JudgmentJay

Probably a dumb question, but is there a way to check if a texture was messed up by DDSOpt outside the game?

The Revamped Exterior Fog mod helps with the haze but if you're using a custom weather mod like CoT and maybe even RLO it probably won't do anything.

My assumption is he's not running the injector.

Oh boy...

It really doesn't look like you do in those screenshots.

Personally I think I'll use TPC forever!

Since we're taunting our good friend here with what his game SHOULD look like if he did it correctly, here are some from me: To be fair mine's not pure STEP. It's 90% STEP plus a grass density mod, different mountain textures, a few city/village improvement mods, and uGrids=7. Best viewed in fullscreen!

PCG4m3r, I saw you mention the resizing of normals in the DDSOpt thread and decided to give it a try. I tested it on my mountain textures. I'm using a 4096 resolution texture with a 2048 normal. I resized the 2048 normal to 1024 and there was absolutely 0 difference in quality in-game. Do you try to keep your normals at 1/2 the texture resolution size or do you just do a 50% reduction across the board? Have you ever noticed any image quality loss? Any problems with doing this in general? It really seems like a great way to free up a significant amount of VRAM.

Not sure if you guys were still considering this mod or what, but I took a couple comparison shots. This is basically Texture Pack Combiner which uses Snow and Rocks Textures HD compared to the same thing with Hectrol's installed over it. Hectrol >> Snow and Rocks Textures HD I think Hectrol's is a drastic improvement even if it removes the neon green moss. Hectrol's still has a slimy, mossy appearance to it without being overbearing. One thing that caught my attention is in the bottom right of the second comparison where the dirt meets the edge of the cliff. The transition doesn't look good for Snow and Rocks, but it's pretty well blended for Hectrol's.

Honestly I think he's just trolling us.

There are dozens if not hundreds of different ENBs and they all provide a different look and feel to the game. EDIT: I'm assuming the screenshots you posted on the first page were taken without an ENB? Because it doesn't look like one is running in those shots. I'd be interested in seeing more shots... of landscapes or something.

The only major differences in his screenshots are the ENB, a grass density mod, and the grass textures which are custom and unreleased. I'm sure a vast majority of his textures are very similar to STEP. Oh, and he also uses the the aforementioned "glamor" mods that make males and females look like supermodels. Also worth mentioning is that if you're hoping for your game to both look like his and be playable you're going to be very disappointed.

I haven't tried ATTK, but if it really does improve memory allocation I'll give it a go.

The texture mods used in STEP are pretty much the highest quality available and if you don't like them then you might as well stop modding because Skyrim will never look good to you. One thing you definitely won't get with STEP is the "glamorous" men/women. Those mods are not lore-friendly and are thus not included. You'll have to do your own research for those.

Unfortunately they're held in physical RAM to some degree as well. Installing Texture Pack Combiner only, my physical RAM usage goes from ~1300 to ~2000 in the middle of Riverwood. Other RAM-heavy mods would be stuff like Skyrim Distant Detail. These types of mods are made even more RAM-intensive by z-fighting tweaks. Also, anything that adds objects to the game. For example Expanded Towns and Cities adds ~150mb RAM usage in the middle of Riverwood. Stuff like Interesting NPCs, Civil War, etc can add a bit depending on where you are. Skyrim also caches interior/exterior cells as you move between them which is a big problem. For example when I'm in Markarth I'm sitting at about 2500mb RAM usage with every mod installed, but when I move into Understone Keep, usage jumps to 3gb+ because it's keeping the exterior cell in RAM.

Would you care to speculate why that might be? I just figure it'd be nice to use some more of that 16 gigabytes....:D Well on paper Skyrim can't use more than 4gb of RAM since it's 32-bit software, but the engine is old and fragile and tends to choke at about 3-3.2gb.

I don't bother with it. I don't care for Skyrim's HDR and I play in first person so the water bugs don't bother me much.

Well they didn't fix everything because I get sound cut out unless I set my sound output to 44.1k, so yeah.

I don't think hitting a VRAM cap will cause crashes, but hitting ~3gb+ physical RAM usage can lead to instability. I know my game is much more likely to crash if I go over that number. Sound tweak?

Kind of off-topic, but I'm wondering how you got the orange horizon color all the way down to the water. Is that normal? I always have a grey-ish horizon at a high enough altitude, as seen here: That's a 100% vanilla game, .inis and all.

Version 4.0 of Realistic Lighting (formerly Realistic Lighting With Customization) was released today and contains many lighting placement fixes. Probably worth a look! https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/30450/

96c is definitely riding the line of what's considered safe for the 560, but I wouldn't consider that strange for modded Skyrim, especially if your ambient temperature is high. You can always modify your fan curves/speeds to try to get the card cooler, but that will result in more noise. The maximum temperature listed for the 560 on nVidia's site is 99c.

While I agree that SLI is not the wave of the future and will continue to remain an enthusiast option, I'll have to disagree about a single 680 being able to run any current game at maxed settings. That might be possible for 1080p, but 1080p isn't "maxed!" Also, this is a Skyrim modding forum. I think we all know how performance-intensive Skyrim can be. With minimal effort I could make my game run at sub-20 FPS. With 3 680s. Also, agree with Neovalen. I've encountered very few games that didn't benefit from SLI since I started using it ~5 years ago. In this day and age it'd be pretty silly to release a game without SLI support. Especially AAA titles.

If you want to use both GPUs, yes, it's basically SLI. You can un-SLI them and use the second GPU for PhysX, but that seems pretty dumb. Also keep in mind that the actual amount of VRAM is typically half of what they advertise on dual GPU cards. The 690 only has 2GB of VRAM.

Found another problem texture from Skyrim - Textures.bsa. textures/effects/gradients/gradsmokediss.dds Optimizing this texture results in the steam coming off waterfalls to get blocky/pixelated briefly every 2-3 seconds.