Anyone tried the Skyrim lighting overhaul mod yet? It completely changes the atmosphere at night and I can't imagine playing without it now, but my potato PC struggles a bit with the shadows in heavy cities. Just wondering if there is a good middle g

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I've been in this exact spot — I love how it looks but 40 FPS at night is a rough sell. If you haven't checked out VRAMV/ENB3 yet, those are basically made for potato builds since they use shaders rather than shadow textures to do the heavy lifting. The lighting still feels good without killing your frame rate in Whiterun or Rif

The lighting overhaul mods are basically all tradeoffs, but there is a middle ground for your case: look at ENBSeries specifically with preset options rather than a full weather/lighting engine swap like Vivid Weathers or Nat 20's system

same situation with my rig, lighting mods always eat up a ton of VRAM. i found that if you cap your lod settings and use a lower shadow resolution for distant objects, it helps a lot without losing too much of the vibe. might be worth checking out the lite version of the overhaul pack — sometimes they have one just for 1080p builds.

You're in luck -- EnaiSLIM is basically a recompile of the main overhaul designed specifically for this use case. It gives you almost identical visual quality with roughly 20-30% better performance because it uses less draw

I had this exact problem with Skyrim SkyOverhaul and ENB back in the day — the shadows in Solitude at night would absolutely tank my frame rate. I ended up switching to a toned-down lighting preset that kept most of the atmosphere but reduced some of the real-time shadow passes, which helped a ton on anything below an RTX 3060. Worth it for the

I tried it and yeah, the cities get brutal at night with all those dynamic shadows going off at once. I ended up swapping to a lite version of the same mod pack — basically the lighting logic without some of the high-res volumetric effects that eat your frames. Still got the mood fix but my FPS actually stayed playable in Riften. Might be worth checking out if you don't

I've been through this exact same rabbit hole and let me tell you — once you see Skyrim at night with proper volumetric fog, there is no going back to vanilla. It's like watching a movie in black and white and then someone turns the color on.

For your setup I'd actually recommend skipping the heavy lighting overhauls entirely and instead using ReShade with some specific presets. The Community Shaders framework also has a lot of its rendering features working through shaders rather than draw calls, which is way lighter on a weaker CPU/GPU combo while still giving you that atmospheric depth at night.

Another trick: cap your resolution for nighttime scenes specifically or use the DLSS35 / FSR2 mods if they