Your best Skyrim "Awesome pictures"? - Page 448

You're one of the lucky few, my 680 capped out insanely quick with the amount of mods I have. 2x MSAA (in-game AA) will add maybe 100-120 MB of VRAM at that resolution. 4x MSAA will add another 200. 8x MSAA would probably add on top another 400 MB, for a total of 700MB because of the exponential increase in sampling points that MSAA uses. This is probably why you're seeing 99% usage when going that high. FXAA uses almost no VRAM because it is just a post-processing affect. Therefore the quality of FXAA is only going to affect the GPU Usage.

Looking at your mod list, I'm guessing you aren't using UGrids 7 or 9 either, I have to agree with SS on this one. You have only scratched the surface as far as number of high-resolution textures go. I'm regularly hitting 1800-1900MB of VRAM usage while in-game and I'm only using the Lite versions of all the texture mods that I have (over 150). I'm only playing at 1080p and I get 60 fps almost everywhere with Quality SSAO, ENB v108, tweaked ultra shadows, and UGrids at 7. I can't use the High version of HD 2k Textures or Skyrim Realistic Overhaul because of my VRAM cap. Anything higher and my FPS drops 20 fps and I get massive stuttering. And my fps is locked with Vsync (something that has absolutely nothing to do with VRAM by the way).

So in essence, don't try the downplay the role of VRAM. Skyrim dynamically allocates VRAM for it to place textures for the game, it assumes it needs 1400 MB of space when in actuality it is only using 1100 MB. Therefore your "kick down" explanation doesn't have anything to do with the VRAM getting maxed out. When your VRAM is truly maxed out, the game will buffer textures from I/O. This could be swap space, your HDD/SDD, or RAM. And that's why you see massive amounts of stuttering and 99% GPU usage, it has to waste GPU clock cycles to get those textures from outside of the card. Your graph is telling you that Skyrim deallocated part of its working memory set because it didn't need it, Afterburner only knows the VRAM allocation not the actual usage. I'll post a link of my Afterburner log when I play the game later and show you how it is doing on my setup and my 680.

I wish I would've waited for the 4 GB version of the 680, then I would be riding with all of my mods full-version in style.

Edit: I'm just saying this because the difference between VRAM on a 580 and a 680 is NO DIFFERENT other than the amount on the card. So you can't say that VRAM varies from one card to the next, maybe from ATI to Nvidia though as far as drivers handle VRAM allocation. I recommended to Droogie to look at the list of possible mods he wanted to use in the future and determine from that how much VRAM he needed.
Edited by modinn - 4/29/12 at 3:51pm

If you pick the right mods and use a texture optimizer you don't need to worry about VRAM quite that much, really.

 

Let me put this into perspective. I run a complete STEP, ENB 0.108, aswell as several extras (like Lush Grass, etc), ran a texture optimizer on my mods and I don't have major problems with frame rate or stuttering. My minimum FPS is normally 45FPS and usually hits well into 60+ @1920x1080. Ultra settings, Shadows @High and SMAA enabled.

 

WIth ENB 0.102 I can max out at around 45FPS usually, though sometimes it can get higher, sometimes a bit less (especially outside Whiterun).

 

If I was to listen to some of the things some people came out with about VRAM I probably wouldn't even bother playing the game, because I didn't and just got on with it I find it to be very much playable.

 

If you are loading up at Ultra settings, max AA, with every mod you have being highest resolution possible, uGrids pushed out, plus ENB it just isn't happening. Even some of the strongest rigs may struggle with that. Have some common sense and balance your mods and settings around your system rather than the other way around.

 

That's just some general (and basic) advice for anyone and everyone thinking about getting into modding Skyrim and using post processors, etc, rather than being aimed at anyone in particular. From someone who uses a pretty weak system in comparison to what some people here are running.

Edited by Lifeshield - 4/29/12 at 3:52pm

Yup, will need to try ugrids and see if I am still alright with 2gb. But from what I have running now, I am not having issues.

I completely agree with you, great advice. Some of the people who are downloading these texture packs that change everything under the sun from rocks to butterflies into 4096x4096 textures and then complain about how their FPS goes down because of it is just irritating in that retrospect. Texture Optimizer has been a very, very useful tool in the past month (thanks for the help on that tool too!).

I saw a mod on the Nexus the other day that added new high resolution rug textures into the game. The mod came in at a staggering 104MB. What was the bulk of the mod? 8196x8196 textures of the rugs. There is absolutely no reason to have rugs that high and to the people who download stuff like that, it becomes a pain when trying to help them optimize their game and explain to them why it is hurting their performance.

I know that I have a couple mods that are taking an unnecessary amount of VRAM out of my total, yet I used Texture Optimizer to reduce them to my global 1024x1024 size for my entire installation except for trees, sky-related textures, and rocks.

What mods are you using for that armor and skins?

btw your character kind of looks like an older version of the chick in your avatar.

Above screenshot so that I am adding something to this thread's purpose.

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Just set ugrids to 7, still not having issues with only having 2gb of vram on the 680s at 5760x1080.

This is what I set:
uExterior Cell Buffer=64
uGridsToLoad=7

I ran all over--I climbed to the highest point so that I could see far into the distance with mountains and trees. Here is a screen of the performance--that first dip was me leaving a cave so I could run around outside for the test. Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)
Wonderful explanation. +1
Edited by svthomas - 4/30/12 at 12:03am

Delete. Double post, sorry.

New enb is out for Nvidia users.

Testing now. Thanks for the news!