How to extend the view distances further

pcthe-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim

OK, I'm lucky enough to have the game run smoothly enough for my tastes on the Ultra settings – so with all the game-provided settings set to maximum.

Most of the time it looks brilliant. However, once you find a large open space, and then can see the distance rendering cut-offs, such as these disappearing grasses just past the road and the smudge of a texture up the hill in the distance:

Since I'm getting just under 50 FPS from the above location (according to Fraps), and that or more elsewhere, I'd like to sacrifice a few of those to improve the visual quality a little bit by making the game draw things further away.

After a quick web search I see lots of talk of modifying ini files, but many of these talk about options without really explaining them. I get the feeling that the other recent Bethesda games have been tweaked like this before and so the tweakers write guides for those already in the know roughly how all this works.

Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people, and I don't really want to wade through tonnes of info and test tonnes of tweaks until I find the right combination.

So, what ini changes (or any other method!) should I use to extend the draw distance further that the defaults the game provides?

Best Answer

OK, I decided not to be lazy and to actually put some effort in myself, and I think it was worth it. Here is the "after" screenshot of the scene from the question. Not quite the right angle and different time of day, but you should be able to get the point.

Notice that the grass goes much further, but also that rocks appears in the far distance and the distant trees that were visible are now of much higher quality. There's even a shrine thing on the left that I couldn't see before. All this with a drop of only ~10FPS to ~40FPS. Very nice.

Here's another shot I took, just to reinforce that this works, before/after the various distance tweaks. Again note the distant trees up the river and through the clearing, but also the bridge up the river and better house on the right:

First, I set the game to it's default Ultra settings. So all the tweaks I make here are based off of that settings group.

In My Documents/My Games/Skyrim there are two files called SkyrimPrefs.ini and Skyrim.ini that we will be tweaking. Back them up before changing anything, or in the worst case delete them if you break them and Skyrim should regenerate new ones.

The most important change: Unlocking the grid

You need to change how many grid cells around the player should be loaded by the game - apparently if a grid cell isn't loaded nothing will make the stuff in that cell render in best quality, so all you'll get are low-quality "big" items like trees/houses/etc and the landscape, at best.

So, in the Skyrim.ini I have changed the following:

uGridsToLoad=5            →  9
uExterior Cell Buffer=36  →  100

uGridsToLoad is the important one, it says how much space around the player should be loaded and active (and thus allow things to render). This will increase RAM usage and load times (but not too significantly). From what I read, it must be an odd number and too high values will crash the game (if it runs out of RAM, you can apparently hack the exe to be large address aware to avoid this, but I didn't fancy messing with that).

I selected 9 as this produced the nice image above, but doesn't (yet) seem to be causing any crashes for me.

uExterior Cell Buffer should, apparently, be set to (uGridsToLoad+1)².

Warning: A saved game cannot be loaded on a lower uGridsToLoad setting. So if you bump this up to 9 and later try to turn it back down again you will be locked out of your saved game. There is a fix for this, which is to load the game at the higher setting and then do the following lines at the console:

setini "ugridstoload:general" 5
saveini
refreshini

Then save and quit, and change the uGridsToLoad to the desired value.

Tweaking the Distances

With it set so distant cells can contain high quality items the next step is to up the loading distances.

Now, Ultra seems to sort most of them out already, and just loading the game with uGridsToLoad increased was an instant improvement (the rocks/trees/etc). If you need to achieve this on lower settings just crank up all the view distance bars in the settings (I'm sure there's ini settings for them, but didn't bother to investigate).

Grass was still an issue. So in SkyrimPrefs.ini I did the following:

fGrassStartFadeDistance=7000.0000     → 25000.0000
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=7000.0000  → 25000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance=0.0000     → 10000.0000

I don't know specifically what each of these three items each do, but those three new values provided the results given, so I'm happy with them.

On advice found in various places I also changed the following variable that should allow more high quality trees. I'm not sure I can see the difference, but it didn't seem to hurt performance:

uiMaxSkinnedTreesToRender=20  →  40

Other tweaks for extra pretty

While researching all this I came across various other tweaks that claim to improve the visual appearance of the game slightly.

The most important (and only ones I could really tell the difference over) are these two, which really improved the game's shadows for me - they are much less "blocky" now:

iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3     →  1
iShadowFilter=3               →  4
fShadowLODStartFade=200.0000  →  1000.0000

Related Solutions

How to view FPS in Skyrim

Install a tool like FRAPS (free, but limited to 30 seconds of screen recording) or RivaTuner (free) and you will be able to see the FPS of any game.

FRAPS can be used for showing your FPS, as well as recording your gameplay, but that will require you to buy the full version.

Weird lags in dungeons

Mostly when there is a "rain" effect in them, or the dust in tombs

I think you're talking about the "light rays coming through the roof" type of effect, and the fog that covers the floor in most dungeons and caves.

In certain areas it is very concentrated and causes a significant dip in framerate, as well as input lag.

On your system it may not be evident that the framerate and input lag are connected because the FPS hit isn't too bad. I played Skyrim over the weekend on a 2009 MacbookPro with a Nvidia 9400M! Was pretty stunned that the game would run at all. Had a program to monitor the GPU temp, fan speed, and also overclocked the GPU. Then I created a custom 1152x720 resolution with the Nvidia control panel. This let me play at an average 22-25 FPS outdoors which is pretty nuts all things considered! What was more amazing to me, is just how incredible the load times are, as they were just as fast on that system, with hgih detail textures, that they are on my Core i5/4850 iMac! So I don't think Elder Scroll's engine is as bad as people make it to be... but I digress.

Back to the topic: in caves and dungeons, it would sometimes dip to 5 FPS!

I'm pretty sure it is not related to GPU shadows. This is one of the first tweaks I tried on the Nvidia 9400M, and it made very little difference. You can sort of disable shadows by changing the shadow distance settings in the SkyrimPrefs file:

fShadowDistance=0.0000
fInteriorShadowDistance=0.0000
fShadowLODStartFade=0.0000

This effectively removes shadows. I played several hours like this, only to find out later that the GPU shadows had a very little impact on performance. On that system I gained only 1-2 FPS. However the change in graphics quality was huge, because editing the settings as above, turns off a lot of lighting that creats dramatic ambiance. Perhaps there is a better way to turn off shadows, but effectively the settings above turned off more than shadows.

Then, on the SkyrimNexus website you can find the mod Fog Mesh Remover which, as is explained on the description page, does not actually improve performance. Still I tried it thinking that perhaps the GPU would skip the polygon entirely if it is all 0 alpha but it doesn't.

Last but not least there was another setting I saw that was suggested. You can reduce the number of particles like so:

iMaxDesired=50

Reportedly, the particles are used to make the "ambiant dust". Having tried this, I found no change in performance. I suspect that the person confused the "dust in the light" texture effect for particles. They are a texture however, which slowly pans to give the impression of dust floating in the air.

Short answer: the fog/light ray/ambiant dust effect appear to be mesh-based, and appears to be fixed in the scenery itself. So there is no setting to turn it off entirely that I know of. Perhaps this will be possible once the Creation Kit comes out starting in January.