

Improved water and snow shaders to make them look a bit more realistic.Improved shadows, which now look softer and higher resolution as opposed to original Skyrim's shadows which looked crawly and aliased even on max settings.Granted, this was something that could be forced with mods or on Nvidia cards through the control panel, but it's nice to see native support. Native support for screenspace ambient occlusion.Volumetric lighting, allowing for "godray" light shafts.And it will take some time for modders to fully exploit it, but I'm sure the DirectX 11 renderer will allow for even better effects over what modders could do with original Skyrim's DirectX 9 renderer. It's not perfect and it still has its limitations, but SSE is definitely much more optimized and stable than the original game.

The engine itself just couldn't handle it. Original Skyrim's engine would choke in such situations, with the framerate dipping to the teens and the game tending to crash regardless of how fast your rig was. This has been shown to definitely help in CPU and memory bound situations, especially when using mods or spawning lots of objects and NPCs with the in-game command console. By far the most significant, the engine has been overhauled to a 64 bit executable and a DirectX 11 renderer.So, just to tally up all the technical changes in Skyrim Special Edition:
