6870 not cutting it?

[Rennn]

People are overlooking the fact that vram speed really matters. 1GB of GDDR5 is a lot better than 1GB of DDR3. People running 2k textures and ENB perfectly on 1GB of vram most likely have a faster speed. 1GB really should not normally be enough for 2048x2048 textures in a game like Skyrim unless you have a very fast card to reuse and clear the vram quickly.

[nemesis108]

thanks for all your help guys i disabled enb and 2k. Im just using realistic lighting and verts with the texture dlc. im running from 30-60fps. only hits 30fps in citys. my 6870 is overclocked as far as i can get it, and no i am not overheating it stays around 67c. its the vram its 1gb just sucks i dont have the money to throw down on a 580. would getting another 6870 in crossfire help? heard its actully performing worse for some people?

[nemesis108]

my display is 1920x1080

 

case: coolermaster haf x

i5 2500k @4.4 water cooled

6870 gpu

8gb of gskill ripjaw 2133

asus maximus IV extreme

Edited March 10, 2012 by nemesis108

[Rennn]

I wouldn't try crossfire with Skyrim, if it was me. It sounds risky from all the problems people have been having. Plus crossfire is never as heat or power efficient as a single better gpu, but without the money for a substantially better card I'd wait. Obviously anything I say is inconsequential because you'll probably end up deciding on your own anyway, but that's what I would do.

 

You may want to try CLO (link included) for potentially better graphics with no framerate loss. I love it, but people who like a more gray Skyrim won't be so happy.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11479

Edited March 10, 2012 by Rennn

[eltucu]

btw, in crossfire/sli setups, the data in the vram of the main card is mirrored on the 2nd one, both work with the same data, thus your vram limit its still 1Gb.

 

Besides, it would be wiser to buy a HD7870 instead of a GTX580. They're more or less in the same level but the HD7870 consumes like half the power and its newer tech.

[coinecc]

I also have a 6870. The graphical mods I have are:

 

2k HD Textures

Official HD Texture Pack

Realistic Colors and Real Nights

Snow HQ Textures

A bunch of random assortments of HQ textures, as well as mods that may or may not affect FPS.

 

I'm at a constant 60 FPS, though my resolution is only 1600x900. I have an i7-2600 @ 3.4 GHz.

 

I'm thinking about using ENB and seeing how that goes. I'll post back here if I do end up going for it.

[vortexhlp]

I have a 6950 (the best version by ASUS, very well cooled, I think 1100mhz and 2gb) and have very little lag issues. Everything is on max settings, distance is set to be fairly far away, I have 4k textures everywhere and if it's not 4k it's at least 2k. The mesh mod is installed and a custom ENB shader. I get a good 60fps but sometimes it gets buggy and I get around 70-80fps.

 

I don't have a monster processor, just a core2duo (3.6ghz), and running on windows 8, 64bit. 8gb of ram and on a $300 ASUS motherboard. So it's a mixture between awesome and terrible parts. However, nothing but bare essential applications run in the background (except skype and steam). Windows indexer seems to be causing a lot of issues for people, sometimes chewing up to 40% of the CPU while playing a game.

 

However, it's not all nice and rosy. In fact, it takes about a minute, sometimes two to load a location. So if I were in Solitude and went inside the inn, it would take about 30seconds, but as soon as I go back out, it can take anywhere between 30 seconds to 2 minutes and it jitters like crazy for about 10-15seconds. Once that's done though, everything runs smoothly at 60fps. Screen res: 1980x1200.

 

To compare, Battlefield 3 gets about 55-60fps on max settings with exception of Anisotropic filtering which is down to 8 instead of 16. When it's on 16, it starts to lag often but not in skyrim.

 

So How do I do it since it seems that I'm under-spec?

