Skyrim and VRAM / Infinite loadscreen

[prod80]

So I recently got a vid card upgrade to GTX680 with 4GB coming from GTX560Ti with 1GB. I picked the 680 over the 7xx series because compatibility with ENB, which the new 320 drivers of Nvidia just simply don't have (or at least for now) and the GTX770 doesn't come yet in 4GB version here (780 is simply too expensive anyway right now).

 

I choose to do some testing to how high you can actually get the VRAM usage and at which point you start to have trouble... My previous game was perfectly fine, tho my card was constantly out of VRAM, it didn't crash the game, though.

 

I installed all the crazy res version of Skyrim HD and overhauled the trees in the game as well with ultra HD textures (just for the heck of it).. Put some extra grass on top. My outside saves on GTX560Ti would not open anymore. I was able to open inside saves, but when going outside - save - restart Skyrim - load game = infinite load screen. So definitely it's VRAM related when your load screen is not opening. TESV.exe showed a peak usage of 2.3GB... far away from the max it can have for a 32bit app (I got plenty of RAM in my system - so it cannot be that there simply isn't more available).

 

After that I replaced the card with the GTX680 with 4GB... and voila, outside saves open without issues. I checked my VRAM usage and it was chopping away 3-3.5GB when walking around the Whiterun area, going in and out of the city. I can image that with the same card and 2GB of VRAM I had run into the same issues as tested with the GTX560... too much & too high textures = load screen issues. After that I reinstalled the lower res version as it was on my old setup to check how much VRAM was requested that my card couldn't deliver... On the old setup the same scene (still Whiterun outside) was loading 1.8GB into my VRAM, my GTX560Ti was stable with that (not fast, just stable :P - tho I did get an infinite loadscreen from time to time, and had to alt-tab to windows to unload VRAM sometimes)

 

I have since pushed the texture extreme button to get this card into infinite load screens... and yes I managed to get there as well. No idea how much VRAM it was requesting, but monitoring had it all maxed out when going around coming from an inside save.

 

So for all you people out there and having load screens issues or not being able to open outside saves (even if you have reasonably good FPS - because even with insane texture mode in which I couldn't open outside saves anymore on this 4GB card I still managed to pull over 40FPS when going outside from an inside area) you need to look at your VRAM, if it's maxed all the time you need to do something about your textures.

[Nudedragon]

Hmm, good to know, although not an issue I've been having. Just wondering, how have you been monitoring your vram, what program?

[prod80]

Would have been MSI Afterburner + GPU-Z