What mods can my pc handle?

[RomanRPK]

AMD fx-6300 6 core 3.5 ghz | 8gb RAM | Sapphire hd 7870 oc edition. At the moment running skyrim on highest settings(without mods) is not a problem but what if i wanted some fancy texture mods? Thanks for responses in advance.

[Rennn]

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.

Edited March 1, 2014 by Rennn

[Errornamenotfound]

I usually have a general rule for using mods. If I get a drop in frames per second, I uninstall the mod or switch to a lower setting. But I think you should be able to handle most of the mods. Always use the best settings first and only lower it if you feel a drop in performance.