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Back story:

So after 5 months of Skyrim modding experience, and having bought the necessary hardware (SSD, Good graphics card etc ...) I have decided to completely uninstall all of my Skyrim folder. So i'm going to start from scratch. The reason for this was because i was getting too many crashes and stutters, and it was driving me up the wall (Literally !). I have a general understanding about mods and their effects, installing them, keeping track of them (installing all mods through NMM so i can easily remove if necessary). I tried literally every fix known to man about trying to fix the stuttering, which was the main problem. This includes texture optimisation, ini tweaks, ENBoost, Nvidia settings, skyrim settings and so on. Nothing worked. When running the Skyrim Performance Monitor, i could identify that the reason for the stutters was because the Disk I/O was getting really high, causing the game to momentarily freeze (which would then lead to a potential freeze). For that reason, i bought an SSD, which unfortunately my motherboard only supports SATA 2 which sucks, but data reading speeds have been majorly improved with it still. Even moving my skyrim folder to the SSD and playing from there didn't fix the stuttering (which came as a big surprise to me).

 

My Rig:

GeForce GTX 680 (2GB)

AMD FX-4100 Quad-Core Processor

8GB System Ram

Windows 7 Ultimate

250GB Samsung SSD 840

 

Ultimately, i want to play my skyrim game with all the mods i want (although im willing to sacrifice some to eliminate sturrering), no stuttering and for it to look stunning with texture mods and an ENB etc... I'm fairly confident that i have a high end PC. Should be able to handle a lot of graphical modifications and so on. So the real question im asking, is which texture/mesh/ENB mod combo do you guys use which you are comfortable with, and wouldn't affect performance too much ?

 

TL:DR Version

Basically, i'm starting from scratch with Skyrim, and wanted to know which texture/ENB/mesh mods are the best combo for you guys with great performance ?

 

 

I appreciate any help here, i have bugged a few people from the nexus community, and they have been really helpful for me (SjoertJansen, author of SkyFalls and SkyMills - Animated Distant Waterfalls and WindMills ). I regularly watch modders such as Gopher, MXR, LiveStyleGaming and Broduel on YouTube. Gopher for example, i watch his lets plays, and his gameplay is always smooth, no matter what the situation. I want my skyrim to be like his lol.

 

Anyways, please and thank you in advanced Skyrim Nexus community. Sorry for babbling on, just wanted to make things clear. If there's any question Please PM me or post here. Again, all help is appreciated.

 

Regards,

Kyrie Iona

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I know this is not something you want to hear, but in game play is just not going to meet your expectations. Here's why.

 

  1. You mention Gopher's gameplay and how he never seems to get much stuttering. He happens to be using 2x Titans in SLI. So unless you are going to drop 2 grand on more video power, you will need to scale back your textures/effects.
  2. Gopher also says in many of his videos, that the top end ENBs he shows still manage to cripple his framerate in some sections.
  3. The kinds of mods that it takes to get those beautiful screenshots people post make Skyrim TOTALLY unplayable.

So, now that I have crushed your dreams, what can we do to build them back up? Here are some tips when going through the visual end of your modding adventure.

 

  • Resist the urge to always choose the "ULTRA HD" version of every mod. This will quickly snowball out of hand. Start with the mid quality textures. Then back down to the low quality version and see if you can really tell the difference. Ask yourself if you care more about that 4096 grass texture, or being able to move your shadow fade distance out another 30 feet.
  • Resist the urge to bump up your UGRIDS. If you intend to PLAY Skyrim instead of just testing mods and taking screenshots, you don't want random save game issues.
  • Pick a visual theme before you start. It will help you pick the mods that match. Sometimes it looks better to go with a slightly lower quality texture that fits the others you use.
  • Shadows are killer. I find them intolerable without using an ENB (even if it is the ONLY option I enable). Since I'm defering my shadow rendering anyway, there is NO need to have the game engine do any more work than it needs to. So I lock my shadow resolution to 512 and make ENB do all the work.

Just my 2 cents. Start with the HD DLC, then put 2K textures on over it. Look to the texture pack combiner for more ideas.

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I personally like Realvision ENB Performance version. Full version chops my framerate by half (I get about 30-35) but the Performance version is pretty light and I still get 60 fps. I do leave DoF off though, otherwise I lose about 10-15 frames. It still looks very nice, imo.

 

I can't play the game with ENB though. That's just a personal thing with me because I don't think the Skyrim world was supposed to look 'pretty.' I think it looks plenty good, but more realistic, with just some nice textures and something like CoT on top.

Personally I use 2K textures (LITE) SFO (LITE) WATER and AOF detailed mountains. I also have tried (and like) Serious HD and Realistic Water Two.

I've got a love/hate relationship with Skyrim Bigger Trees. It looks amazing at times and (to me) a bit silly at other times. Performance hit is really noticeable as well.

 

ENB is really just for screenshots in my case.

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I know this is not something you want to hear, but in game play is just not going to meet your expectations. Here's why.

 

  1. You mention Gopher's gameplay and how he never seems to get much stuttering. He happens to be using 2x Titans in SLI. So unless you are going to drop 2 grand on more video power, you will need to scale back your textures/effects.

 

 

Are you sure? Last I knew he was running a GTX 670 4GB and mentioned recently he'd like to upgrade to a GTX 780. Maybe he does now have Titans but I never heard/saw him say that. :tongue:

 

ASUS 780gtx DirectCU II + ASUS 670gtx DirectCU II (dedicated physx) <--- Copied that from his PC specs on his YouTube channel.

Edited by Draven991
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