Clarification on ENB and Nvidia control panel settings pls

[wysiwyg]

From the documentation:

For better performance and compability strongly recommended to disable forced antialiasing, transparensity antialiasing and anisotropic filtering in display control paned or other tools which do this (NVidia control center, Catalyst control center). Turn off all quality boost or degradation features in there, any kind smoothing is only produce errors. Do not set texture lod bias to negative values, it must be 0 only or not affected at all. Do not turn on SSAO in drivers, because it will cost performance but will not work with ENBSeries.

I'm not absolutely clear on what settings I should be using since I'm not sure which values do what you suggest. Could I get clarification on the specific settings recommended for ENB?

I'm using Skyrim v121212 with SMAA and the current 310.70 Nvidia drivers at the moment.

Basically I don't want to disable needed functionality but I also don't want unnecessary functions degrading either performance or visuals.

First, in Skyrim I have AA Off since I'm using SMAA but should Anisotropic Filtering (AF) also be off in the skyrim settings when using ENB or left at 16 Samples?

In the Nvidia control panel I have the following overrides:

Anisotropic filtering mode: User-defined / Off
Anisotropic filtering setting: 16x <- Should this be off for ENB?
Texture filtering - LOD bias: 0.000 / Automatic (the default value)
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Clamp (this prevents the negative LOD that the doc says should be prevented, correct?)
Ambient Occlusion Setting: Quality <- Should this be off for ENB?
Ambient Occlusion usage: Enabled <- Should this be disabled for ENB?

The rest of the settings are defaults:

Antialiasing - Setting: Application-controlled / Off
Antialiasing - Transparency Multisampling: Disabled
Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling: Off / Multisampling
Texture filtering - Quality: Quality

Thanks for any assistance!

I haven't found anything that'd I'd consider definitive via Google. Lots of different suggestions are around online, often out of date or contradicting each other, but I'm sure Boris will have the right answers.

[ENBSeries]

If anisotropic filtering forced in ENBSeries, then it's ignored from game video options, but i recommend to use in game anisotropy level 16 anyway, because it's there performance free and not affect enbseries (but in video drivers options it's (may) affect performance of the mod). Basically forced af in drivers is good for those games which don't have it, like painkiller, serious sam and even some relatively new titles, but games with complex graphics effects (parallax f.e.) will suffer from performance degradation and even from graphic artifacts if shaders use textures as data for something instead of classic usage for coloring.

Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias - allow or clamp doesn't matter in my mod right now, but what i wrote for af is same for this one, except that this will not so much performance, but graphic bug may appear in some games and in future versions of my mod (especially for reflections, what i planning to do with them).

Ambient Occlusion - don't ask

[wysiwyg]

I have seen some cases where the game turns too dark if AO is used in ENB and is also set in the Nvidia options.

So from now on I disable Ambient Occlusion in the Nvidia options if I'm using an ENB.