Want to greatly increase draw distance in Skyrim - Time for a GTX 680 4GB?

C

Christopher

Gawd
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Sep 16, 2002
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I would love to greatly increase the draw distance in skyrim so I'm thinking its time to move up to a GTX 680 4GB. My question for you folks who have a 680 is what settings can you run skyrim at with a good framerate? Is it a worthy upgrade?

Current hardware:

Intel i7 930 @2.8 GHZ
12GB RAM
Gigabyte GAX58-UDR3 mainboard
Intel 600G ssdsa2cw600g3 (Boot / System / Apps drive)
WD WD1002FAEX 1TB drive (Bulk storage)
PSU - PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910w
Galaxy GTX 480

Thanks!
 
You can increase the draw distance in Skyrim in a couple different ways. The most noticeable improvement is by loading uGrids to 7, but you can't really go much beyond that, and you definitely don't need 4GB of GPU memory unless you plan on installing a ton of texture mods. You could increase uGrids to 7 with your current GPU.
 
Rizen said:
Overclock your processor.
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This.

That 480 should handle Skyrim just fine.

Do you have the patches installed for Skyrim?

If you don't, it is going to mostly run on 1 thread. The newer patches fixed that and it helps a whole lot.

On my system, my cards are only 1GB cards and I can turn draw distance way up as well as pretty much everything else. Never drops below 60fps with vsync on.

There are also some .INI file settings you can change to help out some more.
 
If you have the cash I would do it. I would also get a good cooler and overclock that processor too.
 
I have a 4GB gtx 680. Highest I've seen for vram usage was 2.4GB in Skyrim. This was at 1080p, 8xAA 8xSS. I haven't pushed it really yet. Im sure if i tried i could push 3GB.
 
The main issue with your system atm is your cpu. Skyrim is heavily dependent on your cpu and scales accordingly. You will probably want to upgrade that asap- here is a link with benchmarks.

http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html

Another factor is how heavily you mod skyrim, mainly graphic enhancement mods and hi-rez texture packs. I can tell you from personal experience that when you set uGridsToLoad=9 some areas give CTD when using too many mods (texture pack combiner + overhauls). Skyrim is poorly optimized for the PC.

Also the ENB series increases vram usage depending on what version and settings you use. AO + Supersampling are the two largest vram hogs (you definitely want to read about SMAA, people are reporting amazing results using it in other games besides skyrim too, here is a link http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:ENB).

You do not need anything above 4x MSAA [or 4x SMAA] + 4x SS in skyrim. The differences are not very noticeable at your resolution.

If you do not have to cash for both a CPU+mobo upgrade (around 270 right now for a 3770k+ 130 for a mobo) AND a Gtx 680 (classies are going for 530$ retail right now) I would suggest you get a GTX 670 4GB instead. Once overclocked your performance will be within 10% (or even better than) a reference GTX 680.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130824
430$
 
Thanks everyone for the input. Looks like I'm going to be doing some game tweaking first before throwing some more hardware at it.
 
I OCed my 2500k from stock speeds to 4.4GHZ and noticed a significant increase in performance in skyrim (close to 20 FPS in some areas). Also make sure Skyrim is patched to the latest version, as one of the patches added quite a bit of performance. If you don't patch the game, run the SSE mod that was released which gives similar performance increase to the performance patch.
 
Steam keeps the game up to date, and it says its version 1.7.7.0.6. As far as mods, the only mods I have are the high res texture packs from Bethesda, SKSE and SkyUI, Dawnguard and Hearthfire.

I didn't realize this game was so CPU dependent. Mostly what I'm trying to fix is objects "pop in" suddenly with higher res models and textures in an immersion breaking way as I travel the landscape. It would be ideal if the texture and model swaps happened a bit further away so its harder to see.
 
Christopher said:
Steam keeps the game up to date, and it says its version 1.7.7.0.6. As far as mods, the only mods I have are the high res texture packs from Bethesda, SKSE and SkyUI, Dawnguard and Hearthfire.

I didn't realize this game was so CPU dependent. Mostly what I'm trying to fix is objects "pop in" suddenly with higher res models and textures in an immersion breaking way as I travel the landscape. It would be ideal if the texture and model swaps happened a bit further away so its harder to see.
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You'll see that even with uGrids up to 11, I think is what I set mine to, lol. Crashed the game after a few minutes. You can see the far off areas, but the textures and details at medium range didn't show up no matter what I did.

What you'll see happen when you run out of memory is a long pause, especially when turning quickly. I have two 680s and when I last played the game, it was pretty much maxed out at 2560*1440, high-res textures pack, some high-res replacements for snow and scenery, can't recall what else. Never had an issue.
 
Christopher said:
Steam keeps the game up to date, and it says its version 1.7.7.0.6. As far as mods, the only mods I have are the high res texture packs from Bethesda, SKSE and SkyUI, Dawnguard and Hearthfire.

I didn't realize this game was so CPU dependent. Mostly what I'm trying to fix is objects "pop in" suddenly with higher res models and textures in an immersion breaking way as I travel the landscape. It would be ideal if the texture and model swaps happened a bit further away so its harder to see.
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That is unfortunately going to be a problem no matter what. It gets slightly better depending on your elevation, but there will be popping =(. I understand how you feel, but this is a problem that has plagued the elder scroll series since Oblivion.

Also I would recommend deleting Bethseda's high res pack (there are guides on how to do this) and use some community ones instead. Or use ddsopt (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5755) to optimize them to use less Vram. This does not sacrifice quality of course.
 
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