The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition Forum

Hey All,
As we all know, ENB functionality is not good. I did some searching and stumbled on a way to "start" to get it to work but need some smart people to offer suggestions. I do NOT recommend playing around like I am below but "helpful" suggestions/advice are welcome. :)

1. A Googled search led to a post where a person discussed changing the Library for D3D11 and the 46e and 47e .dll files to "Native".
2. I tried "Native". Game would not launch.
3. Tried "Builtin,Native" and no change.
4. When I switched BACK to "Native,Builtin" is when the fun starts! "ENB Shaders compiling, delete ENB Cache folder on change of d3d11.dll file" message popped up! Then the game crashes to desktop. Which is great progress and was cool to see.
5. I now CAN'T boot the game with "Native,Builtin" or else ENB crashes to desktop so I have to use "Builtin,Native".
6. So now, it would "SEEM", that I am in a typical "identify/turn-off" the crashing/offending" mod in order to get ENB working and am slogging through that. I have yet to just turn everything off EXCEPT SKSE64, so maybe tonight.

Does anyone have ENB working on their Skyrim, under Crossover, that can offer some tips? I also saw some threads about WINE Tricks switches/arguments but don't know enough about WINE/WINE Tricks to understand how to use them.

Anyway, the above is offered as "here is where I am" as a data point for anyone searching later. Will update if I get it all working and how I did it.

Best Regards and Best Wishes for 2024!

So I've been experimenting with it since November last year. ENB runs fine for me through DXVK and MSync, it launches no worries. I've added all the d3dcompilers and d3d11 to WineCFG overwrites (native, builtin), but the ENB was working the same before that. Not all ENB effects work though, and I've had to disable them. For example, most water and underwater effects cause problems, namely Water Tesselation and Underwater Caustics. I cannot get the underwater shader to work at all, its just clear underwater, even when disabled. Last year I was able somehow to get ComplexParticleLights working, but I removed the game to play cyberpunk and now I cannot find a way to get the particle lights working again.

I have not found a way to get ENB to launch with D3Dmetal.

Make sure you download the DirectX for Modern Games from the crossover library. Use BethINI to get the vanilla game running at more optimal performance.

I will be experimenting with ways to force Skyrim through DXVK to try and get the non-working ENB effects working. There is a Linux wrapper in the ENBSeries files, but I haven't noticed any significant effect using that (but haven't been testing so much). I know nothing about this wine stuff, so I'm just basically throwing things against the wall as hard as I can til something sticks.

Actually, I find remarkably little discussion online about modding Skyrim on crossover. Every thread I see just mentions to use WryeBash and do it by hand, which is fine for a small amount of mods and teaches you to manage them correctly, but is incredible painstaking at large load orders. And unnecessary too.

I know your question is about ENB but I'll add some extra information here for anyone who stumbles upon this.

• mod organizer 2 works.
• crossover versions 23.x need LOOT version 15.1
• Wrye bash works.
• matorsmash works for me only on crossover 24.x
• LOOT version 19.x works fine for me on crossover 24.x and is remarkably fast compared to how it was before (on the old version sorting the plugins took upwards of 5mins, now it takes less than 5 seconds)
• wabbajack did not work on crossover 23.x for me. I tried it with parallels and was able to install a huge modpack but it did not run. there are some plugins that don't seem to work through crossover. I have not bothered with wabajack on 24.x
• community shaders does not work. It uses AVX and apple silicon does not have AVX.
• BethINI works fine on crossover. BethINIpie did not on 23.x but I haven't tried on 24.x
• Bodyslide works fine on 23.x and runs extremely fast on 24.x . The outfit studio crashed on 23.x because of OpenGL limitations, I have not found a way around that and frankly don't care to.
• DynDoLod was similar on 23.x, it would not run due to OpenGL limitations. I have not tested on 24.x
• Many Skyrim plugins and ENB presets use keyboard shortcuts with the End or Home or blabla keys that aren't available on Mac. Go into the .ini files and change these using virtual keycodes (http://www.kbdedit.com/manual/low_level_vk_list.html).
• Some keys on the Mac keyboard cause crashes, namely the right CMD button seems to cause issues (or maybe it was the right OPT).

I would love for the Crossover team to chime in about how it might be possible to D3D wrappers running better, or why certain ENB effects just don't seem to appear in game. Again, I know nothing about this stuff.

Currently I've got ~1000 mods running through crossover, I run the game at 1512x982 fullscreen on medium with E.V.C ENB (very well optimised for great visuals, but still needs tweaking) at around 25-30fps outdoors and 30-60fps indoors. I'm now trying to optimise the load order as much as possible to bring the frames up.

I'm using a M1Pro with 16gb and find that this amount of system memory is frankly too low to do anything ambitious with. Because the Mac shares that 16gb between the GPU and CPU it's very easy for skyrim+enb to max out rapidly. But I'm a stubborn motherfucker and want my perfect Skyrim on my Mac.

