Advice on GPU for highly modded skyrim

[ufctom]

Hello. I'm about to build a new computer for gaming.

My current PC is:
i7 930
GTX470 SLI
1080p

Skyrim with lots of hd texture mods and ENB bring it to its knees.

Could anyone please comment from experience whether
4770k
GTX 780
will be ok for 1080p modded skyrim? or should I shell out for SLI?

Besides this one game I can't imagine anything else needing SLI at this resolution as most other games still run fine on my current setup at high settings. Which would mean I'd hold off with SLI until I can get the 780 on ebay for half price.

Thanks.

[fifteenspades]

If you don't have many things that put strain on the GPU. then a cheap one would do like 100$.

But i mean, skyrim is just skyrim and can only handle so much. Meaning you could have the most super awesome video card. Yet... it would do no better

or less then a decent 200$ one.

 

Even with all those textures and the best enb and well... the best of the best of skyrim. You still wouldn't need a super fancy video card

a Video card with 3.5-4 gb of VRAM should be all you will need. as i said before skyrim is just skyrim and can only handle so much you can't throw $ at it and

assume it will make it better ;o

[AbdullahG]

It'll be more than enough. You should have no issue running a heavily modded Skyrim with an ENB.

[Maverick827]

If you don't have many things that put strain on the GPU. then a cheap one would do like 100$.

But i mean, skyrim is just skyrim and can only handle so much. Meaning you could have the most super awesome video card. Yet... it would do no better

or less then a decent 200$ one.

 

Even with all those textures and the best enb and well... the best of the best of skyrim. You still wouldn't need a super fancy video card

a Video card with 3.5-4 gb of VRAM should be all you will need. as i said before skyrim is just skyrim and can only handle so much you can't throw $ at it and

assume it will make it better ;o

 

"It's Skyim, any ol' video card will do!" is not really accurate. I upgraded from a GTX 670 to a GTX Titan and noticed a huge difference in performance with full texture mods + ENB.

 

The 780 should be fine at 1080p.

[Rennn]

The 780 is fine. It's a beast. If you use too many HD textures though (4-8k), you will crash, no matter what your video card is.

 

If you get crashes or slowdown on that 780, it's not because of your GPU, but rather shoddy coding.

Edited August 1, 2013 by Rennn

[Lord Garon]

Most tech reviews (Toms Hardware, say) show Skyrim to be CPU limited; your I7 should do fine with even heavily scripted mods. (Google around for Hyper Thread issues; I saw a forum where a guy turned off Hyperthreading and used only the four full cores; got a substantial performance gain in Skyrim, IIRC.)

 

With a lot of HD textures, go for as much VRAM as you can get in whatever card you decide on. My old Windows game machine was a dual-core Athalon XP machine with no 6-pin power and a 6400 GS (256 MB) card. I played Skyrim on it for over a year. Slow, but playable, IF I tweaked the game settings and Windows. A 1G AMD 7750 (don't laugh) more than doubled my FPS, so I cranked up the resolution; a remarkably small FPS hit. Hi Res texture pack and higher video settings; back to 6400 GS frame rates. Ultra-high resolution textures; CTD's, freezes, lags. Googling around, I found a lot of threads about memory issues; 3.2 GB for Skyrim itself and 2 GB VRAM for HD textures. I guess the GPU loads all the scene graph textures into VRAM, if it can. (I don't know much about graphics cards). Filling up the VRAM seems to cause problems and that jives with my experience, at least, on the low end of GPUs.