FPS w/ HD Texture Mods

[SynX1]

Hi,

 

I've been running a lot of the HD texture mods and have started hitting lower frame rates than I actually thought I would. Not entirely unexpected, but my question here is mainly directed at those other enthusiasts who may be running Skyrim with all the texture mods they can get there hands on. What are you running? What would you say my system would benifit from?

 

I've got 2048, or in a few cases 4096, textures installed on almost all the characters, armors, landscape, clutter, furniture, etc. that I could find. Running with about 25 to 35, with some instances of 20 or lower when loading new textures. I've been using the Elys MemInfo plugin and notice Skyrim mostly only using about 2GB of RAM. Some cases it will briefly go up to 2.3GB, with 2.4GB being the highest I have seen it. I used a LAA patcher found on Nexus, and imagine works but an not too sure. Any other suggestions to get the game to use more memory?

 

Specs:

Intel i7-980x @ 4Ghz stable

12GB DDR3-2000 - System Pagefile disabled

GeForce GTX 480 Tri SLI - OC'd

X-Fi Sound Card

 

Note: I've got a 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3 that I am running Skyrim off of. I've been contemplating throwing another in for RAID0, but I doubt that would help with anything other than the actual loading of the game. Please correct me if I am wrong.

[jimmykudoez]

You really shouldn't turn off your pagefile. Disabling it does nothing to speed up your computer and most programs need it to run effectively (even if it isn't actually used when you have enough RAM). It all has to do with coding, try turning it back on to system managed. Otherwise, you're using textures sizes that were not designed for the game, try turning them down.

 

Also, Skyrim is known for its inability to not make use of large RAM amounts. For a 32bit program (which TES5 is) the practical upper limit is usually about 3GB of RAM. Hope this helps.

[danwatto]

I'm not sure how SLI is with Skyrim, but my experience hasn't been good with multicard as with single. Since we have about $200 added to imported video cards in Australia we're better off to buy a single card whichever is the fastest than go multi gpu anyway.

 

With the 7970 (3gb video ram) I'm running triple screen 5160x1600 resolution, with loads of texture mods from nexus. My mod manager list fills my whole 30" screen lol.

 

She's running Beautifully, I'm running on Ultra everything except AA is only 2x because that's all that's needed on high res like this. It's stutter free, very smooth, frame rates about 45fps.

 

MSI Afterburner reports Skyrim using about 2gb to 2.5gb of the video ram, that high vram use is due to the texture mods but also the 8million pixels per frame. It’s just perfect with the new generation cards.

 

Mods make this game glorious, was roaming around with my new Horse Whistle and horse textures in HD this morning and didn’t want to leave for work.. kind of funny when a game is so great you don’t want to go to work and earn the money that pays for the hobby 

[ProjectVRD]

Your problem could be the GFX cards.... running in SLi. Bethesda seem to have inputted no coding at all to allow for multi-GPU setups, so both nVidia and AMD are really struggling at the moment to get it right. I have the exact same problem with AMD Crossfire and see tons and tons of reports of people getting stuttering, flickering even, with multi-GPUs. Which is why I created a poll for people to vote who they think should be fixing the Skyrim multi-GPU issues... the manufacturers, or Bethesda.

 

 

Really, it should be Bethesda, they have the Cuda and Stream kits for free and those kits were published a long time ago. All gaming devs should be writting the coding to properly allow use of more than one graphics card as a semi-native option, when the card manufacturers constantly update to try and get it working they often break multi-GPU support in other games. Not enough people are aware that it is not the manufacturers that should be doing this work but now they are kind of stuck with it because they picked up the ball when it is was in the other teams half of the pitch.

 

Personally, I would like to see both nVidia and AMD just stop supporting the cards to the extent that they do at the moment, the gaming community should then be told that they can't take it on anymore and they need to push the devs into a corner and make them properly code the games. We'd then have 2 or 3 GPU updates a year compared to the 1 a month we currently experience... and we would never have to bother with those annoying profiles neither. It gives the manufacturers that extra resource needed to improve the performance of the hardware instead of making compatibility updates.

Edited January 31, 2012 by ProjectVRD

[danwatto]

If you sell those 3x480s that should cover a 7970 :)

 

Overclock it to 1150Mhz and it will do anything you ask with its clothed on ;)

 

Multi-GPU is WORK every time you want to get a new game setup.

[ProjectVRD]

If you sell those 3x480s that should cover a 7970 :)

 

Overclock it to 1150Mhz and it will do anything you ask with its clothed on ;)

 

Multi-GPU is WORK every time you want to get a new game setup.

 

This bloke brings up a good point, the money you would get for your three cards would cover the cost of a 7970... or atleast go one heck of a way to paying for it. The 7970 is a single GPU with 3GB VRAM, it is the only 3GB VRAM card on the market. All other 3GB VRAM cards are actually two cards in one that work in Crossfire/SLi.

 

It is a solution you might be want to look at.

 

I am actually considering selling my AMD cards to go back to single GPU using this monster, but I am waiting to here news on the other HD7000 series and new nVidia's. If they are gonna be more than three months away, I will be going for the HD7970. :thumbsup:

Edited January 31, 2012 by ProjectVRD

[SynX1]

I appreciate the replies. I might look into selling them to upgrade towards the GTX 680's when they come out. Not sure if having waterblocks on all three of them would put off buyers though. I've never really been much of an ATI fan to be honest, and I have a nice 3D Vision setup I would lose functionality with where I to switch over. I think I will try running with one GPU and see where that gets me. It would be a great shame were SLI support where the problem lay.

[banzaigtv]

Are you sure you have the latest patch which includes the 4 GB update? I am running a Radeon HD 6770 with 1 GB VRAM and have not hit any fps drops even with several 4K texture mods installed. My fps is 40-60 fps on 1920x1080 resolution. What mods are you using? Your PC should be able to handle anything you throw at it.

[SynX1]

Well, I finally got time to play Skyrim and disabled SLI. Sure enough, without SLI enabled I am getting about 50-60 fps now. Amazing how much of a difference that made. I can't believe Skyrim was handling it that poorly. Thanks all here for the advice.

[MrBuio]

Regarding SLI, have you tried the latest Nvidia beta drivers? I know there can be problems with SLI but I've seen tests with SLI setups that run fine. Maybe it is because of the increased texture load.

 

If you run Process Explorer in the background (or some other similar tool) you can check things like GPU memory used, Skyrim process memory used, GPU and CPU load etc). Process Explorer is a Microsoft utility. There is a GPU tab on the System Information dialog.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653

 

If you want to reduce your VRAM load, I would suggest switching landscape textures to a light version if possible, as it's probably the least noticeable difference while using a lot less VRAM. For example if you use Skyrim HD, the full version zip is 846MB while the lite version is 269MB.

Edited February 1, 2012 by MrBuio