ShadowPaladin

Yeah, not sure I'm willing to sacrifice the shadow quality unless I absolutely have to. I ran an earlier version of STEP with everything on Ultra and didn't have too many problems, so with enough tweaking I can probably get it there again. I seem to recall RCRN's FXAA implementation being very good as well as cheap, so I might turn off the regular MSAA and do that. And it looks like Whiterun is about 1050 and Windhelm is around 1100, which seems fairly normal for Ultra settings with the HD DLC. I'm running a GTX 580 with 1.5gb of VRAM and am allowing Skyrim to use 4gb of system RAM via the .ini so as long as I can keep it around 1500-1600 I don't think I should have much stutter. EDIT - After comparing some screenshots of optimized SkyrimHD 2k and 1k textures, there's almost no discernible quality difference between the two. The 2k textures are a tiny bit sharper in some places, but not really enough to be noticeable while doing anything other than comparing still screenshots. Also, the new DDSOpt prerelease is amazing, it lowered the total texture size of the 1k set by 177mb.

Still playing with the setting, but FOV is set to 78 and ugrids are default at 5. I remember Oblivion having serious problems with ugrids and stability so I'm probably not going to mess with those at all. Now that I look at the .ini again, I see AA was turned off for some reason, so with that turned back to 4x, VRAM use is about 1k-1020mb. This being the case, I may end up using the 1k Skyrim HD textures for STEP instead of the 2k since there doesn't appear to be a significant difference in image quality that's noticeable while playing (i.e. not standing still and looking for it). Even when using DDSOpt, the 2k version skyrockets my VRAM to 1500mb, which would be capping out my card.

Out of curiosity, besides the texture overhauls, what do you guys find uses the most VRAM in Skyrim? I'm building a basic install up right now and have the standard, hd dlc, optimized dlc + vanilla normals all DDSOpt optimized and am sitting at about 775-800mb VRAM use in the middle of Markarth (which tends to be on the high end). All the other settings are Ultra, 1920x1080 res, 4x AA 16x AF. From what I've read on the subject, that seems about average, but the DDSOpt guide shows the VRAM use to be quite a bit lower (662mb); so I'm curious if I'm missing something or maybe I have some settings turned on/up that the guide doesn't?