tommau5

I recently got Skyrim for PC and as soon as I got to Whiterun I noticed horrible flickering in the distant mountains, terrible draw distance on grass and trees (even with the sliders maxed) and weird pop-ins where the game seems to render chunks of landscape/grass/trees all at once right in front of me. I am running mods like Skyrim HD, Sharpshooter's ENB, Flora overhaul etc but I noticed these problems before I installed them. I've used fraps to monitor my frame rate and there are no frame drops at all when any of this happens. I walked from Whiterun to Solitude at a steady 51 FPS, only occasionally dropping to 49 when I turn around or something because Skyrim likes to do that.. I've tried ini tweaks (both raising and lowering LOD parameters) which changed literally nothing. I have tried an LOD mod which also did nothing as far as I can tell.. I have also tried turning off AA + AF and forcing them through CCC, to no avail of course. Are there any known fixes or temporary solutions for these problems? I've searched the forums but the only solutions people offer are ini tweaks and driver rollbacks which don't seem to work for me. I'm pretty convinced there's nothing wrong with my GPU because it runs the following games absolutely fine: Crysis, Crysis 2 (both modded at running stable at 60+ FPS), Sleeping Dogs and Far Cry 3. It also does fine in stress tests e.g Fur Mark, Heaven etc. I'm not overclocking and my GPU definitely isn't overheating. If anyone can help I will seriously love you forever. Cheers. System specs GPU: HD7970 GHz edition CPU: Core i5-3570k RAM: 16GB

Cheers mate, I'm loving some of these ENB mods, its incredible how much they change the appearance of the game. Its almost like a different game. Armory of Tamriel also looks awesome. Are there many good weapon retextures? What really bothers me whilst watching videos demonstrating HD textures/ENBs is when they raise their weapon/shield and it looks shoddy compared to everything else.

My new rig shall be finished by the end of the week so I might as well download some mods in preparation. The problem is that I don't know which ones to get lol. Rig: i5-3570k 3.4 GHz HD 7970 GHz edition 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1920x1080 monitor (for now) From what I've read so far, this set-up could run vanilla Skyrim on max (?) settings very well (75+ FPS) so I really just want an idea of which visual mods I'll be able to use and how much they affect performance. I'm particularly thinking about the HD texture mods, ENBs and all that good stuff. If anyone with a similar set-up can tell me which mods they use or would recommend, that would be very helpful :) Cheers.

Well based on that information and some benchmarks I looked at, I agree that a 7970 would be overkill if I only planned on playing Skyrim, which is not the case. I'm glad I'll be able to run all it with all of the eye candy though, since that (among some other things) is what tipped me over the edge and made me upgrade my rig :P Thanks for that man, very informative. In the end I went with a Sapphire Vapor-X HD 7970 and I'll be building my rig in a couple of days. I bought an Antec case with plenty of room for water cooling so that's something I'll consider. Also, I guess I may as well ask in this thread instead of starting another.. which visual mods would you guys specifically recommend to experience this game to the fullest? Some of the screenshots from ENB mods are just incredible :ohmy: particularly Sharpshooters and a cinematic lighting mod that I can't remember the name of lol.

I would but they're about £100 more and I'm stretching my budget as it is. From what I understand the HD 7970 GHz is outperforming the 680 in most areas anyway. I just wanted an Nvidia card for physx, which isn't worth £100 more if you ask me ;) lol. If the 3GB 7970 GHz will do then I'll go for it. The 4GB version of the 670 is about the same price with slightly lower performance, however if the extra vRAM helps significantly (?) then I will go for that instead. Beat me to it lol. Load screens don't bother me too much tbh; I was a console gamer before. ;) That sounds like pretty impressive performance with the 670. :)

Nice, I was considering a 670 4GB or 680 2GB but I've heard that Skyrim will chew up all the VRAM you throw at it and 2GB may not be enough. What kind of FPS do you get with lots of mods then?

I'm buying a new rig in a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if an HD 7970 3GB GHz edition (will be overclocked) will be suitable to run Skyrim with a lot of mods and all of the 'eye candy' mods, i.e 2k textures, ENBs, realistic water etc. I know that it can handle it on max settings but there doesn't seem to be much info out there on GPUs good for playing modded games. The rest of the rig if it helps: i5-3570k @ 3.4 (probably OC to about 4-4.2) 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR-3 1600 Will be playing at 1920x1080 Cheers for any advice. PS Sorry if this is in the wrong section and if this question gets asked a lot but the search function didn't bring up anything helpful.