squibjb66 Posted October 11, 2012 Share Posted October 11, 2012 Hi folks, I'm not an IT professional, so I was wondering if a external RAMdisk could be used to play Skyrim and help speed up load times and possibly settle down flicker? squibjb66"Make your own luck" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Georgiegril Posted October 12, 2012 Share Posted October 12, 2012 I think there are probably less troublesome ways to address your problem. External RAM might help in the case of very low internal memory, but it probably would not address flicker. What are your computer specs and graphics settings currently and what exactly are the problems you are encountering? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
squibjb66 Posted October 12, 2012 Author Share Posted October 12, 2012 I think there are probably less troublesome ways to address your problem. External RAM might help in the case of very low internal memory, but it probably would not address flicker. What are your computer specs and graphics settings currently and what exactly are the problems you are encountering? Oh my PC is very nice (IMHO), It's a mid level Alienware Aurora with one NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480, I was just wondering because I saw ASUS came out with a new RAMdisk and it advertised much faster load times. I just wasn't sure what loaded faster with this technology. I do get the occasional flicker. What I really hate is striped shadows. I get those in Skyrim around fire and in my new game XCOM. I have everything set to high or Ultra when it's available. Antialiasing 8 & Anisotropic Filtering 16. FXAA is checked.(Don't know what it means though). All reflection boxes are checked Object detail ultra with the object fade box checked. Lastly It has 8 gigs of RAM. I was hoping if it helped the CPU deal with processing graphics that it might alleviate some of the issues myself and other people have. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Georgiegril Posted October 14, 2012 Share Posted October 14, 2012 Striped shadows can be fixed by changing your prefs.ini to these values. iBlurDeferredShadowMask=7 (you can also try 5)fShadowBiasScale=0.5000 (you might try other values if this doesn't work, but I think this is the most commonly used to fix.)This link (external) discusses the pros and cons of setting up a RAMDisk, and also explains how to do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rennn Posted October 14, 2012 Share Posted October 14, 2012 (edited) Shadow flicker upon updating can be fixed by tweaking your Skyrim.ini. I have my shadows set to instantly "pop" into place every hour, and it's much better than seeing that flicker all the time.I don't remember the lines to change, and I don't want to find them or explain how they work. Google it. Shadow striping is different, and the fix listed by another poster above will probably work in most cases. FXAA in Skyrim is not necessary with a 480. Nvidia's FXAA is okay, but Skyrim's FXAA is pretty much just a blur filter designed to hide stray jaggies. The game looks better with regular MSAA, SMAA, or really any other AA. The largest positive feature of Skyrim's FXAA is that even 2x is very efficient for getting rid of jaggies on a low-end pc, but then you also add blur. An SSD would probably be a better way to reduce stutter and/or load times in Skyrim. Ram disks can be good, but idk about external ones. Not only that, but you're then probably dealing with some instability (might lose data if your pc crashes), and you won't be able to store as much. People with 16+GB of internal Ram sometimes use Ram disks, if they don't want to go to a more expensive solution, but if you're buying something anyway I'd personally go with an SSD. If you get large amounts of stutter that just won't seem to go away, I recommend capping your framerate at 60. Not above, and not below. Exactly 60. There's a bug that crops up sometimes where if Skyrim's framerate is capped at anything other than 60, you can get massive stutter regardless of specs. That's probably why Skyrim has its own internal vsync. Edited October 14, 2012 by Rennn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
squibjb66 Posted October 15, 2012 Author Share Posted October 15, 2012 Hey thanks for the replies Georgiegril & Rennn. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this community. I'll get to work on the fixes you suggested and probably go with the SSD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rennn Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 I've tested it a bit more because of this thread, and it looks like FXAA actually does more than I thought. It seems to tweak the lighting. Test with and without, and decide which you prefer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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