Major hiccups in Syrim with HD textures.

[Comandante_J]

Hi all.

I'm having trouble with Skyrim, this is my system:

FX6300@stock
GA-990XA-UD3
1x4GB RAM 1600 CL9
2x5850's (1GB VRAM)
Corsair TX 750 V2
Crappy 320GB 2.5 HDD from a netbook (yeah, you read right).
Somewhat crappy case (Aerocool V3x), but temsp are reasonable, and it's somewhat cold right now where i live.

I'm testing with a fresh Steam install, vanilla, with all the DLC's installed, at 1680x1050 resolution, all settings at max, FXAA disabled.

If i fire up the game with original textures, it runs great. 50-60FPS just one card, rock solid 60FPS with two. But when i add the official HD textures mod... things get messy. FPS impact is almosn non-existent, BUT, whenever i move to a new zone or spin the view too fast, it would lag for a momment, like half a second, sometimes closer to one full second. This happens constantly, more often outside than inside a building.

The thing is that i've read that people played well with 1GB cards, but i'm not experiencing this...

If i fire up MSI Afterburner i can see in my Logitech G13 screen that it's eating almost 2GB of VRAM... wich i thought was impossible because VRAM does not stack in multi GPU configurations.

Anyway, do you think this is a VRAM problem, or could it be related to my absolutely crappy HDD?

(i'm waiting for my new system to arrive, 4690k, z97 board, 8GB 2400 RAM, 2x290's, HX1050 PSU, 128GB SSD, and a nice 750D case with a 4K display, but this PC will go to my little brother and he loves Skyrim, so...)

 

[manez]

It's likely connected to your hdd, I used to get those hiccups too, until i switched to an ssd.

 

[Comandante_J]

Tha would make sense, the SMART report for this drive looks like the Vietnam war... It's really f* up. Windows does a lot of weird stuff, and sometimes, when downloading from Steam, for example, download would stop for literally a minute or more, lagging the whole system. This didnt happen with my old internet connection (30mb VDSL2), but with my new connection, FTTH 100mb, it's a real pain LOL.

The strange thing is that i dont notice too many problems in other games like BF3 or Crysis 2. But i dont have FRAPS open at all times, so who knows if i'm getting lag and i just dont notice it LOL.

I guess i'll throw a little 128GB SSD for the little guy.

 

[manez]

You would only see the difference in large open world games that don't preload the whole area.

 

[Supernova1138]

I think this is more a VRAM issue, Skyrim with HD textures using more than 1GB of VRAM, and if you don't have enough VRAM you do get hiccups like that as data has to be swapped in and out of VRAM and that slows things down compared to just storing it all in VRAM from the start. The slow HDD probably isn't helping either, but I would say VRAM is probably the main cause for your issues.

 

[renz496]

^ i was thinking the same since the hiccups only happen with HD texture.

 

[Comandante_J]

Yeah... probably a combination of both. Anyway, my new system just arrived, now i only need to get a monitor with any digital input (my current one is VGA and the 290 only has DVI-D, HDMI and DP... yeah, that's me). LOL, oddly enough, the integrated card in the CPU handles Skyrim maxed out without hiccups (but at around 20 FPS...).