other interesting options are HDR which tries to mimic real HDR, and LUMASHARPEN which can be used to sharpen the detail of characters and items. You can turn on FXAA or SMAA Anti-aliasing by typing a boolean value (1 for “on”, 0 for “off”), but make sure to turn Anti-aliasing off in the game visual settings, as SweetFX will replace it. Opening the SweetFX_Settings.txt file will reveal a host of options. You can personalize your games further by creating your own SweetFX profiles, or editing existing ones. After installing the SweetFX preset, and using the in-built SMAA, performance improved to 58 fps average, along with a boost in visual quality. You can always change it back to 1080 if you hate it, but I was surprised to find the extra smoothness WITH an ENB made the slightly lesser pixel count un-noticable during actual gameplay.

With the game settings set to Ultra and TXAA turned on, we averaged 52.3 fps. The preset used was “| ULTRA TXAA | NO BLUR” by Sp00ky. By disabling the Anti-aliasing processing in-game and using SweetFX’s SMAA instead, in conjunction with a sharpening filter, we can achieve not only better graphics but also improved performance. Some games that are poorly optimized like Dishonored 2 can greatly benefit from certain SweetFX profiles.

Skyrim sweetfx vs enb