Besidilo

Wouldn't that significantly reduce the textures quality? I'd think it's best to leave that to texture creators who have access to uncompressed texture files.It kind of depends on the texture, it will of course reduce the quality. But a better question is, will you notice it while playing. There are TONs of textures that are extremely oversized and you will only notice the "extra" quality in comparison shots.That's not what I meant. See torminater's post for explanation.

Wouldn't that significantly reduce the textures quality? I'd think it's best to leave that to texture creators who have access to uncompressed texture files.

"how much active VRAM Skyrim makes use of" Yeah, I don't think anybody can measure that accurately. I could keep adding high resolution textures past the point where the system tells me the whole dedicated VRAM is in use and it still won't stutter. That's because of the VRAM that is being buffered on the go by the card's drivers (at least that's how I understand it) and I can't predict the exact point where I'm going to hit the wall. Then it will start stuttering like mad. But that point is hard to even estimate as VRAM usage will vary depending on your texture choice and other settings, not to mention the cell in the game you measure it in (and how long you've been playing the game for continuously, as the game has trouble flushing the buffer for some reason - hence people using the PCB command on demand in interior cells). Case in point, take two identical system with the same Skyrim setup, one with a graphics card with lesser dedicated memory, one with larger amount of VRAM and compare the usage. It won't be the same. The graphics card with more VRAM on board will actually show higher use in game, but the gameplay won't suffer on either card. Easy to notice on mainstream systems with something like Radeon 7850 (1GB and 2GB VRAM), where people using similar settings are getting completely different VRAM usage. My advice would be to just start with a base of 2048+1024 textures and keep replacing the most important textures first and foremost, e.g. upgrade landscapes/dungeons/mountains to 4096 first, then replace models you'll see the most with 2048 textures, then take care of the less important clutter, until you actually run into VRAM issues. 3GB VRAM should be plenty enough on a laptop, you're more likely to run into RAM issues beforehand (the game would crash after certain threshold is reached).

I don't believe you need the ESP if you extract the textures.

The Soul Gem mods always annoy me, there are so many choices, I always end up just installing what everyone else seems to be using or ignoring the mod altogether.

Definitely one to ditch since SMIM does the same thing (albeit in a slightly different way). Thanks for the comparison, rpsgc.

Because I don't care much about SkyLighting (some ENBs don't even use it) and ambient occlusion looks better when forced through NVIDIA drivers. The most important features of ENB for me are colour correction, sun rays, parallax, and above all, the detailed shadows that fix a lot of issues related to shadows.

That's not entirely true, the newer ENB releases support deferred anti-aliasing, but enabling it results in disabling some ENB effects. I don't use ENB anyway, SkyRealism ENB uses v119, so it's not a problem for most users, and edge anti-aliasing that comes with it is a blurry mess, for the lack of better words. I think the only alternative is using SMAA post-processing. Which is an OK solution for most gamers.

lol. Excuse for what exactly? I learned in school, that the far most people in medieval times did not wear any underwear. So with this concept in my mind, I just expect them to be nude under their main cloth. If thats not the case and I find some shiny golden bras and slips instead, Im confused. That is all.Underwear, no. But if you honestly think that they didn't wear clothes under their armour or winter clothes, you honestly ought to start applying logic to your education.

I think the best possible solution is to use a mix of 2048+1024 textures on most PCs. 1024 textures for clutter and small objects, 2048 for landscape+dungeons. You can double the resolution if you have a powerful PC with lots of VRAM ("lots" will depend on screen resolution and anti-aliasing methods used). We should probably maintain a STEP recommended list that would let us know which textures benefit greatly from higher resolution (such as mountains). DDSopt with recommended settings + half the normal maps. Make sure to tweak the shadows in SkyrimPrefs.ini, as these tend to have a big impact on peformance as well. Don't forget to choose the right AA method for your system. I recommend SGSSAA for NVIDIA rigs that can handle it (2x or 4x, depending on your resolution).

I think this would be a better thread to post these screenshots and comments related to Langley's work.

Overpriced piece of hardware that's gonna be old in a year or two. I guess if you have unlimited budget, it doesn't matter. But value for money or performance revolution it is not. Two Radeon 7970s offer more performance for less money, although they would not be an ideal solution for everyone.

I'd like to add that a single benchmark comparison is non-representative. The more results you have, the more realistic the samples will be.

