Besidilo

This was probably a card not throttling when exceeding certain temperature threshold. It shouldn't be an issue for users that have half-decent cooling. I haven't had any issue with that driver, personally. The problem is not even reported by any of the major tech forums. Still to bear in mind that ENB is not compatible with this driver. Scrap that, there are users on overclock.net reporting the issues with Fermi cards, as well as on the official Nvidia forum. I'd avoid them in that case, personally, even though I haven't had an issue with them (but that could be due to a limited number of games I tested it in). ENB is not fully compatible, but besides the SkyLighting bug, I don't think there's anything else that conflicts.

This was probably a card not throttling when exceeding certain temperature threshold. It shouldn't be an issue for users that have half-decent cooling. I haven't had any issue with that driver, personally. The problem is not even reported by any of the major tech forums.

I've played little Skyrim since the 1.9 patch. Is that really a noticeable issue? If so, that's hilarious that they would have left the game in a broken state.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I love my Nexus 7. It does have a terrible I/O performance, though, and it's visible in many games. I'm not just making stuff up, it's easy to see in a number of games which run a lot better on non-Tegra devices. Try playing Order and Chaos on your Nexus, for example. Unfortunately, Nvidia dropped the ball on that one and have since improved their SoC with Tegra 4 towards achieving balanced I/O performance. Besides, you could always go on XDA dev forums and see the multitude of complaints with regards to how it handles newer games. It also gets awfully laggy very quickly when multitasking. Just saying that you have a few geeky friends who like the Nexus doesn't make my statement any less valid. :) It's an excellent device for the money, but it's quite dated by today's standards when it comes to performance. It will still handle mostly everything, but not as well as I'd like it to.

Like I said, ebook readers are vastly superior for reading books. I got my Nook Simple Touch for £26 and it's excellent for that purpose. Save the forests, man!

Nexus 7 is painfully slow for a gaming device and quite small as a media device. Ebook readers are better for reading books and smartphones are more portable and universal. I've got a Nexus 7 and a Nexus 4, and the only use my Nexus 7 gets these days is if I'm travelling somewhere or want to browse web/do some light news reading. On top of that, you can get a far superior Radeon 7870 XT 2GB for €209 whereas the cheapest GTX 660 3GB is €219 (IIRC, you're from Germany). https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/club3d_radeon_7870_joker_review,1.html https://www.pckoloji.com/vtx3d-radeon-hd-7870-black-2gb-gddr5-uefi/ https://www.pureoverclock.com/Review-detail/powercolor-pcs-7870-myst-edition/ https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5158/sapphire_radeon_hd_7870_xt_tahiti_le_2gb_with_boost_overclocked_video_card_review/index.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviewdb/Graphics-Cards/ATI/HD-7870/

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But the problem with measuring VRAM is that it doesn't distinguish between what's being paged, buffered or actually used by the game. It also won't tell you how much VRAM is REQUIRED by the game, since you can have two exactly the same systems, one with 1GB VRAM card (say an HD 7870) and one with 2GB VRAM at a relatively low resolution, like 1600x900, or something along these lines, and on exactly two identically Skyrim setups you will see different VRAM usage? Why? Because one card has more VRAM to do the buffering. In no way does it mean the lower card will struggle performance-wise because it's close to its limit. It's when you actually do hit the limit when the symptoms become too obvious to ignore. Whilst I agree that being on the safe side is always better in the long term, it doesn't necessarily mean that we should fully engage in recommending ridiculously expensive cards with excessive video memory because of some presumptions. I hope that makes my position clearer on the issue. And please, edit out those quotes.

It's also been proven that you'll often run into crashes before you even reach said wall. My initial question still stands, how do you measure the effective VRAM usage in Skyrim? I haven't seen many people doing it any reliable way. S4BN has explained it a number of times. EDIT: let's remove these quotes because the thread is getting ridiculous with replies 10x longer than the actual content.

How do you measure your VRAM usage? I don't believe you can use all 3 GB at 1920x1080 and I haven't seen anyone complaining about 2 GB being a limiting factor in this game. I suppose it really does depend if you use supersampling, but that increases the effective resolution making the argument half-valid and non-relevant to most gamers (since SuperSampling has its own fair share of issues and most people won't use it). Your argument that multi-monitor users "probably need 4 (GB VRAM)" is just a speculation. There's a simple test against that. Look up reviews of the GTX 780 3GB (Titan LE) and see how it fares against the more powerful Titan GPU 6GB when overclocked. Then look for any mentions of VRAM limitations. Here's a tip: you'll find none.

I still don't understand that argument. Unless you go REALLY HIGH resolution with multiple monitors and high levels of AA, 3GB VRAM doesn't become a limiting factor. Just look at the reviews of GTX 780 vs the Titan, one card has 3GB VRAM, the other 6GB. VRAM is not an issue in almost any case, and they test the cards at resolutions way higher than any single monitor can output. The VRAM argument has been overplayed for as long as dedicated graphics card units are a thing. I've been a PC gamer for close to 20 years and it's always the same tune.

