I've recently had a lot of performance issues with Skyrim, primarily huge delays where the screen will freeze for several seconds. This generally occurs in areas with a lot of content. If I have the character rotate while standing in one location, the delays will repeat as the character turns. This is apparently due to the depletion of VRAM resources. My current video card is a nVidia GTX 570 with 2.5 GB of VRAM. It works quite well at 1600x900 resolution with a heavily modded Skyrim (no ENB) 90% of the time, but the VRAM is no longer enough with all the new content and upgraded textures I'm using. I've just received a nVidia GTX 770 with 4 GB of VRAM, and will probably install it soon.

So I'm wondering what sort of experiences people are having with video cards and Skyrim. This would include things like how much VRAM people are having success with at particular resolutions and game settings, possible differences between AMD/ATI and nVidia cards, frame rates, ENB vs. non-ENB, etc. When I purchased the card, I recognized the ATI cards currently have a better price/performance ratio, but purchasers overall seem less satisfied with ATI. I saw a lot of complaints about graphical artifacts in various games, and lack of confidence in current Radeon drivers (an expectations that problems will continue into the future).

I am particularly interested in hearing from people that use a GTX 770, and how that is working for them.

Does not answer your question, but I have been running Skyrim on an ATI card for years and it works just fine. I also don't chase the latest drivers for my video cards so perhaps I have a stable edition. I did start out with Nvidia with Skyrim, and other than the expected performance increase when going to the new ATI card, there was no other differences in stability or look and feel.

Now, the game should run just fine on a 570, so I would look at your mod mix. I have a bunch of texture upgrades on my machine, but no ENB's and a 2GB video card, this one in fact

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PJVB3Y/ref=oh_details_o08_s02_i04?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That is a fine graphics card you have gotten your hands on. Unless you decide to make all the textures 4K and above, you should have no problems. 3GB and 4GB cards really do have an impact when you use any texture replacement mods.

Ok, the issues I mentioned above have been resolved by the 4GB 770. There were additional issues I didn't mention, like occasional random flashes of red and yellow (graphical glitches of some type). and the sky would sometimes have lines appearing which seemed to delineate sections of varying brightness. It's too soon to conclude if those two have also been resolved, but even the menu is much more responsive. The game saves more quickly, and quits more quickly. So things I wasn't expecting to be affected have improved dramatically. I visited some areas that caused stuttering and brief lockups and they are now very smooth.

Good to hear that ATI is working well with Skyrim. I was tempted to get a R9 290, but I played it safe and went with nVidia. I used an ATI card for a long time with Oblivion, and at that time ATI had the edge on drivers, with more frequent updates and better image quality. ATI supplies the GPUs for the current generation of consoles, so they will have plenty of revenue rolling in, and I don't feel badly about supporting nVidia right now. I'd hate to see either company suffer. We need the competition between them.

I agree about the 570. It was absolutely adequate until very recently, as I piled on more mods and more textures. It wasn't a general performance issue. The VRAM wasn't able to maintain all the textures needed to render all of the objects that were visible at some locations in a 360 degree view. It seemed to be swapping textures in and out too much as the character moved slightly to view different part of the world.