if you use skyrim configurator found at https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/814/?
you can set the texture quality to high which on my system shaved off ~900 mb of ram usage in whiterun (biggest ram useage place i know of)
although i have found certain textures dont bode well with the setting on high and kinda look blurred. these include sides of stone walkways which have the lip type curbs. and the vertical sections of stairs. im not sure why the discrepency is so large. i can only assume that when set on high the game starts to use lower quality mips on less important faces (hence the bluriness) keep in mind im using most of the 2K texture packs etc etc. i think this comes down to certain textures being too large to begin with on the 2K texture packs and when set on very high texture quality the game is being forced to load all that useless information for the small surfaces which can be 2K res as well.
