Performance questions with hd packs

[dbgager]

Recently I installed Skyrim again with the intention of exploring the game with HD packs installed. I have installed a variety of Mods, but the mods that will effect performace are the HD texture packs. I decided to go all out., so I downloaded The Texture pack combiner..which is simply a batch file that combines all the best textures into a directory that you can simple then copy into the game..I then downloaded all the texture packs, and ran the batch file.

 

Well my in game performance was not terribly bad in wilderness areas averaging 20-40 fps,although it would stutter often..and somtimes freeze for a short while. But as soon as I came to a town or any area with a number of NPCs it turned into a slide show. When I installed the texture packs I always opted for the 2048 texures rather than the 4096.

 

I have just purchased several upgrades for my computer and hopefully will be able to run Skyrim in HD mode better.

 

My Specs where

 

AMD Phenom 8450 processor..4 GB memory

Asus GTX550ti Video Card

 

 

My purchases where

AMD FX-6300 processor..Asus M5A97 MB...8 GB DD3 1866 ram( I was thinking from how the game was behaving..I had more CPU limiting than GPU limiting).

Asus GTX 660ti with 2 GB video card ( the factory overclocked version)

 

I also purchaseed a newer technolgy HD to speed up HD accesses

Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM.

 

This is about all my budget could afford..at about $700. WIll this run my current Skyrim at an enjoyabel level of performance. I also am curious if I would also be able to add an ENB profile to this..since I know that drags performance down another 10-50%.

Edited April 19, 2013 by dbgager

[Naturlich68]

I can't really give you an answer since we have different specs, that said last week I got myself an MSI GTX560Ti 1Gb /OC, my cpu is a Core2Duo E8400 @ 3.6Ghz and 4 gb DDR3 1333 @ 1066.

 

It's well known that skyrim doesn't use more than 2 cores anyway, so the main thing on the CPU is speed not cores, but also skyrim only really passes Shadows to the CPU.

 

with that out of the way, I run at around 50-60fps with ultra textures and High on everything else, with the view distance sliders maxed on everything. This is WITHOUT HD textures or ENB, and infact I have compressed my textures so I can install HD textures for things I want, like skins, and not fill up my vram and force skyrim to use system cache, thats bad lol

 

In my experience the CPU hasn't been the limiting factor, the amount of vram was. Before I updated to the 560ti I was running crossfired HD4870's, but only the 512mb versions, the cards are very fast, but the lack of vram was causing alot of HD caching, so slowing the game down, but in 3DMark Vantage they were happily scoring 14k on the GPU tests, only 3k or so less than my 560ti, but 3DMark doesn't use as much vram as Skyrim ;)

 

so, my thoughts are that you should be OK with ENB OR HD, but possibly not both (the 2gb vram should be very helpful), even so, you have the system now, so you get to try it out and post what you find :)

 

Nat