NVidia Pascal + Intel Broadwell-E for 255 mod list

[WickedCat]

Hey,

 

I was playing Skyrim with a huge mod list until I reached the 20 fps.

That's when I stopped playing and decided to wait for a computer upgrade.

 

My current setup is:

i5 3570K 4.2GHz

780 GTX 3GB

16 GB DDR

Samsung SSD 250GB (Win7 64b and Skyrim on it)

 

I am looking forward to the nVidia Pascal GC series and the 10 core Intel processor, around april.

 

My mods aim at enhancing the immersion mainly.

 

The mod list is mainly built around:

- NPC

- Towns

- 4k res packs

- Scripts

 

I noticed that Expanded Towns and Cities had a huge impact on my fps, rounding up a 20% decrease of my FPS.

 

I firmly want to use all these mods and get a capped 60 FPS even in town, 50 is acceptable, not below.

 

So, with the upcoming nVidia Pascal GC and 10 cores Intel processors, do you think it is possible ?

 

Here is my mods list (Excel required):

https://mega.nz/#!b1dhGIiL!owdNN5MOvJ8ZWWN6-ELx2OmfECTXvRZ4VCWKW_24LHI

Edited March 10, 2016 by WickedCat

[WickedCat]

Anyone has a clue or knows what I'm talking about ?

Edited March 11, 2016 by WickedCat

[WickedCat]

Anyone geek enough to help me out ?

[ZeroKing]

Skyrim won't make use of 10 cores in any CPU, because the engine is designed that. On top, because the engine is a 32-bit system (yes, even with ENBoost and SKSE's memory patch), you'll still get framerate spikes and slowdowns (stuttering) here and there.

 

Having a more powerful GPU than the GTX 780 will certainly help, though..... for future game titles as well.

[WickedCat]

Come on, decently modded (multiple 4k res texture packs, enb) my current computer handle Skyrim with a steady 60 FPS outdoors, even around Whiterun.

Don't tell me it's impossible to use my mods list posted above and get a rock solid 60 FPS with the new Intel proc (4-8-10 cores no matter which one) + an upcoming 16GB nVidia Pascal graphic card.

 

I can also buy a 64GB ram and create a RAMDisk in which I store Skyrim and its mods.

I read someone did it and had a 60 FPS with greedy mods like ETaC as I mentionned in my first post.

Edited March 13, 2016 by WickedCat

[obobski]

Come on, decently modded (multiple 4k res texture packs, enb) my current computer handle Skyrim with a steady 60 FPS outdoors, even around Whiterun.

Don't tell me it's impossible to use my mods list posted above and get a rock solid 60 FPS with the new Intel proc (4-8-10 cores no matter which one) + an upcoming 16GB nVidia Pascal graphic card.

 

I can also buy a 64GB ram and create a RAMDisk in which I store Skyrim and its mods.

I read someone did it and had a 60 FPS with greedy mods like ETaC as I mentionned in my first post.

 

Yeah, and the new machine won't do much better, if at all, because Skyrim will not benefit from having 10 cores (because its highly tied to single-thread/single-core performance), and you will not get it to use more than 4GB of memory (and that's all inclusive - its a Win32 application, it can only map up to 4GB of memory, and no, that 16GB graphics card doesn't buy you brownie points because A) DirectX doesn't handle memory the way you're proposing/thinking and B) its a Win32 application).

 

Broadwell doesn't offer significant IPC performance improvements over Haswell or Ivy Bridge (and its speculated that the 5675 and 5775 are so "neat" because of that massive L4, not the actual Broadwell IA cores), and the 6950X is clocked lower than your current setup (because of the 10 core design) and doesn't have the giant L4 (because HEDT doesn't get IGP) so barring an overclock (and who knows what that will mean - OC is NOT GUARANTEED and especially not on unreleased hardware; the WR for a 5775C is around 5GHz which is significantly lower than what Haswell and Ivy Bridge chips have done, for whatever that's worth) it would be a step backwards in terms of CPU performance (as far as Skyrim is concerned) and the graphics card may or may not offer the performance gain you want (the VRAM doesn't directly indicate performance either).

 

The RAMdisk (or whatever other "fast storage") will do absolutely nothing for computationally bound tasks, which is what you're dealing with when it comes to Skyrim - all it will help is disk-bound (either access time or bandwidth thruput) tasks, so the game will start and move through loading screens faster, and then lag when it actually starts running.

 

ZeroKing is right - for future games this would probably be at least somewhat of an upgrade (but games that use >4 cores are extremely rare, even today, because almost nobody has such a system), assuming Pascal offers any significant performance gains (and that's a potentially dangerous assumption - GPU performance has been largely stagnant for the last few years), but for Skyrim you're still going to bump your head on the engine's limitations (which is what you're getting right now) - if you're buying this entirely for Skyrim, it sounds like a great way to waste $10,000 and end up basically where you started.

 

What I'd try instead:

 

- You already have a good CPU and its already overclocked, so there's not much to be gained in terms of single-core/single-thread performance there, and Skyrim doesn't use any of the new instructions or features that Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake/Kaby Lake will bring (IOW you're basically capped out there, barring a further overclock), so I'd keep that.

- 16GB of RAM is more than enough and I'd leave that alone as-is. Out of the box Skyrim will use 2GB of memory at max (if you have LAA patch you can push that up to 4GB; SKSE does not integrate the LAA patch, it integrates a memory re-allocation hack that improves stability; ENBoost attempts to implement LAA and a child process to try and extend the address range further, PAE-style, but it isn't a contiguous set of pages so you are and aren't getting "more RAM").

- Your storage is fine; faster storage will decrease load times but not computation times. So I'd leave that be.

 

Where I'd look: if your motherboard and PSU support SLI, another GTX 780 would be worth considering. You still probably won't get to have 4K+ textures on all objects at all times forever (because that's unrealistic for Skyrim's engine to complete), but at bare minimum you can lean on SLI for IQ enhancement (e.g. SLI-AA) in lieu of up-rezing absolutely everything, and more likely than not you'll see at least a partial increase in frame-rate, but again, ZeroKing's point about random stutters and frame-rate drops is just par for the course with what you're asking of the engine.

 

Alternatively, you could buy a newer, more powerful, single GPU to replace the GTX 780. There aren't a ton of options though, and nothing will represent overall huge performance gains, but like the GTX 780 SLI, it isn't an awful path to go down, and even if you get into nutbar expensive stuff like Titan X or Fury X2 you won't be blowing through as much cash as the 6950X machine, and you'll have more to show for it at least.

 

Oh, and just to point out, there is no 8 core Broadwell announced - quad cores already exist, the 5675 and 5775, and the 10-core 6950X is planned for 2011-3 on the X99 platform. I haven't seen an announced release date (admittedly I haven't followed it that closely in recent weeks), so April may be overly optimistic; Wikipedia has no estimated ETA for Pascal so again April may be overly optimistic - you're talking about entirely unreleased and unknown hardware there (the 6950X will do no better than the 5775C out of the box, and may do worse; we don't know what Broadwell sans L4 EDRAM looks like yet).