Nvidia 8GB 970/980's

[whitescar911]

For skyrim, GTX680 would be enough. Maybe you should turn down some effects like SSAO. And to be honest, the largest difference between 680 and 980 is their power consumption.

 

But I only get 15-20FPS. I have a lot of 4k/8k textures mods installed, does VRAM not make a difference here?

[BatteForte]

 

For skyrim, GTX680 would be enough. Maybe you should turn down some effects like SSAO. And to be honest, the largest difference between 680 and 980 is their power consumption.

 

But I only get 15-20FPS. I have a lot of 4k/8k textures mods installed, does VRAM not make a difference here?

 

4k/8k textures are useful only when you have a 4k/8k monitor. Besides, 4k monitor‘s resolution ration is 4096*2160, I can barely see the icon on Windows.

[whitescar911]

so why am i only getting 15-20 fps?

[Boombro]

so why am i only getting 15-20 fps?

Because you have many texture mods, try to changing to 2k.

[whitescar911]

I know that, I wanna what I need to do hardware wise to get better frames. Would 4gb be enough.

[Reynard131]

 

 

For skyrim, GTX680 would be enough. Maybe you should turn down some effects like SSAO. And to be honest, the largest difference between 680 and 980 is their power consumption.

 

But I only get 15-20FPS. I have a lot of 4k/8k textures mods installed, does VRAM not make a difference here?

 

4k/8k textures are useful only when you have a 4k/8k monitor. Besides, 4k monitor‘s resolution ration is 4096*2160, I can barely see the icon on Windows.

 

 

That is mis-information...

 

They are the resolution of the replacement textures, it has nothing to do with final display resolution.

 

The higher the texture density, the better the texture looks especially when down-sampled.

 

I'm going to post a outtake from something i'm working on that has 4k rocks...

 

This is from a GTX 970 it is just goofy because it was edited on Twitch.tv rather than YouTube.

 

You can see the difference pretty plainly...

 

 

 

 

 

[whitescar911]

Not sure if this answers my question tho.

[Reynard131]

Not sure if this answers my question tho.

 

 

 

 

 

You have something that is in your list that is causing....

 

or in your .ini

Edited November 27, 2014 by Reynard131

[DigitalVixen]

Some missconceptions here, I think.

 

I run a SLI GTX 670 OC 4GB setup right now with a raid0 of SSDs to host OS and games along with competent CPU and RAM. Yes, DX9 shadows the VRAM in RAM but that will not affect FPS performance at all. All it means, really, is that you need enough regular RAM to hold the complete VRAM + OS, other apps + rest of Skyrim.

 

My current modded setup is a mix of 2k and 1k textures. Landscape is 1k, for instance. Most armor, weapons, character textures are 2k. I eat up 4GB VRAM like it was icecream. There are many, many places where I would benefit from switching up to 8GB VRAM.

 

As mentioned before VRAM is FIFO but what isn't mentioned is that at each exchange of loaded textures you get HDD activity, traffic over buses etc. and that will lead to stuttering. If your card is able to load up more textures in it's VRAM that it does not have to dump out then the stuttering will be initial and then not come back until VRAM needs to be refreshed either for other reasons or new textures need to be loaded in. Of course, the fact that the textures goes into RAM might on some systems have an impact on stuttering, on some others not so much.

 

As for FPS there are a number of things in Skyrim which will influence in. I regularly run around with 45-55 FPS when not a lot is going on in terms of... scripts!

 

Scripts have an impact on FPS, probably more so than current GPU grunt power. My cards never go over 70%ish utilization, and that's not because Skyrim is poorly optimized or something such. If I tack on higher meshes for certain things I will see the GPU usage go up - but if I remove my script heavy mods the GPU usage will also go up, I can easily max out the cards by smashing in all the higher density meshes I can find without bothering with script heavy mods.

 

Another thing that will influence your GPU usage is the use of added post-processing such as AA, ENBs and the like.

 

Will you benefit from going to 8GB 980? Even without taking into account that you'd quadruple your available VRAM it's a definite yes. Your cards GPU power is about slightly less than half of that 980. To say that the biggest difference between 680 and 980 is power consumptions just shows you need to read up.

 

Your 20ish FPS you get now will go 40+ if the rest of the system can match, and that's not even taking into account how much less stuttering you get from loading textures from your HDD.

 

A little about CPU usage is good to know too. Skyrim isn't very CPU hungry, one would think, but that's where the poor optimization comes in. Skyrim can run on all cores available to it, with some smaller ini tweaks, but it will not utilize the cores effectively.

 

A newer Core i5 which is faster per core than a slightly older Core i7 will most likely be able to produce higher FPS. Again, though, this depends on what you are doing with your game and if you use script heavy mods, HDT physics etcs or not. SKSE extensions such as HDT physics will use 8 cores when available, and will definitely be able to take advantage of that.

 

EDIT: I forgot to mention one thing.

 

4k/8k textures. As mentined before it doesn't mean you need a 4k screen to see the difference, it's not really related at all. However, texture processing will suffer in GPU power from going to higher resolution textures simply because there is more to compute, it's heavier. Not to mention that data from higher texture mods will have to transfer from hdd to both RAM and VRAM in Skyrims case.

Edited December 2, 2014 by DigitalVixen

[cowgirl1776]

For skyrim, GTX680 would be enough. Maybe you should turn down some effects like SSAO. And to be honest, the largest difference between 680 and 980 is their power consumption.

 

The 970 is around twice as fast as the 680 from the benchmarks I've seen.