Questions about VRAM/Textures/Stutter & Jerkiness

[drose25]

Hi All,

 

Historically my Skyrim experience has been very smooth -- usually 58-60 FPS when I track it and my panning is so quick and smooth it makes me dizzy. :biggrin: Recently, however, I started getting a little stutter/jerkiness/lag occasionally, like the game was loading something from a cache. This would be especially noticeable panning in new areas sometimes, but once I panned around the problem went away. This started happening very frequently over the last few days and I think the problem stems from too many texture mods and not enough VRAM, but I wanted to make sure this behavior is symptomatic of that problem. I tried various other stutter fixes recommended in the forums and none of them helped (tried windowed mode, disabling mouse acceleration, capping FPS, etc.)

 

Checking VRAM usage while running Skyrim, it was hovering around 950mb. My full specs are below, but the grapics card is a GTX 560 Ti 1GB Twin Frozr II OC. I figured this was cutting it pretty close so I deactivated the last couple of texture mods I added and saw a little improvement. I then deactivated the official High Res DLC packs (which I installed a long time ago and hadn't been problematic previously) and almost all of the stutter cleared up. Ironically though, my VRAM usage has increased to ~ 1000mb.

 

I would think that an increase in VRAM usage would lead to more stutter, not less. Can anyone explain this to me? I'm getting ready to go through my mods and be a little more selective about my texture packs, etc. to help avoid this stutter problem in the future but I want to understand what I'm looking for better. Is it just texture file size or are there other issues associated with textures that can impact VRAM usage and performance? Will optimizing/compressing textures save VRAM or are they all uncompressed in memory?

 

My CPU doesn't really break a sweat while running Skyrim and many other things in the background so I don't think it's part of the problem. I've been gaming while it encrypts/backs up some 10gb virtual disk files and never had a problem. I run Skyrim in fullscreen mode, 1920x1080, Ultra for the most part. AA 4x, AF 4x. Playing with these settings impacted FPS some, but didn't help with the stutter/jerkiness.

 

Here are my specs just in case there may be a HW issue:

 

CPU: AMD Phenom II x 6 1055T

RAM: 16GB DDR3

Vid: GTX 560 Ti 1GB Twin Frozr II OC (at factory 880/1760/2100, overclocking it higher didn't impact the stutter issue in Skyrim)

HDD: OS - SATA6 SSD Steam/Skyrim - SATA3 SSD

OS: Win7 Pro 64bit

 

Mainly I'm just looking to understand the VRAM/texture relationship so I can optimize and keep an eye out when installing future mods.

 

Thanks!

[Valkyrie]

If you added a bunch of texture mods and it started getting glitchy after that then ya might be able to blame yourself for your current problems. But I keep finding, time and time again, that the game is responsible for causing these problems as your character (saves) advance in time played. Skyrim is a great game but it has its quirks. Memory leaks, bloated saves, etc.. I've experienced and helped ppl with the same problem it seems like every day on here. The one thing that I've found that really helped (besides cleaning your saves which is hit and miss) is to limit your fps in game as these things start to rear their ugly head. Many will disagree I'm sure but try this. We've found for some reason your card will utilize more of its "power" if you limit your fps. I've been using a program called MSI Afterburner and its display server. I turn off v-sync in my video card drivers then limit the fps in game to 30 (which is plenty). Have a look at this thread I bet it will help: http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/955666-skyrim-low-fps-on-my-msi-ge60-0nd/

 

It made Skyrim run smooth as silk again for me on all ultra settings and every texture mod I could find.

 

AMD Phenom 2 Quad Core 985

Geforce GTX560

Geforce GTS250 (running physics)

4 Gigs Ram

 

 

If ya really wanna educate yourself on video card inner workings have a read here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html

 

 

[drose25]

Yeah, I knew I brought it on myself with my love for texture mods, but I wanted to better understand exactly what I screwed up so I could fix it and not do it again in the future. :D Thanks for that tweakguides link, BTW, it was very informative.