Rennn

To replace a GTX 480 AMP? Hmm... A 2GB GTX 760 SC would be about a 30% increase in performance over your card. It'd push 30 fps up to 40 fps, or 60 fps up to 80 fps, for example. Modern VRAM is so much higher clocked that the memory would be a bigger upgrade than simply 1.5GB to 2GB would imply. But if you're going to upgrade for the Witcher 3 and Skyrim with extreme mods, you'd be better off going for a GTX 770. Either 2GB or 4GB would work. 3GB would be the best compromise but those don't really exist. The Witcher 3 is using PhysX, so I do not recommend an AMD card. PhysX would need to be shoved onto the CPU with an AMD video card, and that would murder your framerate. AMD will work equally well for Skyrim though. But AMD cards have jumped in price lately, the only option that actually competes at Nvidia's price point is an r9 270x, and that's not even typically as strong as a GTX 760 SC. Still significantly stronger than a 480 in most games, but it won't handle PhysX very well.

It does look like a 730m is a stronger than I thought, you may want to disregard the first part I said about running on low settings. But what I said about antialiasing, SMAA, and anisotropic filtering still works. This is a link to the SMAA injector. http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html As long as you're using SMAA, it would be pointless to use FXAA or Skyrim's antialiasing. And I still recommend using 8x Anisotropic Filtering, or 4x if you simply can't keep your framerate stable. Also, if you disable scaling in your Nvidia Control Panel, you can make Skyrim run in a smaller fullscreen mode with black borders around the edges. It'll make the viewing area a bit smaller, yes, but it will also make the game much more crisp while running below 1080p. As for the rest of the settings, low, medium, high, etc. You may want to ignore what I said about needing to run the game on low. Turns out there are a lot of different models of GT 730m (who knew?), and they can perform quite differently.

Your Unofficial Patches are in the wrong order. See instructions for ordering those manually in the mod description page of the Unofficial Patch.

You could just have the application profile set for both TESV.exe and SKSE.exe, couldn't you? Anyway, I'm pretty sure SKSE launches TESV.exe because my Nvidia Inspector settings for TESV.exe work in Skyrim when I launch with SKSE.

The shadows are by far the largest performance hit in Skyrim. 1600x900 at a high preset (minus shadows) is still a bit surprising, I doubt you got 40 fps as much as you think. The framerate tends to dive in Hjaalmarch and the Rift.

You essentially have two main options. Go for medium settings at 1360x768, or go for low settings at 1920x1080. Also, if you run below 1080p, would you rather have Skyrim sharp but with black borders and not filling the whole screen, or blurry but filling the whole screen? No matter whether you pick medium or low settings or 768p versus 1080p, the advice below will work. Don't use any multisample antialiasing, your video card won't handle it well. If you want antialiasing, download and install the SMAA injector (or just check the "FXAA" box in Skyrim's options to make it easy, though FXAA is generally not as good as SMAA) Use either 4x or 8x anisotropic filtering, definitely no higher than 8x anisotropic. Don't use ENB or any HD textures, your video card simply won't handle them well. Try limiting your framerate at 35 fps using the free version of a program called dxtory. It will stop your battery from draining so fast and keep heat down. It'll also probably keep your performance a bit more smooth, but the obvious cost is that you'll be limited to 35 frames per second. Still, your video card won't come close to hitting 60 fps so it's overall a good thing to limit your framerate to 35 on a GT 730m.

False. Oblivion gets virtually no performance return from new drivers.

Your video card has 2GB VRAM and it's sufficiently fast for HD textures, so you can pretty much put on whatever textures you want, provided you don't use such extreme mods you break Skyrim's engine. A 2GB card should handle WATER, HD2K LITE, the HD DLC, etc, quite easily. I have a card with very similar performance to yours (GTX 660 GC 2GB), and I just use the official HD DLC as a matter of preference, but I don't get any problems if I decide to run a lot of HD textures. ENB and other graphics mods like SMIM are a bigger problem, however. Middle-range gaming cards like ours will struggle on heavily modded Skyrim. Avoid ENB, and if you use SMIM don't install the rocks and mountains option. The Skyrim Flora Overhaul might be okay, or it might not, I'm not sure. Your CPU is stronger than mine, which will definitely help you in Skyrim, especially with complex mods like Immersive Patrols and that sort of thing. General common sense optimization indicates that the best balance of Skyrim's graphics is 8x Anisotropic Filtering and 4xMSAA. Those are both different methods of compensating for not having enough pixels on the screen for perfect image quality, so at 1080p or above using 16x AF and 8xMSAA is mostly a waste of performance. 8xAF and 4xMSAA is a much more efficient option. If you struggle for performance or want to use ENB, you can even turn off MSAA/antialiasing and use the SMAA injector instead, for a very slight loss of image quality. Note: Never use Skyrim's FXAA check box. FXAA can be good in some games, but in Skyrim it's tuned horribly and will actually make the game worse to have it enabled. Finally, if you ever decide to limit your framerate in Skyrim, don't go below 35 fps. A limit of 30 fps or below will cause bugs and often infinite load screens.

Just because you only use a few mods doesn't mean they're not causing it. Post your load order...