It's funny how some people consider games where decapitating people and setting them on fire is considered normal, but a little boob here and there is a big "NO NO"! 'Murica! Edit: just to be clear, I'm not arguing for using nude mods, as I agree with kryptopyr, the lack of undergarments in a country with such a climate is focking retarded. Not to mention that NOBODY would want to wear a chainmail, or any kind of hardened armour for that matter, on bare skin. Unless they were trying to skin themselves alive, that is. IMHO, if you want to see Nords the way they're meant to be, or even them getting a little kinky, then by all means, do as you please. Stripping Khajits makes you a furry though, and you should see a doctor immediately if that happens to be the case. There are two basic nude mods, CBBE and UNP. Then there are numerous ridiculous variations of those. None of them address the fact that all humans are different.

Good stuff. I love role-playing and anything non-standard grabs my attention fairly quickly.

Supreme Commander 1&2, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Microsoft Flight, Crysis 3, Civilization 5, Unfortunately, there are a number of games where enabling HyperThreading messes up the performance due to the game not differentiating between virtual and logical cores (or something along these lines). Apparently disabling Core Parking can improve performance in some games.

Just to give peeps another point of view, here's an interesting comparison made using quite recent drivers and what kind of improvements. https://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd_nvidia_driver_performance_summary_review/4 Bear in mind, AMD cards may seem slower as Hard OCP used older reference models of the cards in comparison (which is fair enough by the way). The new models (7950 Boost and 7970 1GHz editions) are what "should" be used when you're making a new purchase decision (in reality, the equivalent cards are very close to each other, with Radeons having an edge in some games and NVIDIA having a handful of titles where support is noticeably better). I don't recommend buying a GTX670 4GB, since it costs more than what you would pay for the 7970 3GB 1GHz Edition that is overall a faster card and overclocks like a beast. The myth about bad drivers support from the AMD team has been just taht in recent years, since we've had numerous examples of NVIDIA not performing up to scratch on new games' releases (Tomb Raider being a very recent example). There are issues with framerate latencies and less configurable options compared to NVIDIA cards, though, so it's swings and roundabouts in many aspects.

It says the download has completed but I can't find the RAM file anywhere on my PC. Halp, please. :facepalm:

Nikkita is a member of the Skyrim modding community, and may visit these boards. This sort of comment could make her uncomfortable.

You can't increase the amount of physical VRAM by overclocking. You might be able to slightly reduce stuttering by increasing the memory clock frequency, but the bottom line is that you will still run into this kind of issues unless you reduce the textures resolution, screen resolution or MSAA/SSAA, depending on what you use.

You're misinterpreting the results. Most review websites don't test 20 different graphics cards in the same test run, as that is simply way too time consuming. What they do, however, is establish a testing baseline and renew the tests every now and then, when a new graphics card comes out that brings something refreshing to the market. The Titan review was simply linked to with the assumption that it will contain some of the latest testing results. The rest are for comparison purposes only and are totally legitimate reference points if what you're looking for are the closest cards performance-wise.

All armour and weapons texture mods were removed from STEP at one point.

I know what you were referring to, I've said it once already, I had mentioned MLAA in my second post in this thread: I've had several AMD cards in my rigs over the past few years, I know what options are there in the control panel. Whilst AMD includes a number of deferred AntiAliasing options in their Control Panel, many of them don't work in some games, Skyrim not excluded, therefore rendering them useless. Some, like the Adaptive Multisampling (which is basically transparency MSAA) are known to have issues in many games, whilst forced Supersampling doesn't work in the titles where you'd really want it to work. NVIDIA's drivers have a distinct advantage in this area. I'd rather have options than no options at all. If you don't want to get the best out of your rig for the specific task, just stick to the in-game method of AA, but bear in mind that it sucks in comparison. In what environment are they unsafe? Setting up a game profile has never screwed anything up on my PC (I fail to comprehend how that would be dangerous at all) and most advanced users would know the risk of tweaking other settings. If you don't feel safe using those options, then don't. But please, don't practice scaremongering here, as your information is at best flawed when it comes to the actual use of RadeonPro or NVIDIA Inspector software. Yes, we'd all love that, wouldn't we. But the reality isn't so beautiful, unfortunately. Case in point, Skyrim. Neither the in-game multisampling AA method used nor Anisotropic Filtering can compete with the driver solutions. And this is just one examples, whereas the vast majority of old and new games out there requires tweaking to get the most quality out of them. https://www.dahlsys.com/misc/antialias/index.html I think this will be better at explaining things than I could ever attempt to do. I don't believe MLAA is proprietary (not to mention, it's a post-processing form of AA, not a deferred one), as you can enable it on NVIDIA cards in a few games (Deux Ex and Shogun 2 come to mind).

**** yeah. Chesko is definitely one of my favourite modders out there.