Aiyen

I would always recommend EVGA if you are going Nvidia. They are the only company I ever dealt with that accepted they had sold me a card with faulty memory and as a "sorry" they sendt back a more powerful card. That sort of treatment means I am willing to throw the extra money their way! Also their Factory OC models have some very nice cooling solutions. I only have small regrets that I did not get the 3Gb model... but alas circumstances was so that I could not! I know nothing about tablets or ebookreaders so I am sure what other people are saying is not entirely wrong! :)

There is some fuzzy limit in required VRAM. However as Besidilo mentions then it is almost impossible to figure out due to the nature of how R/W is done to VRAM. A card with only 1Gb of VRAM will not be able to run with as many 2k textures as one with 2Gb+. I have tested this with the difference between my old 768Mb card and my current 2Gb one. However the result from not having enough VRAM is normally excessive stuttering. Which in turn causes the game engine to lag out due to an extreme bottleneck, which then cause CTD´s when scripts fail. At least that is my explaination for it. Other then that then I agree with the notion that getting the most expensive cards is a waste of money. Unless you got so much of it that you can also get a silly large monitor and use full 4k resolutions or something equally bizzare.

I told you that I had about 3Gb in that area as well, but stability was fine for me... Others might have as well! ¨ But that area is A: Wooded, they always have more stuff, and hence higher memory requirements. B: It is near varying vegetation, and climate so there is even more stuff that needs to be loaded. Well the log would note down any scripts... so if a script error pops up for a mod you no longer have on your list then yes. However the log is normally REALLY REALLY long and hard to find around in.

Also it is almost pointless to get the best cards today, since current chipsets are so powerful that current titles are no challenge for even the lower versions! Before the next generation of games come out then a new chipset generation will most likely also have made its appearance.. so the best card to get is the one with the best cost/performance ratio without a doubt.

You do not want to post a papyrus log in here :P If you do please do it in spoiler tags! They are long and horrible to read! Also you can technically always add mods to an old save without it will destroy it. But you cannot keep removing mods and then expect it keeps working. SKSE can only do so much! The best rule for script stability is still... decide on a selection of mods and play! With MO this is even easier since you can make separate profiles for various combinations of mods.

My sun settings are based on the sun textures I have included in my preset. If you use any other sun texture then you need to adjust accordingly. The LOD texture I include makes the LOD textures a bit darker so they do not "glow in the dark", or just overly bright during the brighter weathers. You can use any texture you like of course, but I just thought it was a serious eye sore, especially in some of the winter regions during the night. Vurt is aware of this issue, but as he states on his site, then he cannot make a seperate texture for every ENB setting out there. The same is the case for some of the grass, but my settings are set so it is not super bad imo. SMIM is taxing everywhere there are alot of ropes... and fences mainly. Riverwood gets really demanding due to all the rope work that is present there, but also some of the ports like in solitude get a big hit. Do note that there also are some 4k textures included that you can live without imo. I believe one is for a bird if I do not recall incorrectly. Not something I wanted to spend a 4k texture on anyways.

Decreasing resolution should help on performance logically, since less stuff needs to be rendered. However on todays cards the difference between 1920x1080 and 1680x1050 are somewhat marginal unless you are using really high AA settings. If you see the Nvidia comparison/tweak guide for Skyrim you can see what I am talking about.

Skyrim is still one of the most often used benchmark games, you should easily be able to find reviews that has comparisons.

ENB should not affect stability noticeably, only performance. If you do get more CTD´s and you can isolate it to ENB then it is most likely driver related and not mod related.

Actually the 3.1 is just an avarage value. Some people report CTD at 2.7Gb, some at 3.5Gb This in both VRAM (For 4Gb card users ofc. For people with only 2Gb cards lower values are used, but the game stability is about the same.) and RAM... so there is a certain uncertainty involved in the measured values. Annoying as it might be. This is also why the current recommendations go to replace all exterior textures with their 1k versions, so that there is room for armor and weapons and cosmetic textures instead in the future.

ENB is not compatible with any multicard solution... you are just lucky if you get it working. This is due to the author of ENB´s opinion of multicard solutions (Which is not a good one hehe). There is a tendency that SLI works better then crossfire, but this properly have more to do with the general theme that Nvidia drivers are more optimized then AMD drivers in general.

Shift + enter for the ingame ENB gui. Otherwise in the enbseries.ini (notepad etc.) under EFFECT then set SSAO and Reflection to false

You can always do the cleaning procedure just to make sure. If nothing needs cleaning then the files will not be altered in any way. You can see this by the fact that it will not promt you to save the file at the end.

Yes what you have in the video is most likely a driver issue. Alternatively you could try to disable the AO and Relflection options in the ingame GUI for testing. Those two are the only ones that would normally contribute to flickering since they apply a new texture on top of what is already there in order to produce the effects. I cannot comment on Crossfire, but ENB is not optimized for SLI or Crossfire, and never will be since Boris thinks it is a waste of time. So if you have more cards and sudden issues try to disable them first. If that fails try to rollback to a previous driver version. The newest Nvidia driver version had issues with ENB so perhaps AMD´s could also have. Boris only takes stuff seriously once drivers come out of beta before he implements driver related fixes. At least that is what I gather from the ENB forums when people reports bugs.

Yeah VRAM would increase. Especially if you use ENB since the size of the AO filter is based on screen resolution, so a larger AO texture requires more VRAM since it is stored there. I guess there are other "maps" that also have to be stored in VRAM that will also increase with resolution. But as if those are also mirrored in RAM I do not know for sure. But at least the ENB ones do not seem to be... at least I do not see a 100Mb drop in RAM use when I enable or disable ENB.

