GTX 660 ti sli or GTX 670 sli for modded skyrim?

[Sigurd44]

Came here wondering about this too.

I bought a Gigabyte 670 2gb half a year ago and OC-ed to 1200Mhz just to play modded Skyrim.

However, after using a performance heavy (K-enb) enb and high res texture packs (optimized) the card is starting to show its limits. (avg of 30-40fps)

 

OP: have you considered getting two 7970s? At 3Gb that seems to be the sweet spot, especially if you're going for tons of HD texture mods.

SLI definitly causes wonders for Skyrim. You should watch an almost 100% gain in performance. I thought about the high price for 2 x Asus 670 GTX as well for ONLY one game (if you are ever once addicted in making your Skyrim as good as possible there is no way back :-), but it did work out well. If you are playing other performance pressure games in example egoshooters like Crysis and such, it's a good investment, Those sorts of games do usually all support SLI too. If Skyrim is only your solo play hobby besides heavy playing MMOs, SLI would be an expensive upgrade.

 

But as I said above (in this bloody mess of html.text of a buggy board...), SLI won't double your VRAM. Your GPU power might be doubled, but not your VRAM. So...if you want to play a really heavy mod loaded Skyrim with loads of 2k, 4k and even 8k mods, I would suggest 2 x cards with at least 3 GB if not 4 GB VRAM and you should consider that you will make this investment almost only for Skyrim, because for other games 2GB VRAM is usually more than enough.

 

After fiddling around a lot with my settings I ended up at:

 

27'' monitor 2560x1440 resolution native (and I play Skyrim with that and its awesome)

 

System settings:

 

Nvidia control panel AA settings (forced):

16x AF

16xQ CSAA

8x TrSSAA

 

Other Nvidia settings:

 

Ambient Occlusion: on/quality

Texture Filtering: high quality

Vsync/Tripplebufferung: On

 

Nvidia FXAA off

Skyrim FXAA off

RCRNv36 FXAA on

 

.ini-tweaks:

 

uGridtoLoad 5/36

shadowresolution 4096

all selfshadowing on

some grass/tree load distance tweaks

rest is standard ultra stuff

 

Mods:

 

Almost any texture mod available from 2k over 4k to 8K resolution (Benjamini318's rocks for example)

 

25 - 50 fps

 

...and the most important:

 

If you run SLI it's pretty unavoidable that one card will get hotter than the other. For my ASUS 670 GTX the throttle down border is at 70 C. With the above settings my max is around 65 C with only default fan cooling in a Thermaltake MK 1 casing.

 

I tried CPU and GPU overclocking abit too in the past, but my GPU would get just too hot, even with only moderate overclocking and I am too lazy to get and build in water cooling. Even with SLI you will come to your limits if you use a 27'' monitor and 2560x1440 resolution. This screen and resolution sucks performance like juice.

[Aminados]

Came here wondering about this too.

I bought a Gigabyte 670 2gb half a year ago and OC-ed to 1200Mhz just to play modded Skyrim.

However, after using a performance heavy (K-enb) enb and high res texture packs (optimized) the card is starting to show its limits. (avg of 30-40fps)

 

OP: have you considered getting two 7970s? At 3Gb that seems to be the sweet spot, especially if you're going for tons of HD texture mods.

If I was going for single gpu I would consider AMD cards, but in SLI/CrossFire, SLI is just better in smoothness, fps's might even be the same or more, but in gameplay smoothness, SLI wins. (I have a pc with crossfire) I would recommend everyone to read this article it talks about new game performance testing methods because of micro-stuttering, I'll post the page where it shows the charts, but read it all, it's good info.

 

http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking/5

Edited March 1, 2013 by Aminados

[Sigurd44]

If we are just talking about grafic cards and driver settings and stuff...I want to take some screenshots with different, forced Nvidia driver (AA) settings and link them to the RCRNv36 board.

 

Do changes in the Nvidia control panel work asap while the application is running or do I have to quit the application/game and restart the game after each adjustment change? Don't want to have more work as needed...

[loki1944]

I actually get smoother gameplay with my 290X crossfire rig than I do right now with my 780TI SLI rig, presumably due to drivers since this is even with ENB and mods the same at 1920x1080p. The Nvidia cards have atrocious microstutter for me right now.

[DigitalVixen]

loki if you are running ENB with nVidia SLI - try to turn off CloudShadows.