I love Dark Messiah... on the PC at least, apparently the 360 version had some stuff removed. But I'd probably like the 360 version/Elements as well. I just commented to say that. I'm not good at meshing so I can't actually make this mod.

If it works without mods installed, then one of your mods is causing it. Disable mods and reenable them in small groups to find out which one is buggy.

That's just how Skyrim's shadows are. It's less noticeable if you're running the shadows on ultra, but still there. Lighting mods like ELFX can also make it more noticeable by increasing the shadow casting light intensity and quantities.

I checked your profile for your specs, and you definitely should not start from scratch. Just replace the PSU and GPU. Your CPU is stronger than mine and your RAM holds up well. If your mobo has a slot for a video card, then that's fine as well because it has a nice CPU socket and slots for enough RAM. I suggest you definitely replace your monitor though. I can't imagine a 15" monitor being very good, and a bad monitor will impede your video card's visuals.

The brand and specific model of PSU really matters as well. I've had cheap 700w PSUs die trying run high end video cards, when they were fine on like a 6770, for example...

I'm not sure exactly how many copies were sold, but Oblivion remained one of the top selling games per year on the 360 and PC until 2010. Plenty of ARPGs have dynamic AI on at least some characters. The fact that Skyrim's was stripped down so much is pretty disappointing for a game that sells itself as "another life in another world."

The Thalmor already beat the Empire in a war. Now they're using the Empire as puppets and making them fight the Stormcloaks, with the goal of having the Empire and the Stormcloaks wipe each other out. That way the Thalmor can easily beat the remnants of both. The Empire is going along with it because they believe that if they can quickly take back Skyrim from the Stormcloak rebels, the Empire will have the strength (perhaps) to kick out the Thalmor. If you fight for the Stormcloaks, it's with the hope that Skyrim will be able to defeat the Thalmor alone under Ulfric's leadership, once they're free of Imperial laws, obligations, and battles. if you fight for the Empire, it's with the hope that ruling Skyrim again will give the Empire the resources and manpower to rise up against the Thalmor and win this time.

Oh. My saves folder has the 'read only' square filled as well. That's not the issue then...

Hmm... You could support the wooden pillars with brick bases mostly underwater (possibly using pillars or loose bricks from the Imperial sets). That'd look sensible too.

This wouldn't be terribly hard to do, but I haven't modded Skyrim in a while and I forgot how to set this kind of stuff up. >_> I also am not really interested in it. But the point is it's easily possible if an active modder takes interest.

None of my saves have "read only" checked. That's probably the issue. Do you have permissions to edit those files?

I wouldn't mind dual wielding in FO4, but I hope it comes with heavy, heavy penalties that give it a tactical niche for CQC. And if NPCs use it, I hope they deplete their own ammo instead of having infinite bullets, otherwise it'll be nigh impossible to balance. The risk here isn't really "dual wielding suks becuz COD rawr", it's that the logistics of having two guns instead of one would be difficult to integrate into a serious game. Also, because to any weapons enthusiast two assault rifles looks just as realistic as a Final Fantasy buster sword. Let's put an 85 pound sword the length of an average adult into vanilla TES6, and have the NPCs tote them around... If you don't like it don't use it. Let's also put the ability to use machine guns and helicopters in TES6, because nobody is stopping you from not using them or modding them out. You can't just dismiss all immersion breakers with "well, don't use it if you don't like it" because it's not that simple. Everything in the game, affects the game. :s Like the Dark Souls 2 "easy" mode, for example (which is still not happening as far as I know). The problem isn't so much that hardcore players want to keep their dominant alpha superiority intact. It's that an easy mode would break online play, and Dark Souls is pretty much always online. What happens if a guy on easy cooperates with someone on normal? Does the "normal" guy's world get easier? Does the "easy" player deal more damage? What happens if someone invades them both? Will the noobish "easy" player take down the invader faster than the "normal" player because of a damage multiplier? Will players on "easy" get all the rare loot faster than the loyal fanbase and have an unfair advantage in PvP?

To be fair, turn based combat is even less realistic than dual wielding assault rifles.

If I remember correctly, NMM creates copy files of the mods it installs in a special folder. If *those* files are missing due to the aforementioned Windows corruption, then it could cause problems. However, I don't remember where those files are, or even really if any of what I just said is true.

Limiting your framerate too low can do that. Don't limit it lower than 35. Could also be save bloat, like ripple suggested.

I'm wondering if anyone knows whether the game Miasmata was patched at some point. I bought it when it was new, and although the game itself was good (imo) it ran like crap on my PC. The graphics are meh, but it ran at a mere 15-40 fps on ultra on my GTX 660 GC. I uninstalled it, because below 30 fps is not acceptable performance. My brother had an otherwise identical rig with a 1GB GTX 560 SC instead of a 2GB GTX 660 GC, and his install of Miasmata ran even worse, at 10-30 fps on ultra. I just randomly reinstalled it 2 days ago, and without upgrading my hardware the game now runs on ultra at 60 fps constant. o_o It looks better than I remember as well, though the difference in image quality might just be from calibrating my monitor. The massive performance increase is what I'm most interested in. Has it been patched at some point or did I just get extraordinarily unlucky the first time I installed it?