MontyMM

:P

Happy (probably now belated) Birthday!

Too kind, Gyro! It's good advice though - we must never be discouraged by the bastards that fail to understand how awesome we are! :P

My strategy has been to bet on more VRAM becoming useful within the lifetime of my card; I would take the higher amount of VRAM as my main consideration. Some would argue that you could get by with less, and you probably could, but regarding a community of enthusiast power-modders like STEP, I can see VRAM becoming a frustration before too much longer. If we were just talking Skyrim (with its limitations), then a cheaper card with a bit less memory and faster bus might well be the obvious choice, and provide better performance right now. But, looking forward, then the extra VRAM could make the difference between what level of texture quality settings you could choose, how many modded textures you could apply in upcoming games, and so on. Bear in mind that even today with STEP, if we had a more modern 64bit engine and weren't constrained by the RAM limit, there'd be plenty of people happily loading up 4GB of VRAM if they could.

I'm sure you'll do fine. The main things are to ensure a sufficient supply of certain nutrients, like calcium and B12 (which will be much less of a problem since you're eating dairy), and to eat a range of foods to ensure you receive complete proteins. Like anything to do with health and nutrition, there's an overload of advice (a whole industry in dispensing fads and pet theories), and it can seem overwhelming. Just stick to the basics of healthy veggie eating as recommended by any sensible doctor and you won't come to harm. Don't take any notice of people giving you a hard time - if they give me any nonsense, I like to refer to them as "they who crave the flesh of the dead", their meals as "platefuls of grim remains", and so forth. They hate that.

Welcome to the club! Any specific questions?

Could you post your specs? Â

I wouldn't get into the business of recommending one card over another - there are many pros and cons as mentioned, different aspects have different value to different people, and I don't keep watch on the latest price points. But, in casual terms, that strikes me as a decent price for a very nice card, with a fair amount of VRAM, looking forward.

All respect and gratitude to the modders and VA's for their efforts, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't feel free to criticise. To the end users, and the people to whom we're making recommendations, it's the quality of the finished product that matters. STEP would get pretty difficult if we held back criticism based on an appreciation of sheer effort.

I agree. There is no formula or correct size for a page file - you must work it out for yourself based upon your own workload, and what it will demand beyond your available RAM. If you have such RAM that you would hope to never touch a pagefile, then 1GB is a sensible size. Windows expects it to be present, but that should be enough for its purposes if it generally doesn't have to rely on it.

Windows on the SSD. Also, as many of your often-used applications and games as possible, including Skyrim. The big old HDDs are generally fine for static data like movies, music and other assets, but for anything that needs to respond rapidly, like the OS, a game, or large files you're actually working on - it's what the SSD is for. ;)

+1 We've got some more investigation to do on what we can get away with in terms of maximum recommended textures, (as we've only relatively recently started hitting the ceiling) but this is good advice. EDIT: Yikes! Typo-tastic!

Also, you have raised ugrids to 7, which would be suspect number one, IMO. With vanilla Skyrim, you can get away with ugrids at 7 for a long time, but with a heavy mod load you are very likely to get CTDs. In particular, since you mention it, raised ugrids + STEP + Open Cities almost guarantees a crash for me, when approaching a city. People tend to assume that ugrids are only constrained by GPU power, but they also load much larger chunks of the world to be processed by the engine - AI, spawns, geometry, physics, scripts, the lot. The engine just wasn't expected to handle this.

Night of the Living Thread! It doesn't get mentioned much these days, but I'm still quite fond of RCRN. I find it works quite nicely with some of the more subtle ENBs.

Yes, some very good AMD options too. I would definitely go for as much VRAM as possible. We've had some contentious debates about this before, but I think we're already beginning to see the benefit of more VRAM, and plenty of RAM. This will only increase, and as the new consoles force the 64bit gloves to come off - I think we will see Windows showing its memory hungry ways, which have been somewhat constrained by ports from the aging consoles. I'm particularly interested in witcher 3, with its 64bit DX11 engine, and its impressive modding kit. I will be truly surprised if enthusiats like us aren't getting hungry for resources as we move into games like that.

hard to say, but I went from 2 x 280's in SLI to a 4gb 670, which is a somewhat similar situation. With the old cards I used to get between 20 and 35 fps with Step. With the 670, I'm at 60 fps plus, unless I mess about with ENBs.

I expect that's true. If AMD were about to drop a 'generational leap' chip, Nvidia wouldn't be releasing this warmed over batch now. If I had to buy soon, I would forego the slight advantage of these new cards, for the value proposition of the 600 series - they are still the same family of chips, and very much in the same ballpark of performance.

Yes, I'm not overwhelmed by these new cards, but my point is that they should drive the price of the current models, and there could be some deals. For example, the new 770 is priced at 400 bucks - same as the 670, which must surely now be looking at a price drop, and is an excellent card.

You might like to take a look at the article I posted here: https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=1879&pid=38025#pid38025 Its general advice on upgrading ready for next gen games. I agree with their conclusions. My advice is also that if you are going to upgrade, look to a graphics card with plenty of vram. You can easily add more ram later, and it remains to be seen how significant a CPU upgrade will be. BUT, my best advice would be to wait a bit longer if you can. As the next wave of GPUs come out, there could be some very good deals on the current models.

Yes, I've a suspicion it could be both. The problem with using system metrics to work out what's going on with a specific program, is that they're not really designed to tell us the information that we want. They can give an indication, but not the accurate overall figures we would like.

I'm really not sure. I wouldn't necessarily see any reason for an error threshold with the VRAM metric, assuming it works properly. The difficulty is normally the other way round, in that it reports what it's reserved, rather than what it's necessarily using. What I don't know, is how things behave as VRAM approaches its limit - perhaps part of it is reserved, or that it deliberately tries to avoid filling beyond a certain threshold. This is total speculation though.

I would have thought so. But, the stutter while turning is such a good indication of low VRAM, that I would find that more compelling than what the metrics in the monitor app appear to be telling you.

I would say you could be hitting both VRAM and RAM limitations. The stuttering while turning I would say is almost a guarantee that VRAM is short. Also, with only 4gb of RAM in the system, Skyrim can only use a portion of that, so the rest of its memory use will have to be on disk. Since it keeps textures in memory, it is quite possibly being forced to swap textures during play, which could account for some hideous slowdowns.

Yikes. You could put a kettle on the keyboard and make a nice cup of tea. :P

It's quite dependent on make and model, as designs are improving and this should become less of a factor. Of the serious test reports I've seen, most current drives perform best with between 15 - 25% free space. Mind you, this is relative to their maximum potential - even a very full drive will far outperform an HDD. I also believe that it is write rather than read performance that suffers under a full SSD, and I doubt this would make much impact on Skyrim itself.