SweetFX in LOTRO

You may have noticed from our recent review of Helm’s Deep that I like LOTRO’s landscape. A lot. So it should come to no surprise to you guys that I jumped at the chance to possibly make the game look even better. And boy does this one deliver.

The program in question is SweetFX. This thing improves your visual experience in a number of different ways. The link posted has more detail on them, but I will discuss the stuff that I have personally noticed.

Colo(u)r: Something I hadn’t noticed until trying this program is that LOTRO seems to have a sort of grey ‘filter’ in front of the game screen. This makes the overall colour scheme rather dreary and less vibrant. SweetFX lifts that veil and brings the colours to the forefront, making the blue skies bluer, fire-lit places warmer and dark places darker.

Details: Probably the biggest benefit I’ve found with SweetFX is the Lumasharpen feature. Simply put, it greatly enhances those little textures in LOTRO, everything from the ground textures, to hair to subtle weapons and armour engravings. The screenshots shown below really don’t give them enough credit.

Customisation: A great thing about this program is that if you end up liking some parts of it but not others, you can fine-tune it to your preference. Say for example you want the detailed textures but not the brighter colours. You can simply disable those aspects and keep the rest as is. Changing this is quick and simple.

While I have provided screenshots for comparison, I still heartily recommend trying this out for yourself. It’s easy to add and remove and it has no impact on any of your files. So worry not and give it a try!

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SweetFX

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SweetFX with Vibrancy

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SweetFX without Vibrancy

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7 comments

  1. Scuto /

    Simply stunning.

  2. Very nice indeed!

  3. Andang /

    I have been wanting Turbine to change lighting, contrast and temperature of the game effects for some time now and it is great to see something doing it finally.

  4. I’m using FlightFX, its probably the same thing 😀
    Been using that for almost 2 years now and it’s really great.

  5. Sal Tricomo /

    How does it effect frame rates? I have a fairly decent system running win 7 pro 8 Gigs Ram, 2 Gig vid card GTX 560 based. All running with a I7 multi core processor.

  6. Rabbitses Starkfoot /

    I really like this, thanks for the tip.

  7. AnUnexpectedVidcast /

    Lovely 🙂 stunning views

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