stoppingby4now

I had tried these out and agree they are too pretty for my taste as well (especially Windhelm). The exception for me is that I've been using Sexy Wintherold College and quite enjoy it. I reckon magic is useful for such things as upkeep. :)

BSA's are loaded by ESP's of the same name. If you go that route, you will need to create 3 separate BSA archives as there is a 2GB file size limit (total is over 4GB). In that case you can backup "Skyrim -textures.bsa", "HighResTexturePack01.bsa", and "HighResTexturePack02.bsa" somewhere, then distribute the contents of your optimized textures into those three archives. Then all you need to do is make sure that the ESP files for the HD DLC's are enabled, or add them to the archive list in the ini file per the STEP instructions from the last version.

DDSopt doesn't package them, so you need to do that yourself. Generally having the files loose (installed into the Skyrim\Data\textures folder) is better for performance. To pack them, you'll want to move your "Vanilla Optimized" folder out of the Skyrim\Data folder, then rename it to "textures". Then you can create an archive of the textures folder and install it with whatever mod manager you use. Or, you can copy the textures folder into the Skyrim\Data directory. Using a mod manager will be better since you will be able to control when it is installed so that you can allow other texture packs to overwrite the files, and Wrye Bash is a personal favorite for several of us.

I've always preferred, "If it ain't broke, improve it." :P

I don't know anything about that particular processor, but that's estimating now at over 6 hours. I reckon it will go down a bit more as time goes on, in which case that seems about in line.

Once GTX580's come down in price, going to slap another in for SLI. Just hope I don't have to wait forever. :P

If you followed the guide, you should only be doing vanilla textures plus HDDLC. In that case, as zMan said, should only take a few hours. When I first started, it estimated 13 hours but quickly dropped down. I ended up around 1h10m, but YMV.

Ran the test, and ended up with 23.27FPS. i5 2500K @4.5GHz GTX580 slight OC

Just applied the update and the ice looks so much better.

I coulda swore Lush Trees added more at one time. Must be confusing with another mod then.

Landscapes will be one of the biggest cause of eating up VRAM with the higher resolution versions, including anything that provides variations of textures for objects where there may be a lot in a scene. Part of the problem with some mods is that they don't take into account what the effects of adding multiple mods with textures will do. There are also ini variables that will effect this as well, including uGridstoLoad, view distance modifiers, etc.

I've never used Lush Trees, as I find the tree placement in vanilla to be quite good. Could possibly stand to have more pines though, as they sprout like weeds.

Would be curious to know if any of the weapons in this mod conflict with Weapons of the Third Era (in previous version of STEP). Not sure if TC is re-including it in this version or not, but I see the author has stopped and someone else is updating it now here.

That looks much better Starac. Can't wait to see it included.

The DDSopt version appears slightly less pixelated to me. I still haven't had a chance to redo my fresh DDSopt run, but now I'm dying to get that done and try it out.

Has Better Dynamic Snow improved? I haven't used it in awhile, because while some areas looked really good, others looked worse than vanilla, mainly involving bridges and other man-made stone paths/structures.

Exactly.

The last update I see on SVN was 3 weeks ago. We might want to start capturing edits and providing them on the Wiki page for things that are no brainers as well.

Barely over 3 weeks to go until release. Unfortunately the Beta doesn't let you go beyond Act I, but I'm enjoying it so far. Really digging the Witch Doctor.

Stumbled across this post with some INI tweaks for Skyrim for use in WB.

The unfortunate thing is that it's much more evident that it's meant to be ice when you are moving around and watching the reflections change based on position. Screenshots in this case do not do it justice. It's still pretty bad. So I guess a question to you zMan...do you see the reflections when moving around with your HDDLC textures when optimized with DDSopt? Do you see them with the non optimized version?

Here are some images comparing the ice reflection between HDDLC and SRO. For the most part, the reflections are nearly identical. Both are pixelated and ugly when viewed close up. View 1: HDDLC View 1: SRO View 2: HDDLC View 2: SRO

There are several spots on the steps as part of the bottom portion of the pictures. In the first image, there will be several spots that kind of look smudged. In the second picture, more white is shown. I'm assuming it's reflections, but I can't tell based on that view. A better picture would be looking down at those areas.

I've used the same method that doveman posted when lowering ugridstoload, and it works fine. The main problem with some of the instructions out on the net is that they give console commands to change the ugrids value and then save the ini. That is the biggest cause of corrupted configs as the saveini command does not behave as one would suspect.

BSOD's are indeed rare these days. I have still found a few occasions where having the crash data was useful for me over the years. Mostly it's needed for the oddball crashes that are not common, which thankfully does not happen very often anymore, and for those times when I'm not paying attention enough and don't look at the BSOD code. But those are good suggestions. I have 16GB of RAM, and I have 3 1GB pagefiles setup across three drives, including C: because I want kernel debug information should I crash.