The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - MODS & TWEAKS

topgun06 said:
Cheers. 2K HD textures and W.A.T.E.R are the main two. I'll try uninstalling them. I already have the flora overhaul uninstalled. I did think about the GPU memory. I'll see if I can see how much is being used.
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GTX 580? With 1.5 GB VRAM? I'd be surprised if textures aren't the problem, there is software that will monitor the amount of VRAM used in realtime, just can't remember what it was right now... with all the 2K packs I have it'll get close to the 3 GB my 7950 has onboard. Textures are safe to remove at anytime as they don't leave traces in the savegame, W.A.T.E.R on the other hand has scripts iirc so be careful with that one.

Also worth pointing out generally that RealVision ENB will eat into your framerate unless you have high end card and/or SLI etc. RV gives a huge 20-30 fps drop on mine even the performance version gives a hammering. Personally I don't use ENB's I adjust saturation/contrast, sepia tone etc with SweetFX and I don't get the framerate hit.
 
Worth saying that I've found by and large one of the major contributors to the performance hit on ENBs is the DOF effects... I generally turn them off anyway as I find them too much during normal gameplay, and I noticed immediately a big improvement. This was using the Serenity ENB, but I expect DOF is equally demanding regardless of the specific ENB in use

Since you asked: My system which runs Skyrim with ENB +100 mods or so including a lot of high quality visual mods:

i7 4770K
16Gb RAM
MSI GTX 670 OC Edition (2Gb VRAM)
Crucial M4 SSD (though Skyrim isn't installed on the SSD - makes little difference)

and also in regards to the post above about the VRAM - I find Skyrim absolutely pushes the available 2Gb I have to the limit. Not really in indoor areas but in any major city exterior or in the over-world it will creep right up to 99% VRAM utilisation and stay there. Hoping to replace my card with a GTX 970 which would double the VRAM and give me a bit more headroom in Skyrim
 
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uncle_rufus said:
Worth saying that I've found by and large one of the major contributors to the performance hit on ENBs is the DOF effects... I generally turn them off anyway as I find them too much during normal gameplay, and I noticed immediately a big improvement. This was using the Serenity ENB, but I expect DOF is equally demanding regardless of the specific ENB in use

Since you asked: My system which runs Skyrim with ENB +100 mods or so including a lot of high quality visual mods:

i7 4770K
16Gb RAM
MSI GTX 670 OC Edition (2Gb VRAM)
Crucial M4 SSD (though Skyrim isn't installed on the SSD - makes little difference)

and also in regards to the post above about the VRAM - I find Skyrim absolutely pushes the available 2Gb I have to the limit. Not really in indoor areas but in any major city exterior or in the over-world it will creep right up to 99% VRAM utilisation and stay there. Hoping to replace my card with a GTX 970 which would double the VRAM and give me a bit more headroom in Skyrim
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Do you still think that the Serenity ENB is the "better" one to try out..?

In the past, with my 670GTX, I always had performance hits when trying any of the ENB type mods and so gave up for hat alone. Hopefully...

3570k @ 4.4
16GB RAM
SSD
MSI 970 GTX

.....the 970GTX might make enough of a difference to make it worthwhile this time.
 
uncle_rufus said:
Worth saying that I've found by and large one of the major contributors to the performance hit on ENBs is the DOF effects... I generally turn them off anyway as I find them too much during normal gameplay, and I noticed immediately a big improvement. This was using the Serenity ENB, but I expect DOF is equally demanding regardless of the specific ENB in use
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I find Ambient Occlusion to be a bigger performance hit than DOF, can kill your FPS. I usually keep it on though and disable DOF. Use Dynavision instead with static DOF. For me it's just to blur out the distant terrain a bit and hide the terrible transitions as stuff pops into existence.
 
I can't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to run it...

I like Serenity mostly because it's a little bit less saturated looking than RealVision and some of the others - they just look like a colour explosion overload to my eyes and it's all just a bit too vibrant

I started with a vanilla install of Skyrim and the very first thing I did was install Serenity ENB (maybe I installed SKSE or something as well) and play about with it to see what the performance was like. In my case disabling DOF gave me pretty much the performance I wanted... Then I set to work gradually installing mods and checking if they had any negative impact on how it ran as I went along

Edit (to the guy above): I did run Dynavision for a while but I just don't think I like DOF in general, something about the focus shift effect as you highlight close or far objects just made me feel almost queazy... Perhaps there is some setting I could try that would make it less exaggerated
 
Thanks for that.

I remember using Dynavvison (Gophers mods IIRC) for the Fallout series but after the novelty aspect of using it I then removed the mod as I found it too distracting overall.
 
IronWarrior said:
Does the i7 not help in Skyrim at all even at large resolutions and many scripts running?

If not, then I will happy stick to the i5 and save that £100. ;)
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I know that Skyrim doesn't use threads at all, and am not sure if make's use of all 4 cores properly. They're some .ini tweaks but I don't know if they help/work at all.

Some of the mods I have mentioned help with performance. :)
 
+1 for not needing for the i7... I can't see that Skyrim ever really uses much more than a single thread

I got my i7 for 3d rendering work and testing MPI and parallelism in my own coding projects, and for that it's very useful... If I was only interested in gaming I'd have stuck with an i5 and put the extra ~£100 into getting the next-model-up graphics card instead
 
So I'm looking at an upgrade then from the 580 GTX then. I've had a quick look at going SLI but my particular card seems hard to come by.

So the 970 is the next go to card then..? Anyway, needs some research.
 
It's getting good recommendations at the moment that's for sure...

Personally though I'm sure many on these forums would disagree I've always been of the philosophy that sooner or later no matter how amazing a particular SLi setup might be, a single card will come along some time later which outperforms it. Yes you have to wait a little for the performance to catch up but I can't be bothered worrying about any possible SLi problems, and I rarely have double the amount of money of a single card to splash out
 
GTX970 at 1080P will run Skyrim and a nice ENB pretty well (Solid 60FPS indoors, 50-60 outside). I've just gone over 75% (out of 4GB) VRAM usage. My up/side-grade from 3GB GTX780 is justified! :).

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