Here's a few tips to help offset the increased VRAM usage from the HD texture pack released by Bethesda. The following do involve some trade-offs in some cases, but are well worth it if you are getting stuttery/unsmooth gameplay due to lack of VRAM. We all know the symptoms of VRAM buffer overrun. You're cruising along at 50+ FPS but turn suddenly and feel everything turn into a stuttery mess, even though your FPS are still nice and high (but perhaps fluctuating wildly).

1) *Not needed for Skyrim* - Disable Aero and Desktop Composition for Skyrim - Simple enough fix, some people enjoy Aero for normal usage so disabling it this way will turn off Aero when you start Skyrim and re-enable it when you quit. This can free up anywhere from 50-100MB of VRAM for Skyrim.

• Just find your Skyrim root folder, most likely %:\\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim
  
• right click on TESV.exe > Properties
  
• go to Compatibility tab and click "Disable visual themese" and "Disable desktop composition"

2) Close any and all web browsers, photo viewers, photoshop, paint, and even Origin/Steam (they don't use as much VRAM if left open in system tray). Each of these programs can use 100MB or more per instance. If you have 4-5 web browser windows open or multiple tabs in a single browser window, you can easily use 400-500MB for just IE. Close them completely to immediately free up significant amounts of VRAM for Skyrim.

3) Reduce MSAA and TSAA levels and rely on FXAA instead to reduce aliasing. AA is lovely as most of us know, but the MSAA modes also uses a ton of VRAM in Skyrim. Every increment of MSAA/TSAA over 2xAA uses roughly 200MB more VRAM at 1080p, which can easily push your videocard over its VRAM budget with HD textures enabled. Personally, I would enable FXAA and try to get away with 2xMSAA+2xTSAA. If you still find you're pushing your VRAM limits, try disabling TSAA. If that's still not enough, disable MSAA. On my GTX 480s with 1.5GB I generally settle for 2xMSAA+2xTSAA+FXAA and often come up on 1.5GB.

4) Reduce draw distance settings and/or ugrids settings. I personally don't budge on this but it is an option for less powerful video cards.

5) There's a few other tweaks, like cleaning up your desktop of icons or using a plain background for your desktop, but these generally have much smaller impact on VRAM.

6) Reduce resolution. This is a last resort imo, and defeats much of the point of using HD textures to begin with. Personally I don't recommend touching this for a variety of reasons but it all leads to the same thing: poor image quality.

Much of this is common knowledge so I can't take credit for it, but taken as a whole these tips can help many of you alleviate the VRAM issues you might be having with the HD texture pack. These tips are also helpful for other games that svck up VRAM like Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Witcher 2, etc.

If you use a program like MSI AfterBurner you can see how much VRAM your card is using while idle at desktop and in-game. If you have more than 50-75MB of VRAM while sitting in Windows, you can definitely stand to benefit from some of these tweaks. Generally, with just the Windows/browser tweak you can drop to ~150MB. With the Aero disable tweak, you can drop that to ~70MB. Generally while gaming, I try not to completely max out VRAM as that means you're susceptible to VRAM overrun, but instead, I try to sit in the 1400MB range.

Hope that helps!

Thanks! Will try a few of these.

You won't save any VRAM on disabling Aero because it disables on fullscreen window anyway and if you look at your VRAM usage it makes no difference whatsoever. Compatibility isn't some performance gain option, it's just a way to debug issues when running such app or game.

yeah i was just going to say about aero glass interface.... it actually provides performance improvements by offloading the cpu while working within the windows environment and hardware accelerating the interface. Much more efficient.

Other application like steam or whatever are not using vram.. physical ram somewhat.. unless your running windows 32bit and need to squeeze every last bit of physical ram and memory that windows is able to allocate .... there is no benefit to closing these things down unless your really lacking on the cpu front.

Yeah, I think the OP is confusing VRAM with virtual RAM or something. And virtual isn't even accurate here...

Displaying aero when running skyrim decreased my vram usage cheers!

Sure you do, have you tried it? Your taskbar will turn opaque before you start the game and even if you alt-tab, it will stay opaque. Compared to not turning it off and alt-tabbing, your taskbar will be translucent, meaning Aero is always on. Its designed this way so that you get the seamless transition to your aero desktop, if you turn it off you get that flash/transition.

