Is it worth upgrading a GTX 670 for Heavy Modded SKYRIM?

[Nozzer66]

Sorry: 'Your Mileage may vary' = YMMV. Too used to intarwebs memes and leetspeek... 

[m3dicat3d]

Gracias, and thanks again for all the replies :)

[crime_syndicate]

whoops... YMMV? unfamiliar with that one, and also, and crime_syndicate, thanks for the heads up on the SweetFX preset, it's not ENB (like it says) but boy does it look great after I configured it!

You're welcome :)

[jabelsk]

If you haven't upgraded yet; that's a tricky question. Easy rule of thumb is to check Tom's Hardware and go up at least three tiers to make your GPU upgrade worthwhile. Going by that standard you're looking at dropping a lot of cash so I'd wait for either AMD's 290 to come back down to it's actual MSRP (probably will never happen) or wait for the 800 series GeForce cards, which should be coming out soon.Your post caught my eye because I'm running two 670's in SLI. Back when I bought them there was no better deal out there unless you could manage to actually find a sold-out 690. My biggest limitation, and regret, is only having 2GB of VRAM to work with. That's why I wouldn't upgrade unless I was going to get at least 4GB VRAM; in my situation there's nothing else worth upgrading to at the moment. Again, I'm running these in SLI, which achieves a constant 60fps at 5000x900 resolution using ENB version .254 with either RealVision ENB or NLA ENB (my new favorite) + AA + DoF. I'm also running an i7-3930k with 16GB of system RAM (yes I know Skyrim only uses 4 cores and taps out at 4GB RAM but we also all know how awesome Skyrim is at memory management).

 

nVidia vs AMD is a fanboy choice. Judge by hardware to price ratio. (Both companies order their fabrications from the same factory anyway.) 

ENBoost does "remove" the VRAM cap but that still can't compare to blazing along with a 6GB VRAM card. What texture resolution you want to use and your screen resolution needs be factored into your decision.

 

Hope my lack of an actual answer helps :) but empowers you to make a more informed decision on your own.

Edited June 29, 2014 by jabelsk

[Aiyen]

A little bit of a tiny necro but oh well! 

Just to clarify one thing!

 

ENBoost does not "remove" the VRAM cap.. that cap is still 4Gb and that is a hardcoded DX9 thing that nothing short of game engine recompilation to dx11 can "fix". It does remove the RAM cap so you can use more then 4Gb of RAM making skyrim a pesudo 64bit application instead of just a 32bit one. 

[jabelsk]

Total nerco but like I said, it caught my eye because the OP has my same GPU so I figured I'd throw in my two cents since these cards are expensive.Thanks for giving a more in-depth description of ENBoost. I intentionally put the word "remove" in quotes because I didn't want to go into too much detail about it, old post after all :)