Hello,

So I stopped playing Skyrim because I was using 250 mods and getting constant stutters with 20 FPS.

Groups of mods I'm using:

• 4k resolution texture packs


• city mods


• npc mods


• weather mods


• script mods like SkyRe

Overhaul, my game was beautiful but I was getting stutters and low fps the whole time, except indoors, capped at 60.

I noticed the Expanded Towns and Cities mod had one of the strongest impact on my FPS reduction (-20% FPS).

My gpu recently fried so I thought to buy a new one once Pascal gpu get released.

Rig previously used with stutters and 20 fps oudoors:

• i5 3570k 4.2GHz


• 780 GTX 3GB (fried)


• 16GB RAM


• SSD


• 1080p resolution


• Win 7 64-Bit

My question:

Even though the Skyrim engine is out dated and can be the culprit here, do you think the new 1080 GTX GPU of 8GB, or the upcoming Titan X replacement could stop those stutters and help me get 50+ FPS with all my mods ?

I can post my whole mods list, and also I would like to hear the opinion of those who are using the Expanded Towns and Cities mods as it adds a lot of buildings and so textures to load. Basically, people who have the same experience as me.

Thank you for your insight.

You would likely get improvement. Impossible to say exactly how many frames you will get. ENB can be the biggest hit depending on what you use.

When your game has to load things from HDD, your performance will suffer a lot. You can notice having good FPS at one point, and doing a 180 turn suddenly causes massive stutters before stabilizing again. This is when you hit the VRAM limit, I think it is the most common performance issue. With more mods requiring more VRAM, these stutters can become continuous. New GPUs with more RAM will help. ENBBoost also helps greatly. It is best to trim your mods down to the state before doing 180s becomes a problem. Saving a few hundred MBs can often solve the problem completely. Texture optimizers can help there too.

I'd like to add that you should probably get something with at least 4GB (maybe more) VRAM especially with using high texture mods. If you can afford the new cards, then I would say go for it. Probably expensive though.

I have used RealVision ENB, only this one. I'm not an ENB expert, I just tweak the shadows and some other things to make it even better for the eye.

Not sure of the impact it has on my performances in % as I've always played with fps capped at 60.

I am already using my SSD as the only storage for my Skyrim + mods and Win 7.

I do have a 10 year-old HDD that takes 5sec to load the first time when I open the disk D: in "My Computer", but there's nothing related to Skyrim inside it, so at the end of the day I doubt it causes any stutters and fps issues.

I think I'm using ENBoost, unless it's been rendered useless with the patches, but I'm using multiple tools to help with performances.

What is "trim mods down to the state" ?

I haven't used any texture optimizer yet, I will once I have a new gpu.

Thank you by the way, I will watch his video you posted.

I will post here my full mods list, it is an excel file though.

But it's organized and very easy to read.

https:// mega. nz/#!b1dhGIiL!owdNN5MOvJ8ZWWN6-ELx2OmfECTXvRZ4VCWKW_24LHI

SSD must be helping but it is still slow compared to RAM, much slower compared to VRAM. ENBoost requires some tweaking, it helped a lot with my game. Make sure it is enabled.

By trimming mods, I mean giving up on some demanding mods to gain performance. By state, I mean pinpointing when VRAM usage exceeds your limit for both halves of your game world. When you cross this limit, even by a few hundred MBs, it creates a bottleneck that would result in constant stutters. Doing a 360 head turn shouldn't cause a stutter.

You can also gain a lot of performance by disabling ENB effects, what works and makes a visual difference vs. things too costly and visually not different. Don't afraid to mod it, the in-game tool is helpful. ENB tweaks come with additional custom effect files which can cause high performance hits. I personally find a performance enb and migrate settings from the actual enb config I want, to have best of both worlds. I don't like it when simple color effects cause high FPS hits.

If the issue is with the expanded towns then I think that having a better graphics card might not be enough of a boost since the issue might not be related to the graphics but items that are depended on CPU to process. I think the expanded towns adds quite a bit of objects to cities and towns.

Yes the ETAC mod adds a lot of meshes, especially outside Whiterun.

So, as you said, buildings are CPU dependant, not GPU ? Still they add those textures to load, some of them being 2k to 4k.

But when I am on the bridge of Riverwood, looking at the town, I display a lot of meshes, lots of tree, the whole city.

I think the FPS drop at this point is more about displaying a lot of objects, rather than a lot of textures.

So, a GPU won't be enough ?

What can be enough then ?

I thought of this already, but if getting a top notch GPU (Pascal serie from nVidia) isn't enough, I will go on the next point.

Getting a top-notch CPU (released later this year from Intel), but then a MOBO also obviously because of the socket.

If it's still not enough, I will get 64GB RAM and put all my Skyrim folder onto a RAMDISK of 40GB.

RAMDISK isnt going to do anything. Except load areas faster probably. WIndows will cache Skyrim pages anyway as long as there is RAM available. You have plenty already.

Check out the section on HD textures, enbs, and graphic settings: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13608/?tab=4&&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fskyrim%2Fajax%2Fcomments%2F%3Fmod_id%3D13608%26page%3D1%26sort%3DDESC%26pid%3D0%26thread_id%3D1775321

I would suggest a clean skyrim installation, and adding one texture mod at a time, watching your frame-rates.

Also keep in mind, to many texture mods will cripple your performance.

This applies on a system without extra (useless) background processes and stable ini settings.

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An ENB with lots of graphic mods added, can lower your frame-rate easily to 30.

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And i wanna add, the higher the resolution the smaller the differences between an i5 and i7.

This difference can be explained by the fact, that the CPU isn't the bottleneck in this case any more, but the GPU.

You can see the results on that link: http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1061&page=10

From what I was reading earlier the 1080 is about 30% faster than a 980ti, which is already a good card.

Its hard to say exactly how much improvement you'll get but you will get some. Your basic problem though is you basically have too much for the game to handle, 4k textures, RealVision's DoF is an FPS killer (I know, I use it myself. It's lovely but it hammers framerates). Etc. Trim it down a bit and see.

I never used DoF, it hurts my eyes and I hate those features, they're useless to me.

I'm all about the atmosphere, immersion, realism.

I'm scared to make such investment and find out the culprit is the Skyrim engine.

That I can't play with all my mods list without removing some.