May Someone Explain Some Things about CS vs. ENB?

[Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang]

Wasn't sure how to title this without making it extraordinarily long, so let me rephrase the question:

I am downloading some new textures and similar things to my game, and I notice since Community Shaders has been introduced, there's a lot of new extra stuff I am unfamiliar with, like Complex Materials, PBR, Auto-Parallax, Light Placer, etc.

Do I need any of this as an ENB user? Or is that strictly for CS users.

[Hypertext Eye]

Light Placer is a CS addon. Only functions if you already have CS. And, it does nothing on its own, it needs json files to tell it what to do (there are mods that provide those for you).
PBR is only supported by CS.
Complex Materials is supported by CS and by ENB. If you want it, use it, but you don't have to. (unless you are talking about the mod called "Complex Materials", then don't use it, it is obsolete)
Auto-Parallax has become obsolete since PG Patcher (formerly ParallaxGen) is a thing. Use PG Patcher if you have parallax, complex, or PBR texture mods (or some combination of the three).

[CEPHY]

The short verion is that ENB and CS are two seperate things and not compatible with each other.

ENB has been around for ages, but CS is always getting more features and updates that are just as good as, if not straight up better then what ENB offers.

The biggest difference is that ENB is made by one dude, and if he someday decides to call it quits, ENB is dead in the water. CS, as the name implies, is community-made, and as such will always be around as long as someone keeps it working.

And finally, as for visuals, I think CS is far ahead of ENB by now. Making use of all the CS-exclusive features like skylighting, terrain shadows and so on, you can get impressive results without the performance impact of an ENB setup. Heck, the latest CS version supports frame generation. That's free FPS.

And if that isn't enough, you can put Reshade on top of that.

EDIT:
Here's an example. This is my current setup with CS.
Looks even better in other places.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725585
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725656

[Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang]

Originally posted by CEPHY:

Here's an example. This is my current setup with CS.
Looks even better in other places.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725585
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725656

Looks like a lot of white blur and intense vignette which I can't stand, not making a good case for yourself.
Also doesn't address the question, which someone has already thoroughly answered.

[Hypertext Eye]

Yeah those are not good screenshots. I use CS and my game doesn't look like that.

[Nabinkemper]

Here are a couple of screenshots for Cs and ENB. I didn't like CS water reflections and it had an issue with the wetness overlay on the waterwheel in the background. Everything else, including lighting, worked well. It's primarily down to resource efficiency. I do prefer ENB more.

CS with NAT III Weather
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3391900402

Rudy ENB with NAT III
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3050030353

EDIT: also, the window lighting was handled differently.

[Fofaodacarreta72]

Light Placer is a CS addon. Only functions if you already have CS.

[CEPHY]

Originally posted by Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang:

Originally posted by CEPHY:

Here's an example. This is my current setup with CS.
Looks even better in other places.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725585
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443725656

Looks like a lot of white blur and intense vignette which I can't stand, not making a good case for yourself.
Also doesn't address the question, which someone has already thoroughly answered.

Originally posted by Hypertext Eye:

Yeah those are not good screenshots. I use CS and my game doesn't look like that.

The viginette is from a reshade preset.

Should I point out that you can customize the thing?

[76561198050929976]

neither one of the example screenshots posted look better than ENB, and that one comparing to rudy is embarrassing for CS lmao

[Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang]

Originally posted by CEPHY:

Should I point out that you can customize the thing?

Perhaps I sounded condescending but I was not asking for a case to be made for either-or.

Maybe my topic title was confusing but it is almost immediately clarified in the original post.

I made my decision on which to use and indicated that I was asking about which addons belong to CS or ENB respectively.
I have no strong feeling about either, but I am comfortable with ENB and very satisfied with it, and have no intention to change given it is happily entrenched in my loadorder.

I am very familiar with the "new thing good" or "new thing bad" attitude of the modding community, but perhaps you should take your energy on "new thing good" and tell people to use the latest version of Skyrim instead of hanging onto the old outdated versions.

[Hypertext Eye]

Originally posted by Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang:

I have no strong feeling about either, but I am comfortable with ENB and very satisfied with it, and have no intention to change given it is happily entrenched in my loadorder.

As long as you're happy we're happy.
All you're really missing out on by not using CS is PBR textures.