No harm done! Just glad I could help! Sounds like you will have your own content up soon enough with that passion! :)

Due to the way DirectX9 works then textures need to be in both RAM and VRAM. Also there is an upper limit of 4Gb VRAM as well in DirectX9... however due to the former you would never get this high anyways. This is becasue there is no split of "gameplay memory" and "Graphics memory" in Dx9, this is only the case in dx11 (and dx10 as I recall). You have to make everything fit within a 4Gb limit. So what I am saying is... do not buy a Titan for the sake of Skyrim since it would be a waste of money. Only do it if you plan on making it as a future investment in next generation games that will actually benefit from more VRAM. If you have 3Gb of VRAM then that would be enough for Skyrim. As for intensive areas, then Falkreath, Riverwood/Whiterun etc. are good. In general any areas where you have both winter and non winter cells close to each other since this forces the highest amount of textures to be loaded in. In general if you hit 3Gb of VRAM, then you most likely are also using about that in RAM, which means that you have dangerously little memory room left for scripts, so if you use alot of script intensive mods then you might experience more freezes and CTD´s because scripts do not perform as they should. Also in your case then there simply is not enough room left for all textures, in which case stuff will be black and texture-less and a CTD will follow soon after, since the game cannot run for long with missing resources. There is however no "special" figure of VRAM or RAM use that says "now the game will stop working"... other then the 4Gb hard limit. But none of the monitoring programs can read this value, they only read what the Windows Memory Manager says which is a lower figure. The finer technical points of this I cannot answer though. We have a debate and investigations going on however, but they are ultimately limited by the fact that we cannot access the soruce code of the game to see how its memory is managed and cleaned.

Should not matter no. The texture resolution etc. remain the same. More stuff just needs to be rendered at any one point so the GPU/CPU needs to do more computing, but that is about it.

Nope it is essentially the same meshes that have some altered properties that ENB uses to determine how certain lighting effects behave.

Sorry if I came off as being annoyed! That was in no way my intention! :) The Skyrim Revisited is a more advanced guide for people who want to learn more, but it does deviate from the STEP mandate in that it also contains gameplay altering mods. A such then it have more issues since more scripted mods gets added, which is why it is a good thing to reduce the amount of conflicts for a more stable experience. You can of course take the edits from SR and apply them to STEP if you wish, most changes from the DLC and unofficial patches would also apply to STEP. The various mod patches will however only apply if you actually use said mods. As for the why and how to do things, then there are some comprehensive guides on tes5edit(Actually its fallout counterpart but the essence of them is the same.) about that are several hundred pages long if you really want to get into the details. As to learning these things on your own, then the SR guide is a good tool. The first time I did it then I also just closed my eyes and copy pasted things to get through it. Then when various mods got updated I took more time when I had to reapply the changes to see what they actually where doing. Ultimately I tried to take various mods not on the list and then looked through them myself to see if I could make the changes myself. The more you do it the more you just know which entries are in need of being replaced. In the end it depends on how much time you want to put into studying the finer details of mod install and management. If you just want to get playing you can just follow the STEP guide to the letter and you should be playing in a day. If you follow SR then it will most likely require a few days before you can get playing. The wiki is not so much meant to teach as it is to provide a reference for which you can setup your skyrim experience according to certain parameters. You can of course learn from doing the setup. And you can always come back here and ask, everybody loves a good puzzle!

What you ask for would require that every mod author gives permission for STEP to alter their content, which is not going to happen. The only thing BOSS does is add cleaning notes to various mods. The only thing this process do is to remove entries from mods that have not been altered in any way from vanilla. These do not cause any inherit instability, it is just good practice not to have identical copies of the vanilla masters in a mod, since they are loaded anyways. If a mod have been accepted to be on the STEP list, then it is because it has been tested stable and a good addition to the list. Just because someone else on some other forum says a mod have issues, then half the time it is because they do not even bother to use BOSS. I know it is also widespread that certain people just install and remove mods on current saves and then thinks it is the next mod they try that is the cause of issues. The list could go on like this. All the mods on the STEP list have been verified and tested as being compatible and will provide a stable experience as long as you have the required hardware requirements for your specific choices. Edit: The reason SR is doing all of this, is because it is a take on what STEP can be when you add even more complexity on top. Then down the line then all these small errors, and mishaps add up and cause the game to be more unstable. For STEP that is not so much an issue.

Nope still testing and tweaking.. but if you have any feedback then just send me a pm :) Also in order to turn reflection of you just put false under [EFFECT] reflection.

Well there is not much you can do inside cities, since there are not really any way to reduce the amount of stuff that is rendered. If you want better performance there then I guess you have to reduce shadow quality further... Other then that then draw distances might be the only way to go. At least that is what I can come up with off the top of my head. edit: For ENB you can also make sure that reflection is either turned off, or its sizescale is low. That should help a bit as well. Most people tend to forget that reflection take up performance as well.

Have you actually started a game to create the .ini´s ? You need to do this before MO can get them. Start through the normal steam menu, and then proceed up until char generation and then quit. That should make sure you have the .ini´s edit: Also registry entries are not made until you have started the game at least once.

Black meshes etc are due to you hitting the RAM limit of the game. There is simply not enough memory to load all the textures you are asking the game to load. (Textures are essentially mirrored in both RAM and VRAM to keep it simple) You can have 6Gb of VRAM and it would not help you in any way what so ever. The game will never use more then 3.X Gb of VRAM and that is only if ALL memory goes into textures and the game lets you get away with it... but then you would most likely CTD because there would be nothing left to run scripts etc. You have 4 Gb of memory to play with in total. Having more RAM lets all cache be in the RAM for minimum stuttering, and perhaps some freeze protection, but that is about it. All in all no point in buying any card with more then 3Gb of VRAM if your only intention is to play Skyrim. If you go higher then it is to gamble that there will be games you want to play in the next few years that actually benefit from the extra memory.