My recent history of GPUs:

1) 5870 (current)
2) GTX 260
3) 8800 GTX SLI
4) 8800 GTX (besides my voodoo 1, this was easily the biggest leap forward)
5) 6800 GT
6) erf.... can't accurately remember any further back - two more Geforce something-or-others, and before that a voodoo 2; with a voodoo 1 being my first 3d card . (along the way there were a few early radeon cards & a voodoo banshee put into family machines)

All that i've learnt:

1) AMD/ATI drivers svck compared to NVidia.
2) SLI drivers svck. (I can't imagine how bad AMD/ATI crossfire is!)

My system is similar to yours.

I upgraded from a 8600GT to a Twin Frozr 560Ti (around 200 euro) and I gained a massive FPS improvement. Processor is an E8400 dual core 3.0 Ghz. Most places, outside and inside give me a stable 50-60 fps. Some problematic spots, like Dragonsreach have only 25-30 fps. Overclocking CPU+GPU even gives 30+ fps at Dragonsreach. Really happy with his card. Only problem I had were the snow textures until I realized they were meant to look this ugly...

I can't believe more people aren't recommending you upgrade your system RAM first before you dump any money into a video card. Get yourself up to 4-6GB before you do anything else as that will help with caching textures and other data your video card will be calling, clearing, and calling again into VRAM. You might find that after you upgrade your RAM you don't necessarily need to upgrade your video card just yet.

Several folks here have already mentioned upgrading to the best video card on the market today wouldn't necessarily help you any if your system has bottlenecks elsewhere. It's all about balance. You need to look at your system as a scale with four plates: CPU, RAM (system memory), HDD (hard drive), and GPU (video card). If any one of these is imbalanced compared to the others, it will drag all your performance down. Your CPU is decent, no idea about your HDD, your GPU is ok but could be improved (I would look at this second), but your RAM is really lacking.

Wait for more responses after this post before deciding, but for the money, RAM will probably net you the most improvement at this point. Then you can look at upgrading your video card.

Good luck!

-RMWChaos

I have the Nvidia GTX 560 Ti 1GB and I've encountered very few problems, nothing that would stop me playing the game.

I doubt a new gpu will solve something like that. Most of any issue to be found it due to bugs stemming from this fail Creation Engine. In terms of perfomance nvidia cards typically have the least, quirks, when it comes to games. For Skyrim though, peformance, for fps, is primarily held back by someone's cpu, or rather, the clock speed of their cpu and it's age. The Creation Engine is basically game byro v2, it has the same cpu bottleneck in-engine that Oblivion has. Your gpu will be at 50% and your fps will be below 60, at like 40, even 30fps. This game only knows how to use 2cores in processing capacity, and higher clocks are the only way, on any processor, to improve performance. Given newer processors have better architecture with better performance than older ones at the same clock.

In short, the only way to have the best performance in Skyrim is to buy a 2500k and OC it. It get's to 4.2ghz easily, with no real tweaks. Just go in there and put the turboclock to 42 in the UEFI.

i have core i7 920, 12 gb of ddr 3 ram, think i will bottleneck with a 570 gtx?

At default speeds, yes (in Skyrim only). But you'll still have a great experience.

Recommended Specs for Actual Skyrim Gaming, with MODS. Since why else would you be playing PC version.

AMD or Intel Quad core/ six core + clocked to AT LEAST 4ghz
4GB RAM
1GB / 1.5GB VRAM Video card AT the VERY LEAST AMD/NVID

Not very helpful. Six cores is absolutely not needed, 4ghz isn't needed unless you are trying to run at ultra, and VRAM is one of the least helpful measures of video card performance.

6 cores being over kill: agreed.
4Ghz not universally helping? Disagree.
Vram not being a decent part of the Skyrim video card measuring stick? Disagree, Skyrim is a memory monster especially with the mod community and vram is a very valid thing to consider when shopping for skyrim friendly cards. Of course the card needs a strong enough 'everything else' to put that vram to proper use but its still one of the more vram consuming game engines out there and very often you'll see people talking about how they hit the vram wall long before the GPU is saturated.

It wasn't a 'helping' it was 'recommended'. 4ghz is not needed to play the game enjoyably on high settings, so doesn't need to be the recommended spec (at least, with decent architecture chip).

That's (bolded) the key. A powerful 512mb card can still give a great experience with the game + mods. Given the choice between the miriad of low end cards with lots of VRAM and a powerful card with 512mb, the latter is definitely favourable.

In a thread titled 'best card for Skyrim' I would choose 'none of the above', personally. Now we can back & forth about the merits of vram as a measurement but I think we can both agree that yes in general its been a terribly abused term that means nothing compared to the over all picture but specifically in Skyrim's case its not something to take lightly. I'm sure you itch for more of the stuff, gotta be a pretty tight squeeze fitting likely a 720p Skyrim and some mods into that quantity of vram that even top end cards from 2006 had more of (8800GTXes, probably my favourite 'spare no expense' style cards for sure, 768MB of the stuff).

Hi guys, not trying to hi-jack the thread, but I have a similar question.

Here is my specs:

i5 2500k
8GB RAM
Radeon 5870 1GB

I already have a good card and I'm running on Ultra+ for some settings, but have turned some down too to high or medium via the ini. I basically tested everything and turned down settings that make little difference like Decals and TreeLOD so I could have others, like Shadows on extremely high settings. I am running a FXAA mod, and some other mods like Realistic Water and Vurts Flora etc, but my video mem is according to the GPU-Z monitor maxed out so I don't have room for Skyrim HD which I was hoping to run, aswell as some HD shield and armour mod I've been watching.