If you go without ENB, currently very large load orders are extremely possible on crossover. For ENB I fear that 16gb is not enough

I've found guides for linux and windows systems to force Skyrim to run through DXVK vulkan through some tricks (https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/yjin79/updated_instructions_vulkan_for_skyrim_with/) have managed to get that working but not run any tests on it yet. Not sure if it is even doing much, or maybe it is. Again, if the crossover team could chime in that would be fantastic.

With crossover 24.x out and seeing Andrew Tsai's video about getting FSR3 and Frame Generation running on DX12 games, and then seeing stuff like PureDarks FSR3+FG for DX11 Games and Skyrim specifically, I think we may be soon able to do some wonderous things through Crossover. PureDark says that the FSR3+FG doesn't work on Proton yet, but supposedly neither does ENB out the box and yet it worked for me on Skyrim no problem. But his FSR plugin is behind a DRM paywall and I'm not exactly willing to spend money on the slight chance I can get it working. Once again again, if someone knows better about these things it would be a massive help.

Once last thing that I question is Skyrims ability to use virtual memory through crossover. On PC it's recommended to set quite a large amount for large load orders, but obviously on Mac this is dynamically choses by the system. So I question, is the amount that Skyrim needs/wants/uses correctly reported to the system through crossover? I get inexplicably random crashes that seem to be memory issues and it's extremely tedious to diagnose whether it was CPU, GPU, or disk. For example, many times my C: drive in crossover reports a different level of free memory (ie. more) than regular Mac folders report.

Because I see zero real information about this stuff anywhere, I'm considering writing some sort of guide to help get Mac users started with modding. I would love to see people smarter than I apply a scalpel to this game to really push the limits of Skyrim on Mac, but until then its just gonna be me smashing my thick skull against the wall.

I'll also add that this guide

https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/intro.html

is amazing at setting up a base modded Skyrim with significant engine tweaks for strong performance gains. Just base a modlist on this. Make sure to not install CommunityShaders or any of its add-ons.

Hey Denel,
Excellent! Thank You for the update and will try this!
Best Regards and Best Wishes!

Wanted to chime in with some results. I found this thread initially via Reddit and found it useful and would like to see mroe itnerest in Mac modding compatabilty.

-I managed to get Skyrim AE running on Crossover 24.0.5 ENB and a somewhat extensive modlist.
-I am on a M1 Pro macbook Pro 14 with 16GB of RAM.
-I am using a Wabbajack modlist that I assembled on Windows 11. I zipped it up, put it on my external SSD, copied it over, unzipped it, then manually edited the ModOrganizer.ini to point all paths to the c_drive location wihtin the bottle. There are two formats for paths, some like C:/Home... and come like C:\Home\ (with the double backslash). You need to Find/Replace all of them for everythign to work. Most important is the managed game path.
-The modlist is Anvil - Core, which includes ENB, SMP, and SKSE. In total I see over 300 esps and over 700 mod entries. Total size is ony the order of 70-80GB for this modlist alone.

Once all the paths were setup the game loaded just fine! I included some screenshots!

Now for the not as good news:
-I have tried another modlist too: my main modlist on PC, which is based on Anvil but about another 300 mods and an extra 100GB of size for the entire modlist. When using this modlist ModOrganizer opens fine and I can navigate around it. However, the moemnt I try to run anything including BodySlide ModOrganizer hangs and becomes completely unresponsive.
-I sometimes experience similar unresponsiveness ont he Anvil modlist mentioned above however it only lasts a couple seconds before MO2 starts whatever commend I was running.
-The major difference here I suspect is the much larger mod list space and significantly larger mod count.
-When MO2 becomes unresponsive is immediately before you ordinarily see the progress bar showing the preparation of the VFS with the laod order.
-My suspicion is that MO2 is hanging tryign to intiialize the VFS. This could be either due to some issue interacting with the MacOS file system due to the size of the modlist or it could also be a limitation with only have 16GB of RAM. I have to assume some portion of intantiating the VFS involves increased memory usage. My PC has 32GB of RAM and still is not quick running large modlists.
-Bodyslide worked, but the Preview did not, complaining about OpenGL context not being OK. Evidently this is due to not having a OpenGL 3 driver. I might look into this a bit and see if it can be solved.

Having said all of that I'm really happy this works at all! I could see starting from a much simpler modlist, running a basic texture back like Noble or Skyland AIO and a decent ENB (Picta Realis maybe?) and getting great results! The truth is in more or less any Wabbajack modlist you get a lot of mods that you would never individually install (e.g. for me, I love the idea of combat overhaul mods but I know I will eventually find a bow and be tempted by my old friend the sneak key...)