Am I aiming too high with respect to graphics quality?

[Thick8]

Hi Guys,

I have installed STEP:Extended with all of the HQ variants. I didn't install anything over the 2048 level though. I also installed CBBE and improved NPC clothing. The game setting is at Ultra with 2xAA and 16xAF. I've reached level 32 with only about 10 CTDs over a 2 week time span. I tried DynDOLOD on high settings but the game just kept looping the initial load screen on startup. Same thing with medium setting. I have yet to try low settings as the screenshots don't look like it will offer much visually.  

System specs are CPU=FX8350@5Ghz, Memory=16GB DDR3 1866, GPU=R9290 (x2). FPS usually hangs around 40-50 with dips into the low 30s at times.

I've played with uGridToLoad from 5 to 11 (11 won't get past the load screen).

I would like to use DynDOLOD on high but will settle for medium if I have to; yet I don't want to trade the "up close" fidelity for distance fidelity.

I've done all of the tweaks that have been mentioned here on the forum in hopes of being able to run ALL of the eyecandy.

Does anyone have ALL of the eyecandy turned on with DynDOLOD installed? If so, I'd like to hear how you did it.

Thanks.

John

Edited September 10, 2015 by Thick8

[Greg]

I initially installed STEP Extended with 1K meshes and textures and DynDOLOD on medium. After testing to make sure everything is relatively smooth and stable, I made a copy of the STEP profile named STEP HD (for lack of a better imagination) and bumped some of the meshes and textures to 2K, reran DynDOLOD on high, and it worked fine. I'm concerned about the uGridsToLoad setting because this should be set to 5 when using DynDOLOD. You might get away with 7, but I don't think it's really necessary with DynDOLOD and just eats more memory because you're loading significantly more cells (I think 49 cells with uGridsToLoad=7 versus 25 cells with uGridsToLoad=5).

 

This is the list of mods I bumped to 2K resolution, although I'm just trying to find a middle ground with decent performance and a decent in-game experience.

 

 

 

Serious HD Retexture Landscape

Serious HD Retexture Riften

Serious HD Full - Landscape

Tobes Hi-Res Textures

aMidianBorn Caves and Mines

aMidianBorn Farmhouse

aMidianBorn Solsteheim Landscape

aMidianBorn Whiterun

HD Enhanced Terrain

HQ Snow Texture

Real Wood Textures - Famrhouses No Green Moss Version

Redefined Dungeons

Skyrim Improved Puddles

The Beauty of Skyrim - Dungeons

Visible Windows High

STEP LOD Textures High

TES5LODGen High

Vividian - Weather and Lighting Enhancement - 7.00 High

 

 

[Cameron9428]

Are you using an ENB? I run a modified step with 2k textures, dyndolod on high and an ENB and my frames are usually in the 50s or capped at 60. This is with a single 780 ti and a i5 4690k OC'd to 4.4Ghz. Also what kind of FPS are you expecting? 40-50 sounds great to me,  most people are going to dip down a little in taxing areas.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Cameron9428

[Greg]

Yes, I'm using Vividian Vanilla ENB... it's the last one in the list in the above post.

[Cameron9428]

Yes, I'm using Vividian Vanilla ENB... it's the last one in the list in the above post.

Honestly I think you're more than fine to use 2k textures. With 4gb vram medium I wouldn't worry too much. I don't think you're aiming to high at all either, your system looks more than capable imo :)

Edited September 10, 2015 by Cameron9428

[TechAngel85]

You should get your STEP install running and stable as it is in the Guide before altering things. I'm not familiar with your video card, but I'm on a GTX 760 4GB and I run Extended mainly maxed out at 60, sometimes 50's if is a more taxing area, and rarely in the 40s. With ENB, (Vividian Vanilla Performance version) I stay mainly in the high 40's to low 50's range.

 

I have no issues with DynDOLOD on medium.

[Greg]

He's basically using the same video card I have (dual R9 290s versus my single R9 290X), so he should be fine using 2k textures.

[Thick8]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm only using ENB for the memory bump, not for any presets. My understanding is that the ENB mods merely change the ENBseries.ini settings. Is this wrong? do they help with memory management? 

I'm thinking that the infinite loop when loading a game is caused be the system running out of video memory. Does this sound reasonable considering I went with the 2k variant of everything? Or do you think my issue is something else. I did try to use DynDOLOD prior to adding anything that was not STEP but ran into the same issue I'm having now.

