Skyrim eating my VRAM

[PlanetNorris]

Hi, recently I did a clean install of Skyrim and after installing all the nice neccessities (high resolution textures, ENB preset) I ran into a few issues.


First and foremost I appear to be getting massive stutters (sometimes up to 10s) when loading a new area or spinning around extremely quickly, I did the only natural thing to do and loaded up Skyrim Performance Manager to get to the bottom of the issue and found that Skyrim was eating ALL of my VRAM, yet all as I'm running is HD textures and ENB which surely shouldn't be enough to max out 3GB VRAM?

Why is that? and is there a way to fix it? screenshot included.

http://oi61.tinypic.com/4uuikw.jpg

[Hyacathusarullistad]

And ENB setup can quite easily eat up that level or resources. It's about the norm with the majority of presets, unfortunately. That's the nature of the beast, really.

[Rennn]

Get used to it. :/

Skyrim's engine is quite bad and ENB is unbelievably badly optimized on top of it. 3GB of VRAM use is easily possible (and indeed likely) running ENB and HD textures at the same time.

Any other, better looking, newer game will take 1-1.5GB. But you have to be prepared for frustration trying to mod Skyrim's graphics, because it's just a resource hog with no efficiency at all.

[Jeir]

3GB VRAM? I'm running an ENB with just 1GB. Of course, the moment I add anything like Frostfall, game goes from 2+ hours stability to 20mins, so I'm probably close to the limit of what my game/specs can handle.

 

Consider using lower res textures (a mix of 1k and 2k, with the rare 4k, instead of all 2-4k+. Unless you spend all your time stationary and staring at things, having super detailed textures aren't really necessary), and see if mods like Project Optimisation and Grass on Steroids help at all.

[Lord Garon]

Subjective opinion (no real data to back this up): I have a fairly low-end gaming rig and have worked to balance performance/looks. Currently, I'm using several HD texture replacements and the Hi-Res versions of several mesh replacers, but the textures are "optimized" to lower resolutions with DDSOpt. I know that sounds self-defeating, but it SEEMS to me (the subjective part) that the game looks much better with reduced resolution hi-quality textures than it does with vanilla assets. In any case, my machine (Intel G2030, HD-7770 2GB) simply cannot maintain the "responsiveness" I want in Skyrim with a bucket load of 2k and 4k textures. With a majority of 1k "optimized" textures, the game plays very well, and looks pretty good, IMHO. I can't make screenshots to promote a new ENB, but the graphical "immersion" level is the highest I've been able to achieve, so far.

 

I might also add that lighting mods can make a big difference, for a relatively lower performance hit than simply cranking up texture resolutions. I like quality in the exterior world, vice indoors, and CoT gives some pretty cool effects with a very small performance hit on my system. My sister has a beast i7 rig (she does 3D artwork) and, truthfully, my machine is actually "smoother" than her's in Skyrim and the difference in graphics quality is not that much (on one of her three monitors, at 1080p), though I certainly wouldn't mind having her graphics and my game play. I'm just too cheap, I mean poor, to actually pay for it.

 

You might give something like the HRDLC Optimized packs a shot and see if they help.

[Rennn]

Subjective opinion (no real data to back this up): I have a fairly low-end gaming rig and have worked to balance performance/looks. Currently, I'm using several HD texture replacements and the Hi-Res versions of several mesh replacers, but the textures are "optimized" to lower resolutions with DDSOpt. I know that sounds self-defeating, but it SEEMS to me (the subjective part) that the game looks much better with reduced resolution hi-quality textures than it does with vanilla assets. In any case, my machine (Intel G2030, HD-7770 2GB) simply cannot maintain the "responsiveness" I want in Skyrim with a bucket load of 2k and 4k textures. With a majority of 1k "optimized" textures, the game plays very well, and looks pretty good, IMHO. I can't make screenshots to promote a new ENB, but the graphical "immersion" level is the highest I've been able to achieve, so far.

 

I might also add that lighting mods can make a big difference, for a relatively lower performance hit than simply cranking up texture resolutions. I like quality in the exterior world, vice indoors, and CoT gives some pretty cool effects with a very small performance hit on my system. My sister has a beast i7 rig (she does 3D artwork) and, truthfully, my machine is actually "smoother" than her's in Skyrim and the difference in graphics quality is not that much (on one of her three monitors, at 1080p), though I certainly wouldn't mind having her graphics and my game play. I'm just too cheap, I mean poor, to actually pay for it.

 

You might give something like the HRDLC Optimized packs a shot and see if they help.

 

To be fair, your monitor is 15" which seems to hint it's 720p. That offers pretty big increases on performance from ENB and HD textures.

 

Aside from that, lighting is generally much more efficient to improve graphics than meshes and textures. That's why the best looking PS3 games go for very low resolution textures and simple meshes, but can maintain quite nice lighting and decent graphics overall despite the weak PS3 specs. Lighting > Textures.

The problem is ENB itself is badly optimized, so when I say "lighting > textures" I mean in-engine lighting like CoT or RLO, not post FX added by ENB.

[Lord Garon]

@Rennn: I couldn't figure out your 15" monitor remark until I finally looked at my profile. I have no idea why there is a random monitor spec, and nothing else, in there. Actually, there is an ACER G226 on the Little Pentium That Could (game machine). Although I do run an active ENB in some Skyrim setups (not just ENBoost), its mainly for shadow fixing, not generic post processing, so the ENB hit is minimal. And, the only HD textures I have left after optimizing are LOD and body (*blush*) textures/msn maps. Most game textures are now 1024 x 1024 and the normal maps are 512 x 512, so their hit is also reduced, both in terms of performance and VRAM usage.

 

I just wanted to clarify things for others looking for "better" graphics and more performance. It seems to me that reducing the resolution of Hi-Quality textures results in a greater performance increase than the associated graphics quality reduction. FWIW. EDIT: The preceding doesn't sound right. What I meant to say: It seems to me that the performance gain achieved by reducing the resolution of High Quality textures more than offsets any actual reduction of in-game visual quality caused by the lower texture resolutions.

Edited March 7, 2014 by Lord Garon

[PlanetNorris]

Hey guys, just reporting in to say that I believe it's due to HDD thrashing, I have done a lil bit of research and I still have an old 5400RPM HDD in my PC, Skyrim is not the only game which I get Micro-freezes and what not on (which I assumed were being caused by the VRAM usage), I was going to get a new HDD next month anyway, so it looks like now I have an incentive to pick it up a tad earlier.