New gpu. ugridstoload 15...?

[Writhes]

I bought a gtx 670 recently specifically so I could max out all the graphics while gaming. It was a much needed upgrade from my old gtx 550 ti. Although I am aware that there are even better cards out there they are simply way beyond a confortable price range for me.

 

The old 550 ti I would get 20-30 fps with high quality enb settings and hd texture packs. To be honest I really didn't think my new graphics card would be THAT much of an improvement so the best I was hoping for was to maintain the same settings and bring up my frame rate to a better range. I just had no idea...

 

So I start skyrim up for the first time with my new card and to be expected the fps was smooth. Since this first time experience went so well I decided to take things a step further and max out my Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering still rocking a solid smooth fps. Now I have maxed out all the shadow quality and reflection quality settings in the skyrimprefs just to find out the game still maintains a smooth framerate.

 

With nothing more to do it was time to up the ugridstoload to 7 so I went through the process via ingame commands with "refreshini" and double checking the skyrim prefs etc... Next thing I knew It was at 9 then 11 then 13 and now 15... I feel like this could go up higher, but It seems that the only obstacle at this point is the stability of the game. Although FPS is still pretty solid at "ugrids 15" the game crashes at random after a few mins.

 

It seems that even with the insane modding community of skyrim adding such amazing things such as hd texture packs, enb, and many more graphical improvements that hardware is exceeding the game at even the most extreme settings.

Edited June 5, 2013 by Writhes

[FatalRegime]

I have a GTX 670 as well, and while I never change uGrids To Load because I fear of save corruption, I find that it is hard to make Skyrim bring the card to its knees. I play with the extreme version of STEP and with an ENB set to its very highest settings and the game still runs smoothly. The only crashes I ever get are because of stupid things like load order issues. GTX 670 is definitely a significant increase in performance over the GTX 5xx series.