Can anyone recommend a card which performs at least equally to a 5870 but has more VRAM, preferably 2GB at least but cost less than ￡350? All the cards I managed to find cost around ￡500, which is too much for me.

Are you saying it does not work if you try to use the "Skyrim HD" mod, or you just think it won't since you see it as full and think there is no room for it?

Since you've got 8Gb of system RAM, i'm not seeing that you've got 1Gb of Vram as an issue. If you want to squeeze abit of performance out of it, both the CPU and Gfx card overclock really well.
That should help it cope if it starts using system RAM more, due to the heavier texture mods. If you are not overclocking yet, or maybe reached your current max you should consider the more cost effective option of getting a bigger heat sink for both and seeing what they can do with overclocking. This game loves a faster processor, it thrives once you start uping the Ghz...

If however you insist on wanting a bigger gfx card, cclonline is a decent uk based online store to go for parts of a budget.
This 2GB and obviously abit faster than yours currently is (Radeon HD6870X2 2048MB) ~ ￡300
http://www.cclonline.com/product/63477/VX6870X2-2GBD5-2DHG/Graphics-Cards/VTX3D-Radeon-HD6870X2-2048MB-Graphics-Card/VGA0338/

Pick one of the 6970s, doesn't really matter which:
http://www.dabs.com/category/components-and-storage,graphics--tv-tuners-and-i-o,graphics/11137-55120000-55570000-464780000

(Just did some googling, no idea if that's a good shop in the UK to buy from but yah that type of card appears to be the best without heading higher in the budget but if you could, the 7970 is a monster)

That would end up 1GB/GPU, IE exactly the same situation he's in right now.

My bad, forgot those merged dual gfx cards end up mirroring the vram. Still a quick look through, does show a few other 2Gb cards that fill his requirements.

I haven't tried it, but my card was already using over 900mb, the highest was around 950mb so its pretty much maxed out, but I didn't know that having more RAM would compensate for less VRAM. Of course I'll try it before buying a new card, but the mod creators seem to recommend higher than 1GB VRAM for their HD mods, I figured since they x4 or x8 everything, having about 5% VRAM left wouldn't be enough

I have virtually an identical system to yours and have no issue running the "HD" mods. I would load the mods you want and see if your actually taking a severe performance hit before you upgrade to a card with more memory. With 8 GB of RAM you have a lot of room for the gpu to offload some of it without affecting performance much. While the card may show that it is using up 900mb of Space, not all of that is actually being used for rendering at any given moment. The GPU is going to use it's own memory when it can to be mroe efficient but it doesn't necessarily NEED everything is has buffered. With that much RAM I would say you probably have a ways to go before you card actually runs into memory issues. In fact, rendering larger texture file is a lot easier for the GPU than post processing, so I doubt you will see as significant hit from HD textures as you will from tweaking shadows

I notice with my 7970 when in Skyrim, it is consistantly using atleast 2700MB of memory on my card. 5760x1080 with some high resolution textures.

Skyrim is already playable with almost full and solid 60fps thanks to Skyboost r3 and Bethesda who improved a little the performance in the game.

BUT, if you want to play the game at full 60fps with heavy mods, like a 6gb of graphical mods, you will need to wait for the ivy bridge cpu who i've heard could bump up to a easy 5ghz with 1.2v and a Kepler GPU with some 3Gb VRAM (VRAM Is needed if you have modded your Skyrim with many mods), or the yet released HD7970 who has plenty of VRAM.

So, you need this things if you want NO problem with Skyrim WITH and WITHOUT MODS

-a cpu who can make a 5ghz
-a gpu with 2-3gb vram (Kepler or AMD 7000 series)
-skyboost r3 mod
-wait for 1.4 patch from Bethesda, in the changelog is something releated to performance increase
-wait the creation kit, this SDK is very important, with this one you could remove things that you don't want in the game, and possible in the future modders will be able to make a Enhanced Edition of Skyrim (much better performance management, etc, nerd stuff).

This isn't a graphics card issue. Game glitches and bugs.
But according to your system, forget about the video card, get some system memory first. You got 2 Gigs, that's very marginal. Even your Operating system's performance and videos all sorts of stuff improves if you get more memory.
Get this software first, install it: http://filehippo.com/download_cpuz/

Run it, then mark down the type of memory it shows you on the memory tab,
Try to get a similar one, same manufacturer or at least the same speed. preferably another 4 GB, or replace your 2 gig with a 4Gig stick. You can go even 6 or 8 gigabyte if you got a 64bit operating system, but even just a 4GB memory stick will significantly improve your performance.

Stick or kit, I hope you mean kit and I agree switching to a 4GB kit will be a great benefit. Switching to or adding a single 4GB stick however will not. (if you're unsure of why I say this, look up what DDR stands for and what needs to be in place for it to do what it does).

You don't need a 5ghz processer and 2-3gb if vram lol

I have an i5-2500k @ 4.3ghz and a GTX 580 (1536MB).

I play everything on Ultra with shadows on High.
32xCSAA, 8xSSAA, 16xAF, AO On(performance).
uGridsLoad= 7
30+ Textures Mods (In installed all per the STEP program)
Skyboost R4

I have 60fps everywhere including Whiterun with Vsync. It's flawless. I can even enable triple buffering with D3D overrider and get smoother gameplay at no cost.

This setup will anywhere from 60-99% GPU (with triple buffering) and almost all my VRAM. Considering the game is so badly optimized this will only improve when the new patch comes out.

I have 2.60GHz and it runs the game near flawlessly (to the point where it doesn't bother me in the least)