Does DDSopt Help VRAM or GPU?

[mtar925]

OK, I'm not great with computers. I've downloaded DDSopt and played around with starting the optimization process twice now, but chickened out. Last time, I screwed up the extraction process somehow and the extractor appeared to work but the folder I thought I'd directed the file to is still empty. Thanks very much for the detailed step-by-step guides, I blame only my own skills.

 

Anyway, I am struggling for FPS with even vanilla textures (no HRDLC) and will persevere with DDSopt if it will help me substantially. But which system component does it help the most? I have 3mb VRAM on my GT555M and Skyrim Performance Monitor tells me I have never loaded as much as 1mb on it, yet. But, my GPU is pegged at 99% while delivering 25-35fps, more or less. Shadows seem to be the major load on the GPU (and I started a thread on shadow tweaking in General Support).

 

So, if optimization via DDSopt will help my GPU significantly I will try, try again. But if it mostly reduces VRAM usage, I apparently have that to burn as my GPU is the bottleneck. In that case I would be inclined to save myself the considerable (due to my incompetence) time of optimizing and risk of breaking my game.

 

Relatedly - what about Hi-res textures in general? As I said I have VRAM to burn as I work down the STEP list and decide which mod versions to install. But will Hi-res textures increase load on the GPU as well?  My plan now is to skip the Bethsoft HRDLC (at least until I'm able to Optimize them). And stick with mods that use 1024 textures only - like the Full 1024 edition of "HRDLC Optimized" - and skip the ones that use 2048+ or strive for photo-realism. I'm already happy with how vanilla Skyrim looks on my 17" 1080 line 60hz notebook monitor and anything more than 1024 would probably be overkill, anyway.

 

Any advice would be appreciated!

[phazer11]

Ok so what I do is I load Mod Organizer by telling Skyrim Performance Monitor to load it instead of Skyrim. That should display your VRAM and RAM usage properly.

 

You'll notice a little bit of performance increase but what you'll really notice is how much less your VRAM and RA will be which in addition to ENB (and it's ENBoost features) helps improve stability (via reducing crashes caused by overloading the game's RAM limit).

[mtar925]

Yep, that's how I'm getting my data, by using Skyrim Performance Monitor to load MO and then MO to run SKSE loader.  SPM is telling me that my CPU is running around 50-60%, RAM and VRAM usage is less than half capacity, but GPU is pegged at 99%. I interpret this to say that the GPU is my bottleneck and I have RAM, VRAM, and CPU capacity to spare. This surprised me as, based on the STEP Hardware Guide, I expected my 2.8ghz CPU would be the weakest link.

 

If I understand you correctly, the main benefit of optimizing with DDSopt is to reduce RAM and VRAM usage. And if I'm interpreting the data correctly that won't help my system much.... until RAM and VRAM usage approaches the limit of the game engine, which is a factor I hadn't considered. I am guessing that if I stick with 1024 textures I will not approach that limit, even with unoptimized textures.

[Aiyen]

GPU´s do not have an as fine separated usage curve as CPU´s do.

Most GPU, have just 3 or 4 settings.

No load 0%

low load 33%

Medium load 66% (not all have this)

full load 99%

 

The GPU will always be in one of those states. Hence it the usage figure is not usable when determining a bottleneck. A hard FPS limit that you cannot get above shows a GPU bottleneck, since then it simply cannot render all effects fast enough.