Estimated Preformance

[Asimov]

Hi guy,

 

So I believe I have now successfully installed STEP...and my GOD it looks gorgeous. I started the game up without any mods running just so I would understand the differences and holy cow. When it got to actually running around though I have a lot of studdering when I look at certain sections and do certain things.

 

Right now I am running 2 nVidea GTX 470's in SLI with 6 Gigs of Ram and a Intel Quad Core 2.6 Gz with a 120G SSD at 4 AA and the performance settings shown on the thread Good Performance Handling and Mandread's set up. I see between 20-30 FPS in the cities (with no beautiful city mods) and about 30-40 fps in the world. I think I could handle this but I keep getting these lag intervals where the FPS drops to 3 to 5 when I see things. Some of the textures seem to blink on and off very quickly and oddly when this happens, not sure if I lag because of these or the lag causes these.

 

I am running the default step, I have only also included Deadly Dragons and RCRN instead of the 2 lighting mods in step in STEP 2 section 4. Do I just have my settings too high? What would you expect for FPS on a rig like mine or what do you get on yours?

 

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[z929669]

Congrats on the successful setup! You are a brand new WB user following the guide, right? Your feedback on the guide would be appreciated if you could post to that thread when you have a chance.

 

It sounds like you are at or exceeding your VRAM threshold. How much memory in the 470s?

 

Nothing else should be limiting on your system....

 

I also assume that you did not change the default INIs beyond what TheCompiler recommends? You can reduce iShadowMapResolution=4096 to 2048 in the SkyrimPrefs.ini and see how that helps. The only other things might be your NVIDIA settings and possibly RCRN (although I know little about either). Ask around the other performance threads.

[Asimov]

I will do so when I get a chance this weekend or later this week.

 

Each card has 1280MB VRam on it. Some of the compilers advice was already done in the .INI when I opened it, I figured his was out of date. I changed what he suggested though. The only additions were the ones I spoke of before posted by Mandread.

 

What would you expect out of a system I describe though? I am just wondering if I screwed something up with the mods, or would that present itself in different ways?

[blacksol]

As per other threads cards in SLI still only have 1 card's memory ie 1280, not 2560, as the vram contents are duplicated between the cards. Therefore use the lite/mid versions of the texture mods especially Skyrim HD and Vurts.

 

You could also try dropping AA to 2x and see what it looks like in game to gain some FPS. Personally I cannot see much difference between 2x and 4x unless I am standing still starring at say a diagonal roof line. I run at 1900x1200 on a 24 inch screen

[Asimov]

I will try that. Thanks for the info.

[z929669]

Get GPU-Z and see what you are getting as your dedicated and dynamic memory loads with the setup you are running. Take a look at the bottom of this post and let us know what you have in one of the stuttering areas you are talking about.

 

I suspect that your dynamic VRAM may be approaching or exceeding around 1900. If that is the case, and you are running the 4x textures (hi-res) versions of the big texture replacers, blacksol's advice (get the 2x low-res versions) is spot on.

[venkman781]

Get GPU-Z and see what you are getting as your dedicated and dynamic memory loads with the setup you are running. Take a look at the bottom of this post and let us know what you have in one of the stuttering areas you are talking about.

 

I suspect that your dynamic VRAM may be approaching or exceeding around 1900. If that is the case, and you are running the 4x textures (hi-res) versions of the big texture replacers, blacksol's advice (get the 2x low-res versions) is spot on.

 

I was curious to try this out, so I took the benchmark area I've been using and did just that. The 30 second benchmark starts on a small hill outside of Riverwood, and I run down the path into the center of town, past the blacksmith. I do see micro-stutter in this area as I start to look around close to entering Riverwood.

 

I ran a vanilla-high test and a test with all of the texture mods from B1 of STEP 2.0.1a. I used only x16 AF forced through CCC, no AA, no lighting/shaders.

 

Here's what I recorded:

 

Vanilla - 78fps (avg), 1364MB dedicated (max), 101mb dynamic (max)

 

STEP - 62fps (avg), 2570MB dedicated (max), 104MB dynamic (max)

 

According to the GPUz logs, it seems like dedicated VRAM is maxed out (2GB cards in Xfire) running STEP, but dynamic is only around 100mb... :| I'm not sure I understand the difference between these two VRAM figures in a way that helps me interpret the results in any actionable way...

 

Any thoughts on this?

[z929669]

 

Get GPU-Z and see what you are getting as your dedicated and dynamic memory loads with the setup you are running. Take a look at the bottom of this post and let us know what you have in one of the stuttering areas you are talking about.

 

I suspect that your dynamic VRAM may be approaching or exceeding around 1900. If that is the case, and you are running the 4x textures (hi-res) versions of the big texture replacers, blacksol's advice (get the 2x low-res versions) is spot on.

 

I was curious to try this out, so I took the benchmark area I've been using and did just that. The 30 second benchmark starts on a small hill outside of Riverwood, and I run down the path into the center of town, past the blacksmith. I do see micro-stutter in this area as I start to look around close to entering Riverwood.

 

I ran a vanilla-high test and a test with all of the texture mods from B1 of STEP 2.0.1a. I used only x16 AF forced through CCC, no AA, no lighting/shaders.

 

Here's what I recorded:

 

Vanilla - 78fps (avg), 1364MB dedicated (max), 101mb dynamic (max)

 

STEP - 62fps (avg), 2570MB dedicated (max), 104MB dynamic (max)

 

According to the GPUz logs, it seems like dedicated VRAM is maxed out (2GB cards in Xfire) running STEP, but dynamic is only around 100mb... :| I'm not sure I understand the difference between these two VRAM figures in a way that helps me interpret the results in any actionable way...

 

Any thoughts on this?

 

 

Your results are consistent with my theory . Your FPS is only mildly affected due to GPU benefits of Xfire, and your VRAM has gone up significantly, but since you are well under 1.5x your max total VRAM (= (2+1)+(2+1) = 6Gb in your case), you do not see any increase in dynamic VRAM. That will spike at final approach to 4 GB dedicated VRAM (VRAM mirror is reported by GPU-z and NOT effective VRAM, which is really 2 GB in your case). So if you had a single card, GPU-z would report just over half of your dedicated VRAM (about 700 Mb and 1300 Mb in your scenarios) and your dynamic (about 65 Mb in your scenarios). All well below 1.5x max, so you should not get any crippling stutteringuntil you double to triple the memory size of your current max STEP.

 

Take a look at my test results for GPU-z (scroll to bottom) using my 2x ATI 6850 (Sapphire) @1Gb each. My stuttering begins with full hi-res STEP 2.0.1a., which maxes to about 2700 Mb VRAM (so low res 1k options for big packs will fit me just fine)

 

I would advise you to go with hi res all the way or at least set up for both to test. You should be good to go for uber-STEP graphics of the future