Water

What is this button?

Author:
OpenMW Authors
Description:
OpenMW has a configurable water shader, with several parameters that can be adjusted.

Mod Installation/Setup Info

Did you find any inaccurate information below? Please let us know by opening an issue on GitLab or joining our Discord!

Usage Notes:

Water settings can have a huge impact on performance without it being very obvious. Some things that can affect performance:

  • Texture quality: It can be tempting to set this to "High", but the difference between that and "Low" is actually not too noticeable in practice. In any case, it may be a worthy tradeoff to simply set this to "Low"
  • Reflection shader detail: This is another one that may be tempting to max out, but really beyond "World" reflections a lot of the extra detail is hard to notice and very expensive to render
  • Refraction: Like the above reflection option, this one requires the engine to draw the entire scene twice which results in a decent performance hit. It is recommended to keep this option disabled unless you don't mind sacrificing the FPS

Extra Configs:
These values need to be added to settings.cfg (be sure to consult the CFG Generator for a complete readout of all required settings):
[Water]
shader = true
rtt size = 512
reflection detail = 2
refraction = true