 

Cameron, Are you running with ultra settings, AA, and AF enabled? Could you post your ENB, Skyrim, and SkyrimPrefs .ini files? Maybe I have something wrong there.

 

BTW: I am monitoring GPU ram, system ram, and cpu usage during game loading. Cpu is using about 60% on three cores. System memory usage rises about 2Gb. Vram levels off at about 8Gb before CPU and GPU usage drops back down to near zero. At this point I know the game froze; yet the load screen keeps chugging merrily along until I task manager out of it.

 

EDIT: It just occurred to me that I've left out (probably) the most important part. My screen res is 5918x1080.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Thick8

[TechAngel85]

Holy cow!! Yeah, you're probably maxing out your memory. Why such a high resolution? You're likely going to have to turn that down to play with everything.

[Greg]

No, ENB presets don't have anything to do with memory management. ENB presets are basically just "eye candy" provided on top of ENB, although there's a bit more to ENB presets than just changing the ENB settings. These typically come with custom shader functions, custom meshes and/or textures optimized for the ENB preset, customizations for lighting and weather, SMAA or SweetFX plugins, etc. on top of the ENB settings. If I use an ENB preset, I always add it in last after I get the base STEP Extended profile stable and bump to 2K textures.

[Cameron9428]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm only using ENB for the memory bump, not for any presets. My understanding is that the ENB mods merely change the ENBseries.ini settings. Is this wrong? do they help with memory management? 

I'm thinking that the infinite loop when loading a game is caused be the system running out of video memory. Does this sound reasonable considering I went with the 2k variant of everything? Or do you think my issue is something else. I did try to use DynDOLOD prior to adding anything that was not STEP but ran into the same issue I'm having now.

 

Cameron, Are you running with ultra settings, AA, and AF enabled? Could you post your ENB, Skyrim, and SkyrimPrefs .ini files? Maybe I have something wrong there.

 

BTW: I am monitoring GPU ram, system ram, and cpu usage during game loading. Cpu is using about 60% on three cores. System memory usage rises about 2Gb. Vram levels off at about 8Gb before CPU and GPU usage drops back down to near zero. At this point I know the game froze; yet the load screen keeps chugging merrily along until I task manager out of it.

 

EDIT: It just occurred to me that I've left out (probably) the most important part. My screen res is 5918x1080.

I use *mostly* ultra settings and SMAA / AF. I personally use Ruvaak Dahmaan ENB Redone, my personal favorite on the nexus. 

 

The main difference is definitely our respective resolutions...I run at 1920x1080. 5918x1080 seems like a rather odd resolution, to be honest. For INI files I reccomend checking out EWI's Prefs, you can find them in the download page of RealVision ENB. That memory usage is also pretty crazy... definitely try lowering the res like Tech said.

[TechAngel85]

Don't use EWI's inis! They have some bad settings in them. DoubleYou has put hours into testing all the parameters and their values for our INI Guides. I recommend you use those instead to learn the settings and tweak them as you will based off the information.

[Thick8]

I use *mostly* ultra settings and SMAA / AF. I personally use Ruvaak Dahmaan ENB Redone, my personal favorite on the nexus. 

 

The main difference is definitely our respective resolutions...I run at 1920x1080. 5918x1080 seems like a rather odd resolution, to be honest. For INI files I reccomend checking out EWI's Prefs, you can find them in the download page of RealVision ENB. That memory usage is also pretty crazy... definitely try lowering the res like Tech said.

The odd resolution is triple screen with bezel management enabled. I plan on taking my monitors out of their frames to be able to mount them closer together and lower the resolution a little. I hope to get it down to about 5800x1080. I know that's not much but every little bit helps. I also have the FOV set at 90. not sure if this adds much in the way of memory usage.

[TechAngel85]

The resolution is insane. I've never heard of anyone playing this game like that. My recommendation you're not going to like. Drop one of the monitors and just play on two for Skyrim. That will likely fix the problem.

[Thick8]

That's so not going to happen.

 

 

 

Edited September 12, 2015 by Thick8

[echo451]

Some good resources for INI tweaking. 

 

Guide:Skyrim_Configuration_Settings

Guide:Skyrim_INI

Guide:SkyrimPrefs_INI