- Close up all of the unnecessary background applications (a batch file is useful for this)

- Close, in fact completely remove windows indexer service. It's wasteful and can use up to 40% of your CPU while playing a game

- My videocard, while it sounds mediocre, it's the best that ASUS offers for that series. It is specifically created for overclocking and it can be modified to unlock 6970 featured; making it faster than ever before. So what this means is that my videocard stays cool under stressful conditions, and it's technically a 6970 now after the custom bios update

- Your hard drive is an important factor in speedy games. If you're using a hard drive with an IDE cable, the chances are, it's going to hog down the performance. Secondly, the more RPM the better unless you have SSD in which case it's probably faster than a 10,000RPM hard drive. (Never compared specs for that)

- Your motherboard is important, don't just buy a $40-$80 motherboard and hope that it'll do well for you. With that said, get one that does the job with quality parts, proper thermal cooling, and improved data specs. You'd be surprised just how much of a difference one motherboard does over another. Also make sure it's 'unlocked' so you can modify things directly. (multi-bios support is recommended)

- 64bit versus 32bit; 64bit requires more memory but it's much faster (at times over 3x faster than x86) and this is especially true with directX

- RAM is important, the more the better but there's a limit. You won't need more than 8gb for now, and make sure that you don't have a single stick of 2,4,6,8gb... because it's not very efficient. Assuming the specs are the same, 2x 512mb ram is better than 1x 1gb ram. Having 4x4 or 2x2x2 is great because it can properly delegate the necessary information to different cards instead of forcing it all within one.

- Proper ventilation on your computer case is important when playing high-end games! Suck air from the top, throw it out of the side. If your power supply is located at the top, then the odds are, your pc case isn't very efficient with cooling

- Thermal compound: Every 6-months or so, get rid of the thermal compound from your processor and slap some new one on there. Some people never change this and this causes overheating issues, sometimes failures. It's like taking your computer to the dentist, it has to be done

- Dirt / other maintenance: Clean your PC, get rid of that 2inch of dust clogging up your videocard's fan. Go through and clean everything so you can eat dinner off of your hard drive. Seriously, keep it clean! This helps with heating issues and prevents future hardware failure.

 

That's basically it, at least for my setup. The most important part is to understand your computer because if you have a lot of things running in the background (check resource monitor inside task manager, not the first thing you see), have a PC configuration that is meant for internet use and minor gaming then you won't get very far, even with a good videocard. Clean that computer, add new thermal compound (remove the old one first), get rid of unnecessary peripherals (are you going to be using that wacom tablet any time soon or how about that bluetooth adapter? The latter is like, minor improvement that might not matter, but it can prevent background applications from running while you're playing a game. So that's it! I hope this was useful to some :)

[Rennn]

Well that Anisotropic filtering thing is strange. It really shouldn't affect performance at all. I'd call it a bug, because an extra 8x AF only hurts my fps by less than 1 fps on my GTX 460.

[xlcr]

hi vortexhlp, i was alittle surprised to see you mention your loading times transitioning to a new cell/location,

30 secs - 2 mins w/jittering seems excessive and maybe something's not right; but, all those 4K textures are probably the reason and you're willing to live with it.

just for comparison, w/my aging asus g73 laptop i7/460m 1.4gb vram (4gb total shared w/system), 8gb mem win7-64bit machine,

i've stuck to mostly 2K textures, disabled interior/exterior fog effects, installed mods to replace rain/snow/water/foliage/sky textures/animation/sound, and no enb -

- transition times average 5-15 secs everywhere. of course i don't get all the eye candy you have lol.

(wondering if you've got somekind of mod that might have a memory leak).

Edited March 10, 2012 by xlcr

[nemesis108]

ill just list all my mods that im using to give more reference to my situation as of right now im getting 50ish fps in the fields out side of white run. in whiterun 25 top step. 40ish in a forested areas

 

-A Quality World Map

-Apachii Sky Hair

-Cover Eyes

-Cover Women

-Cover Khajjits

-Better Dynamic Snow

-Deadly Spell Impacts

-Dynavison

-Enhanced Blood Textures

-Enhanced Distant Terrain

-Enhanced Night Sky

-Intricate Spider Webs

-Kill Move Plus

-Lush Grass

-Lush Trees w/Verts Compatibility

-Midas Magic

-Pise

-Realistic Lighting With Customization

-Realistic Smoke And Embers

-Realistic Water

-Shadow Striping Fix

-Skyrim Flora Overhaul

-Skyrim Sun-glare V3

-Sky UI

-Sounds of skyrim Both

-Static Mesh

-WarZones

-HD Texture patch

 

if i add 2k textures to this and enb it bogs my system down to 40fps - 19fps in wild, and 25-15 in whiterun

 

just thought id post my results with the 6870, for people looking into the card or people wanting to see results, and comparing