Customizing OBGE has a learning curve so I'll try to help you understand how to make the game look better after you've got it installed. Here are the
technicalities of the shaders and here are some
recommended settings for them. I'll be doing an as thorough as possible review of the shaders until I get bored :^)
Shaders can be edited by opening up the .fx files with a text editor or using either of the in-game shader controllers, I use
Notepad++ when editing .fx or .ini files. Also keep in mind I have a decent GPU and my display is a 1920x1200 IPS so some of my preferred shaders may or may not be suited for you.
As for in-game tweaking
I use the GUI rather than the menu based editor. It has less shaders to play with but it's more intuitive and you can set automatic interior settings and backup slots, I've never set up an interior profile though.
[Ambient Occlusion] - AO tries(and usually fails) to emulate the way shadows work. Typically it's adding darkness around objects in your games pretending they are shadows, it looks nice usually but some games have awful settings. Newer implementations of AO don't have much of a performance hit but these ones injected into Oblivion will.
I personally use Volumetric and Ring SSAO depending on the scene.
- Volumetric_SSAO.fx
- Good environment AO but adds artefacts to hair and faces
- Ring_SSAO.fx
- Good overall AO but it darkens the entire scene and adds some grain.
- Ring_SSAO-q.fx
- Didn't seem to do anything.
- CrysisAO.fx
- Similar to RingSSAO but less with less grain on the environment but more on the faces/hair.
- HBAO.fx
- HDAO.fx
- Similar to CrysisAO but with terrible face grain.
- HSAO.fx
- JakobsenAO.fx
[Lighting Effects] - These control how light affects the environment. I use Godrays06.
- Godrays05.fx
- Old godrays file. I don't think there's any gain in using this.
- Godrays06.fx
- New godrays file. Has a lot of worthwhile edits you can make to the .fx but I have forgotten how to tweak it properly. I set the number of passes to 80 to get rid of the dithered look of the beams.
- LightShafts_PCS.fx
- Godrays for use with PCS. PCS conflicts with All Natural though.
- Volumetric_SSII.fx
- Indirect illumination tries to better replicate how light works in the real world. At default values it adds grain to basically everything and makes everything typically brighter, it can look cool but it has an absolutely massive performance hit.
- Volumetric_SSGI.fx
- Global illumination is similar to SSII but it also adds some SSAO. If you tweak this it looks amazing and can have a reduced performance hit.
[Filtering] - 'Anti-aliasing' techniques. I don't tweak these in the .fx files since none of them help with shimmering(my only real grip with aliasing). You can force AA if you have an Nvidia card but the performance hit is very large. I use MDFAA and SweetFX's SMAA.
- NormalFilterAA.fx
- DLAA.fx
- FXAA2.fx
- FXAA3.fx
- MLAA.fx
- This doesn't blur the screen but it seems to add jaggies when used with SweetFX's SMAA.
- MDLAA.fx
- Pretty good but blurry. It's a mixture of MLAA and DLAA.
- MFXAA.fx
- Mixture of MLAA and FXAA. Really good and works well with SweetFX.
- SMAA.fx
- No blur as far as I can tell but I'm not sure since I can't enable/disable it in-game. I'd imagine it's the same as SweetFX.
[Depth of Field] - DoF techniques either blur what you aren't looking at or blur areas that are far away from your character. Tweaking these makes a radical difference unlike most of the above shaders. I use and frequently tweak all of the bokeh shaders except shaped depending on the scene.
- Shaped_Bokeh_DoF.fx
- This one is weird. Most bokeh's blur what you aren't looking at but don't blur anything when you're looking at the sky - this one blurs everything when you're looking at the sky. Pretty awful with default settings but it's a WIP(thatwillneverbefinished).
- Bokeh_Hexagon_DoF.fx
- Bokeh_Circle_DoF.fx
- Pseudo_Bokeh_DoF.fx
- CrysisDoF.fx
- This is a port of the Crysis Warhead DoF. It's similar to bokeh in that it blurs what you aren't looking at but it's mostly blurring things off into the distance. If tweaked it's pretty nice for making the distant LOD and leaf jaggies less ugly.
- DepthOfField.fx
- This is a distance blurring DoF.
[Misc] - These are miscellany shaders that have alter the way the whole picture looks.
- LensEffects.fx
- Tilt shift bokeh type of thing, this is a photoraphy trick. Looks cool and is neat for screenshots.
- CelShader+EdgeAA.fx
- This adds a celshader and an edge AA. At first glance it may just seem like this traces edges and makes them black but it actually does add a slight celshading effect ala Okami. Decent at removing jaggies if you don't mind the cartoon look.
- ColorEffects.fx
- All of the effects in this shader can be used for good except for the sepia and color invert. It pays off to mess around with them in-game in conjunction with the other shaders. At first glance the blur highlight looks useless for improving the image but you can mess with it's three settings to darken or brighten the entire scene, or you could emulate a s1ck acid trip.
- ColorMood.fx
- RBG sepia filter. The ratio controls how strong the effect is, setting it low can make the color adjusting nice. Very good at adding Comforting™ brown filter for interiors.
- ENBColorEffect.fx
- This is a port of the old ENB Boris(?) made for Oblivion. At default values it blurs the scene and doesn't look too good but you can tweak it and improve what it does.
- HLSLbleachbypass.fx
- "Essentially superimposes an image with a fully desaturated version of itself to increase contrasts and make highlights even brighter". I set it to a negative value to brighten the screen differently than contrast/brightness/gamma does. Or something.
- HLSLColorGrading02.fx
- Older version of the below?
- HLSLColorGrading03.fx(???)
- The definition of color grading seems to be the enemy of a layman but this shader is very powerful, it's good thing it only has two variables! It's pretty easy to improve the saturation and depth of a scene using this shader but only as a temporary measure, when you tweak it in one scene it will make most of the other scenes look very strange.
- HLSLvignette.fx
- Adds a circular vignette(darkness in the corners of the screen). Vignette is usually the bane of gameplay and screenshots but some games use it well to emulate claustrophobia. For instance Black Flag used it in the jungle and underwater sequences.
- obsharpen.fx
- Sharpening shader. I set it to 1.x to get rid of some post processing blur from the other shaders.
- Toon.fx
- This will make your game look like an oil painting. I once tried tweaking it to make it look 'good' but couldn't.
- Film16.fx
- Film shader. At default settings it gives the game a floaty and desaturated look. Might be rewarding to customize the .fx.
- SmartSat.fx
- Seems to blur the screen.
- Technicolor3.fx
- This shader makes the game look like old television. Gray and cold looking.