Every few months someone posts a screenshot of their Skyrim install that looks like a Cyberpunk mod, asks "how do I get this," and then quietly uninstalls a week later because their game runs at 28 fps in Whiterun. So here's the honest version of the modern-looking Skyrim stack, with the performance cliffs marked, because nobody tells you where they are until you've already driven off one.
ENB vs Community Shaders: pick your lane first
This is the fork in the road, and it decides everything downstream.
ENB is the old guard. It hooks the DirectX pipeline and gives you the richest effects. Proper complex interior lighting, screen-space ambient occlusion that actually looks right, subsurface scattering, the works. The cost is real: a heavy ENB preset can eat 20-40 fps on its own, mostly from ambient occlusion and complex parallax. The good news is ENB scales. You can turn off the expensive bits in the in-game menu (Shift+Enter) and keep the color grading, which is honestly where 70% of the "modern" look comes from anyway.
Community Shaders is the newer, leaner option and it's genuinely changed the calculus over the last couple of years. It's open-source, it plays nicer with the engine, and its feature set has caught up fast. Grass collision, screen-space shadows, terrain parallax, water improvements, dynamic cubemaps. The performance hit is meaningfully smaller than equivalent ENB, and it doesn't have ENB's habit of crushing your blacks into mud. If you're on a mid-range card or you care about a stable 60, start here. I switched my main load order over and don't regret it.
My actual advice: don't agonize. Try Community Shaders first. If you find yourself missing a specific ENB effect, you'll know exactly what you're chasing instead of installing a 3GB preset blind.
Textures: resolution is a trap
The instinct is to grab a 4K-everything pack and call it done. Don't. 4K textures on every pebble and tankard will hammer your VRAM, and Skyrim's engine handles VRAM pressure badly. You get stutter and texture pop-in, not a clean framerate drop. The sane setup is 2K for the world (landscape, architecture, the stuff you see constantly) and reserve 4K for hero assets you actually look at up close. Skyrim 202X, Skyland AIO, and Noble are the usual reliable bases. Pick one as a foundation and patch from there rather than stacking three packs that overwrite each other into a mess.
Parallax and grass: the two real cliffs
Parallax is the single best bang-for-buck visual upgrade. It gives flat stone roads and walls actual depth. Complex parallax through Community Shaders is reasonably cheap. The catch is it needs matched meshes and textures; mismatch them and you get shimmering, gaps, or that nauseating "swimming" texture effect. Use a curated parallax pack rather than rolling your own.
Grass is where framerates go to die. Grass density and draw distance are brutal on the GPU, and a lush field of waving grass in the Rift can cost you 15-25 fps. Cache your grass (the precache step bakes it so it's not generated on the fly) and be ruthless with density values in the ini. This is the setting I tweak most.
A rough order of operations: textures and meshes first, then your shader stack, then parallax, then grass last so you can dial density against whatever headroom you have left. Test in Whiterun and an exterior. Whiterun's draw calls are a reliable stress point.
The question I keep coming back to
Here's my actual reservation, and it's why I run a fairly restrained setup. Original Skyrim has a deliberate, slightly painterly, desaturated Nordic look. Cold blues, soft fog, that washed concept-art quality. A lot of the photoreal stacks bulldoze that. You end up with a technically impressive, saturated, wet-rock world that could be any open-world game. It looks modern and it looks generic at the same time.
So I'll throw it open: when you mod Skyrim's visuals, are you trying to make it look real, or trying to make it look like the best version of what Bethesda's art team was actually going for? Because I'm increasingly convinced those are two different mods, and the second one is harder to build.