MontyMM

6GB VRAM is not likely to be any use for Skyrim. It seems that the textures in VRAM must be copied into RAM. Skyrim cannot use more than 4GB RAM, and seems to become unstable even at 3GB. I have experimented with ugrids quite a bit, though it is not recommended. My experience suggests that the two key factors in ugrids stability are RAM usage and shadows. I can run stable with ugrids at 9, so long as I reduce my mod load to keep RAM usage comfortably below 3GB, reduce shadow settings, and avoid mods that are likely to increase the number of shadows processed. The question of shadows is just my theory from my own testing, and should be considered anecdotal, but the memory concerns are widely reported.

This can be debated without suggesting that people are liars or can't think properly.

I tend to agree, and I'm personally pretty skeptical of the whole business. I can see an argument for better quality bodies, but I can't see much point in full nudity. I think the single-gender nature of the vast majority of these things tells you all you need to know about the motivation for their creation.

Just going by the videos, it looks nice in some scenes, and a bit weird in others. Do you know if it's tied to windy weather types, with accompanying wind sounds? That could work well. If not, it could be quite easy to implement that - copy an existing weather type, add some beefed up wind effects, and activate the animation.

That actually looks pretty human. Now, I assume he has a corresponding mod for the male of the species...?

I've moved this thread to the INI tweaking forum, as it isn't a support question. You'll find that Skyrim uses multiple threads by default. You need to post those comparisons of with and without the tweaks, or the information doesn't really show us anything.

Skyrim's not inherently programmed to have a low memory limit, as such. The fundamental limit is 4gb, due to its 32bit executable. It seems clear now that textures in VRAM are largely mirrored in RAM - possibly by design, or likely due to the behavior of DX9. There is emerging evidence that Skyrim will crash when RAM usage for the Skyrim process exceeds 3GB. However: - there does not appear to be an exact limit in the 3 - 4 gb range, experiences vary. - we don't know why this is happening, it may or may not be due to poor coding, or some other limitation we have not identified. - we cannot be sure yet that it is definitely memory causing the crashes. There appears to be a correlation, but it could be some other factor that increases roughly in tandem with memory usage. - many users can use high res textures without problems. So, while this is something we need to investigate as we progress, it's a bit premature to start warning people off high quality textures.

I don't think we're a terribly prudish bunch around here, and if there was a good quality male/female body replacement mod, we'd probably take a look at it. My personal concern, is that although such investigation may start out mature and reasonable, we risk opening a portal to the sad and tacky dimension.

It's worth having a look at the screenshots and changelog for the upcoming version of RLO (stickied in their comments section). They've acknowledged and addressed the orange/redness issue, improved ambient lighting, and increased overall brightness. I think it's looking much more promising.

I don't use either of those, so I can't say with certainty, but as far I know it should be possible. I would think that the use of ENBs with ATTK is very common, and I'm sure I've seen people discussing using RadeonPro with ENBs. It should be possible by using the proxy dll setting in the ENB ini, or using the ENB injector app instead of the wrapper dll. Others here may be able to tell you exactly. You could always give the ENB a try without RadeonPro, just to see if looks like it will work out for you, before you spend time setting up the combination.

@Aiyen Yes, I've thought about that. The biggest downside from a STEP point of view is that I'd like to be able to recommend a setup to others, and that gets problematic once we get into editing mods. If CoT was made customisable through MCM, as you suggest, that would be excellent. @jawz Wow. I really hope that comes to fruition. Looks like it would be very much to my tastes.

Just install an ENB dll in the normal way, but instead of installing any presets, just create an "enbseries.ini" file in your Skyrim folder, and paste this into it. I just knocked this up quickly, so no guarantees, but I don't think it should do too much besides smooth shadows. Try it out with low quality shadows and see how it works for you.

A simple ENB can be stripped down so that it is doing little besides processing shadows. Doing so while turning down shadow details in the engine may well result in a performance gain.

You might try experimenting with a light performance ENB. I've found that you can reduce the shadow quality greatly in the Skyrim engine, and use the ENB to smooth them out. This results in less detailed shadows, but they look very natural and certainly don't spoil the image.

I totally understand the logic of the decision to cut the weather module and leave it to CoT, but I think it's a bit of a shame at the same time. I think CoT is a great piece of work, but I find that while it looks good most of time, some of the skies and weather conditions look unnatural to my eyes. Weather, like the lighting, is so subjective that I'd personally like to have more "competing visions" to choose from, as we have now with the selection of excellent lighting mods.

Amen to that.

She has an excellent voice for this sort of thing. A very underrated skill. I'd love to have her do some acting in a quest mod. Far better than many of the Skyrim VAs that sound like they're doing bad Schwarzenegger impersonations. It's not essential to have dodgy european accents the moment you enter a fantasy realm!

Sadly, uGridstoload tweaks are just not reliable (and we don't recommend them), and it's not only a matter of memory load. It's frustrating, I know, as I have experimented with ugrids at 7 and 9 and found the performance and stability very good most of the time. But there are a handful of areas that will regularly CTD for me with raised ugrids, even without mods, and even if RAM utilisation is low. As far as I know, no-one has really understood the causes of ugrids instability, and Bethesda's line is simply "don't do it." There is also the concern that raised ugrids can cause save corruption after prolonged play.

Good stuff, thanks Jawz. In other news, it seems that Anamorfus has been given permission to incorporate the RLO image spaces directly into ELFX. I'll be very interested to see how this turns out, as I like the way the ELFX handles the lights in most cases.

That's great - thanks. It'll be good to have this detailed data in a really useful form. Also, you'll be able to get more involved once you're familiar with the wiki.Â

Yes, the forum clearly isn't really designed to handle this sort of data. The wiki is the place for this. The CSVs aren't very readable, and proper tables in the wiki would work much better all round.

Hi Nshell, Thanks for posting detailed benchmarks. Could you please edit the OP when you add new details, rather than creating a new post each time? It gets a bit confusing when we see a long thread constantly bumping to the top. Thanks.Â

I don't think there's any reason yet to think that these are STEP bugs. You've posted a number of problems in the support forum, and they've been resolved, which is great. Let's be patient and leave these in the support forum too until we have good reason to suspect bugs in STEP.Â

I'll grab the pitchforks! :P They don't want to see the massed ranks of STEP darkening the horizon!

I'm not convinced of that. I don't see any fundamental reason why that instability should exist. I still think that there could simply be some poor coding that hasn't given enough consideration to higher memory requirements, which only really arise for the serious modder. Bethsoft are not the best in this regard. They let something as atrocious as the navmesh bug bedevil modders for years, until they really had no choice but to fix it. I think it's vanishingly unlikely that we'll see a 64 bit upgrade for Skyrim. But just maybe, there is a very slightly greater chance of seeing a DX11 version. This was originally planned (and promised), and could have a major impact on memory behaviour. Still not likely, but I think it would involve far fewer complications for Beth than moving to 64bit, and could also be used to generate new interest and publicity by including a couple of fancy new effects. If we were going to start a petition and march on Bethsoft headquarters, that's what I would call for.