I wouldn't exactly call the GTX 660M powerful. It has less power than a GTX 650, which is a rather weak card, all things considered. I suppose it's not so bad for a mobile GPU. In any case, if you can find someone with a GTX 650, the performance should be fairly comparable. https://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2012/10/04/evga-geforce-gtx-650-1gb-review/5

95% of the time you'd be limited by the raw power of the GPU anyway. Unless you have an uber rig with 2 or 3 high-end Nvidia/AMD cards, I wouldn't worry all that much about VRAM. That is, until you decide to pair your weak PC with a high resolution monitor... Maxing out the potential of Skyrim results in crashes regardless of your VRAM buffer. The engine is not capable of handling 4K-8K resolution textures or loading up large areas at once.

Inb4 cease and desist.

I wouldn't be able to make any gains by eating plants all day. A well balanced diet is where it's at. Besides, meat is delicious and there's no reason for me to give up eating it. Sustainability is a problem that won't be solved by going fully vegan and I'd worry about health issues related to the lack of right proteins rather than the dangers of eating meat of any kind.

I'm struggling to find games that would make an efficient use of my Radeon 7970's 3GB VRAM at 2560x1440. Honestly, Skyrim is the only one that comes close to the limit with the right choice of textures. 1.5 GB on my old GTX 580 was another story. It becomes a limiting factor in quite a few games. I highly doubt we'll see use of console video games using excessive amounts of VRAM. After all, they're be all limited to 1920x1080 anyway. In any case, Falcon's guide is fairly decent if you live in the US. Although I wouldn't completely rely on it for building a gaming system, since it's usually better to allocate 25-40% of your budget towards the best graphics card you can get. Radeon 7950 3GB is the best value for money card that can overclock to similar levels that most 7970s do and is even better than an overclocked GTX 770 (or GTX 680 for the well-informed individuals) in some games. PC Part Picker has a good rundown of the best prices for specific components, which may save you $'000s if used right. Honestly, don't bother future-proofing your rig, because it will be dated in a year or two no matter what you do. Just make the most efficient use of your budget and buy a good all-around system. If you ever need to upgrade, the graphics card is the most likely component to be replaced and these have struggled with providing any improvements in the past few years.

Happy Birthday, Farlo!

I advise against using GeForce Experience to tweak Skyrim. It pretty much defaults to Ultra settings on my card, which is useless if you want to use ENB or force your own AA through the drivers. Its game database is fairly limited to and I found it intrusive and inaccurate for games you would do the tweaking yourself. Still, it's a great tool for gamers who have no idea how their system handles the new titles. I didn't suggest to use it for tweaking Skyrim, more for driver updates. NCP has an automatic update function already. You can also choose whether you want it to search for Beta drivers or not. https://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-update.html

I'm surprised Chesko hasn't acknowledged the issue yet. Time to send him a PM and see if anything can be done about that.

I advise against using GeForce Experience to tweak Skyrim. It pretty much defaults to Ultra settings on my card, which is useless if you want to use ENB or force your own AA through the drivers. Its game database is fairly limited to and I found it intrusive and inaccurate for games you would do the tweaking yourself. Still, it's a great tool for gamers who have no idea how their system handles the new titles.

That looks fantastic for the price! I'm looking forward to your feedback on the monitor.

Just the graphics card. Radeon 7950/70s do extremely well at this resolution if you're not a freak about anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion or similarly taxing graphical settings. $750 can buy you one of these: Dell U2913WM - excellent monitor for movies and games that support the odd resolution - e.g. anything that doesn't run at fixed ratio. 21:9 ratio is almost like having two 5:4 monitors stuck together. Here's the size comparison of a 27" 2560x1440 monitor to the 29" 2560x1080 one. I'd only recommend it to people that play new games and watch a lot of movies on their PCs. For that, it's an excellent choice, and the relatively small increase in resolution won't be too taxing on the GPU (2.3m pixels vs 2.07m on a standard widescreen monitor). I would also advise taking a look at the AOC 29" monitor that most likely utilises the same panel and costs a whopping $125 less. IMHO the current best choice on the market is Dell U2713HM. For $650 it's a no-brainer, the customer service Dell provides is second to none (at least when it comes to their premium grade monitors), and it has everything you might possibly want from a general purpose monitor. Mind you, the pixel density difference is quite noticeable at first, 109 PPI against 90-100 PPI on most monitors. A good alternative would be the Asus PB278Q, which uses a Samsung PLS panel (all 27" IPS monitors use the LG panels AFAIK). It's around the same price as Dell U2713HM and has a few advantages over it (but it isn't flawless).

The player was just lazy and couldn't think of a solution that would win his game. That scenario was resolved within a day of releasing the savegames. Good story to tell, not so much a simulation.

I'm busy with real life and won't be able to contribute to STEP any time soon. Feel free to demote me to whatever rank. I still follow the updates and progress on fairly regular basis, although I haven't been on Nexus in a while and getting my mods list up to date is not a priority to me, since I have some unrelated hardware issues and no time to really sort them out. Another issue is that when I actually find the time to spend some time here and see how I can contribute, I'm overwhelmed with the number of threads and new posts, which slows down any progress I could make towards catching up with you. Whilst I still have some time to play video games, I find Skyrim generally boring on its own and maintaining an up to date STEP + gameplay mods list is time consuming and frustrating. That said, congratulations on the progress and I hope you guys will be able to increase the popularity of the project and keep on going towards the ultimate Skyrim experience.