Lowering Skyrims vram usage

[psychodegu]

I have skyrim with realvision enb, at 1600p, but only have 1.28G of vram to use. I run my game without the HD textures, and I allso keep Anti aliasing and anisotropic setting low or off. What else can I do to lower vram usage? I am asking abeacue I am only using ~80% of my graphics cards but some times I get fps dips that cause a stutter. and I am running a i5-2500k@4.7Ghz, so I don't think it is a cpu bottle neck.

 

[Snipergod87]

If the data (textures) the game is looking for isn't on your VRAM, then it heads to your system RAM, if it is not there, they it goes to your hard drive (very slow). It appears that RealVision ENB uses some higher res textures, if you disable that addon does framerate go up? another alternative is lowering the resolution.

I originally has a GTX 770 2GB model, and found i was often getting frame rate studders at 1920x1200 with various high res texture packs and mods installed. After returning it and upgrading to a 4GB model I found that Skyrim was caching a little over 3GB of data in VRAM, which would explain the issues I had.

Edit: The mod's poster recommend a GTX 660 Ti with 2GB of VRAM, and thats @ 1080p.

 

[psychodegu]

If the data (textures) the game is looking for isn't on your VRAM, then it heads to your system RAM, if it is not there, they it goes to your hard drive (very slow). It appears that RealVision ENB uses some higher res textures, if you disable that addon does framerate go up? another alternative is lowering the resolution.

I originally has a GTX 770 2GB model, and found i was often getting frame rate studders at 1920x1200 with various high res texture packs and mods installed. After returning it and upgrading to a 4GB model I found that Skyrim was caching a little over 3GB of data in VRAM, which would explain the issues I had.

Edit: The mod's poster recommend a GTX 660 Ti with 2GB of VRAM, and thats @ 1080p.

So a solution to this could be running the game off an ssd, or ramdisk? I'll try to find the addon to disable.

 

[Snipergod87]

Neither of those are a solution really, even when the video card runs to system RAM for textures it does slow down quite a lot, a SSD would be even worse (better then a mechanical disk though)

First try removing RealVision ENB and see how that handles for you.
You can also try lowering the resolution to say 1080p instead of 1600p.

If you do want to run at 1600p and with RealVision ENB on you most likely need a graphics card with more VRAM on it, which would solve those frame rate drops.
Frankly speaking you are hitting a hardware limit with 1.28GB of VRAM, running at that high of a resolution.

 

[psychodegu]

I'm just trying to gain the benefits of the enb, since my 2 gpu are very underutilized (~55% with no enb), but in order to do so I need to turn off any enb options that are vram heavy. Still pretty new at enb, and haven't found any good documentation on the various options and the resource impact it has on a computer.

I have played it with no enb and it is very good, so the enb must be pushing the vram just past the breaking point.

 

[Snipergod87]

I'm just trying to gain the benefits of the enb, since my 2 gpu are very underutilized (~55% with no enb), but in order to do so I need to turn off any enb options that are vram heavy. Still pretty new at enb, and haven't found any good documentation on the various options and the resource impact it has on a computer.

I have played it with no enb and it is very good, so the enb must be pushing the vram just past the breaking point.

I believe that is what is happening here, since without ENB it runs well.