Again, have you tried it? Steam uses a very small amount of VRAM, but at its heart, its still a browser. Those images it displays use VRAM. Its only 10-15MB of VRAM but its there. Origin uses much more, up to 25MB. I just verified and tested this, if you minimize them to tray they use less, but you're still better off closing Origin completely because it does use quite a bit of VRAM.

No, I'm quite obviously not.

glad it helped!

You say obviously but provide no test results or procedure. It's not obvious at all, really.

No, its really quite simple and detailed there. Download MSI Afterburner or any similar program (this allows you to monitor VRAM usage).

Perform any of the steps I mentioned and watch VRAM go down.

It really takes all of 10-15 seconds per step to replicate and verify for yourself for each bullet point. As fast as your PC opens or closes a browser or program really.

Again, you have provided neither. You haven't provided any before and after or information on what was running and so forth. It's like giving me a screwdriver and telling me to go build a house and watch as the people move in.

You're kidding right? Sorry if you don't know how to download a simple GPU monitoring program and then click the X button on the various applications you have open that I clearly outline in my OP, then this obviously isn't something you should be concerned about. You should call Dell desktop to support to walk you through it maybe.

If you want to be skeptical that's fine, it takes all of 20 seconds to verify these changes work just as I describe. If you're too lazy or not technically competent enough to do verify for yourself, that's your loss.

No, I'm not kidding. If you're going to post this it'd be best to provide the following:

A thorough anolysis of all resources used before and after, a listing of the major things running, what you turned off, what settings you're running at, how long you tested (for scaling purposes), tested with more than a single program, list the hardware specs...

Otherwise, there's no way to tell if it's just placebo or otherwise.


And by the way, I know how to download and use it. But that's not really my point here. In any case, I'd be unable to do it anyways as this is not the computer I use for games. This is my dev computer.

lol i could do all that, or i could allow those who have 20 seconds to verify for themselves to verify it for themselves. For someone like you, I'd just tell you to piss off, I really don't care if you use it or not.

I tried it, VRAM is the same and turning off Aero does nothing. I don't think anything offscreen takes performance but on startup, Skyrim takes up 80Mb of VRAM, which is about right for that screen animation and if what you are saying is right it should say 180MB of VRAM with Aero on, so am afraid the evidence is stacked against what you say. Also, we know that if you do an alt, tab some of your VRAM gets flushed and that's probably what happens when the screen goes full.

I'm trying to help make sure inaccurate information isn't spread here, that's all.

Look.. when you enter a full screen game.... the vram is cleared for the game or 3d application to take full control.. whatever was in the vram is unloaded.

the only situation in which this wouldn't occur is if your running in fake full screen or windowed mode... which isn't exactly massively the norm... granted some people do it. But even then, a lot of it is still made "available" to based on the priority...

OK I just verified this and Skyrim does automatically disable Aero on start-up now, not sure if that has always been the case but pretty sure it didn't at least with 1.3 when I started doing it manually. So there is no need to use those compatibility flags for Skyrim as it disables Aero automatically.

The hires pack averaged on 1.5GB on me and from some point and further, it crashed. I remember seeing somewhere that Skyrim's default setting, is a maximum memory usage cap of 1800MB.

I believe it crashed because it reached and exceeded that mark.

Currently, I'm testing a raised cap of 4096MB (iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=4096000000 on skyrm.ini) as I've got 6GBs RAM on a Win7x64 machine. I'll see how it goes.

RAM != VRAM

Big difference.

Right, except anyone could verify the findings for themselves in a few seconds if they were accurate or not.


This isn't always the case, I just verified with BF3 which is one of the games I started doing this for. It will keep aero enabled on launch and you do benefit from the VRAM freed up by disabling Aero.

You can verify yourself by:

1) Launch BF3 with Aero enabled. Watch VRAM before and after.
2) Alt-Tab out.
3) Disable Aero, VRAM will drop.
4) Alt-Tab back in and VRAM will still be lower than before you alt-tabbed out.

But yes you guys are correct, Skyrim automatically disables Aero in fullscreen so there's no need to disable it on launch.

Not really. It's called a placebo effect.

So, you're saying that the "iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes" variable, refers to VRAM.

Memory is complex, it's not as easy to just read what you see and take it as what that real memory is. Perhaps you should do a test and open loads of windows, run a game and see if all of those windows take up VRAM when in-game.

No, what I'm saying is that I think you're a bit confused. Skyrim has the LAA flag enabled, so it can use up to 2.75 GB of RAM now or something like that. I'm not sure what that value does, but I remember something about it not doing what people think.