Silent Horizons 2

Hybrid Linear Lighting

Instead of doing lighting purely in gamma or linear space, SH2 converts textures into an intermediate color space. This provides a substantial improvement to the scene lighting while remaining compatible with textures designed for the vanilla system.

This unique technique allows textures to be rendered more realistically without requiring a complete rework of every asset, bringing a taste of modern rendering into your game hassle-free.

Built-in screen space global illumination

Careful tuning of ENBs SSAO/IL (screen space ambient occlusion/indirect lighting) provides the scene with beautiful bounce lighting and tastefully balanced shadowing.

Making both environments and characters feel like they’re an actual part of the game world and its lighting.

Skylighting rounds off the whole picture by bringing much-needed depth to shadows on a larger scale.

Horizons as breathtaking as they are Silent

SH2 features full integration of ENBs sky and cloud scattering, creating beautiful backdrops for Skyrims landscape.

Giving flat clouds a nice bit of volume and providing the previously rather static sky gradient with realistic atmospheric scattering.

Attenuated Histogram Adaptation

My take on an adaptation shader aiming to provide intuitive controls instead of getting in your way.

It skips hard limits and opts for adjustable attenuation sliders, providing a smooth adaptation experience while still giving the shader the power to handle almost anything you can throw at it.

Texture enhancements with KiSharp

The newest evolution of my sharpening shader. It reacts to both object edges and local contrast, bringing out texture details without risking oversharpening or ugly haloing.

You surely think something this small isn’t going to have a significant impact but you would be surprised. Reactions ranged from “like wearing glasses for the first time” to “I was able to drop the resolution of my textures”.
It simply feels natural.

2 Dynamic 2 Bloom

The second generation of my bloom shader. Sporting a simplified yet still powerful UI that gives you full control at all times.

Able to take full advantage of even the smallest rendering passes thanks to smart filtering and upscaling.
On top of that, it also offers the option to do depth-based tweaking with never-before-seen accuracy and advanced bloom mixing and blending.

Mapping all the Tones

Before leaving the world of HDR colors, SH2 applies a custom toneampper that ties the whole scene together. It’s not only extremely fast and easy to tweak but also provides optimal highlight compression, ensuring as much data as possible is preserved.

The shader setup offers a ton of alternative curves as well, which can be chosen freely within the UI. This also includes ones that provide LOG footage, letting you grade it as if you were using a real-world camera.
In short, flexibility unheard of before.

Grading and adjusting your Colors

SH2s powerful color grading stack - KiSuite - provides you with an incredible amount of tools for all of your coloring needs. A small Lightroom directly inside of your game, in real-time.

Add to that the smaller and arguably more important HDR counterpart and you’re able to achieve almost any style you can think of.

If you’re feeling like experimenting with black and white, my Monochroma shader is included as well. It allows targeting a range of hues that should keep their saturation while the rest of the scene loses it.

LUT up your world

If the LUT system in the first Silent Horizons was groundbreaking, this one can only be classified as earth-shattering.

The most powerful and adaptive LUT system ever seen in an ENB. You won’t need a single bit of HLSL knowledge to utilize it. Mix and match whatever you want. Single textures, atlases, day-night-interior separated, and even per-weather! Everything can be loaded with a single command, the shader and UI will adapt to it automatically.

All of this is powered by a high quality tetrahedral based shader, allowing SH2 to get the most out of even low precision LUTs.

And if you don’t feel like adding your own, SH2 comes preloaded with a set of LUTs ready to be played with.

Space for Imagespaces

Imagespaces are Skyrims way of applying various post-processing effects. Used by weathers, interiors, magic effects, etc. While most ENBs simply ignore this innate color grading, SH2 takes a different route. Using the AGIS (Apply Game ImageSpace) shader, it honors the game’s output with smart limits.

Allowing magic effects like night eye/vision or fade-to-black transitions to simply work out of the box. This also includes mod-added ones like Predator Vision for example.

Choose your Anti-Aliasing

Not only are both SMAA and FXAA available, they are now fully tweakable and toggleable from within the GUI thanks to the ENB Extender. SMAA also received some upgrades under the hood ensuring a more robust implementation.

Fighting banding with Dithering

Also included again is my custom dithering shader to combat any kind of color banding with a pleasing Gaussian-distributed blue noise pattern. Fast and clean.

Note: The example is exaggerated (only using 4 bits per channel) to better visualize the effects of banding and dithering.

Framing screenshots with cinematic goodies

Borders and a vignette can’t be missing either and SH2 includes some very flexible shaders for them.

These include some nifty features like being able to render borders behind in-game objects.
Ready for experimentation.

Performance-conscious quality improvements

Keeping a balance between fidelity and performance is one of the main principles of Silent Horizons, this is no different for New Dawn.

While overall heavier than the Core variants, effects have only been added or given improved quality when the costs are justified.

Effects that are only situationally desired are fully configured but turned off by default.
This results in an optimal out-of-the-box experience while allowing easy access to a wide range of additional features.

The mighty Depth of Field

A port of Silent Horizons DoF with first-party ENB Exender integration. Giving Skyrims most advanced DoF shader another chance to shine.

Better performance, cleaner UI and all features available straight from within your game.

In short: The best-in-class DoF got even better.

Versatile lens flares and effects

Featuring an assortment of lens effects ranging from flares and dirt to weather effects like rain droplets and a frost vignette.

Reproduce real-world camera lens artifacts, enhance your immersion with weather effects during storms or simply spice up your visuals. The choice is yours.
Fully configured and ready to be used with a single click.

High-quality film grain

A shader aiming to emulate how actual film grain looks, unlike your usual “grain” shaders that simply add the equivalent of digital noise.

Allowing for multiple layers of grain, choosing their type, size and density. Compositing happens in a logarithmic color space for a more authentic and pleasant effect.

Advanced chromatic aberration (CA) and lens distortion

This isn’t your usual simple and ugly channel-shift CA.

Instead of leaving unsightly “gaps” between color channels, this shader provides a continuous “gradient” for the entire length of the distortion. Resulting in a smooth and realistic chromatic aberration.

It also features a fully fledged lens distortion effect, allowing both to work seamlessly with one another.

Upgraded blur suite

This suite combines a bunch of blurring methods and masks into a single powerful shader, allowing you to recreate all kinds of blur effects with ease.

Now with full ENB Extender integration to allow instant toggling of the entire effect.
Ensuring the best possible performance, quality and user experience.