with the new nvidia 680, what kind of performance are you guys getting framerate wise? Can you run the new texture pack at full settings at a rock solid 60fps?

Skyrim isn't really a game for GPU benchmarks. Your performance will heavily depend on your CPU and RAM, and will constantly change depending on where you are (cities, large battles, forests).

The short answer is yes.
It's a beast! And very heat/power/noise efficient, too...
Adaptive Vsync will switch off the Vsync if frames fall below 60, anyway.
nVidia rocks.

i just installed my 680 today and i couldn't be more pleased. all the hotspots and areas that made my old card (6970) struggle have vanished completly. i haven't even begun tweaking really, but already i can see that skyrim performance isn't an issue. the card is tremendous.

The only thing that someone should worry about when it comes to skyrim is the single-core performance of their CPU.

If you want to compare your system and it's performance to other gaming rigs then run 3dmark.

I bought a gtx680 the day it was released. I am very happy. If you can afford the 500 euros/dollars, it is a very good deal, imho. Especially for Skyrim.

To run Skyrim with a lot of texturepacks and other graphical mods, your videocard needs to have a lot of video-ram (vram). Most mid-price videocards have 1GB of vram. Budget cards have even less. 1GB is enough to run vanilla Skyrim, with a few mods. But probably not enough for the official texture-pack or fan-made large texture packs. So you want more than 1GB.

AMD cards tend to have a bit more vram, compared to equally priced nVidia cards. Unfortunately the AMD cards run a little slower on average (10-25%) in some games, compared to nVidia cards in the same price range. For some games, but Skyrim is one of those games.

The gtx680 is very fast. The fastest card there is (single GPU, non-CF/SLI, before someone starts to nag).
And it has 2GB of vram. Enough to run Skyrim with any mod or texture-pack you want.

Now how fast is the gtx680 ?
That depends on other factors. Indeed, how fast is your CPU ? How much eyecandy do you enable ? Do you care about never dropping under 60 dps ?

I'll give you my own example.
I had a gtx260 videocard. That card has about 1/3rd the power of a gtx680. And a E8500 cpu (2 cores, 3.1GHz). It was 3-4 years old. It ran vanilla Skyrim fine. 1920x1200, 4xMSAA, 16xAF, high settings, some small texture packs (water, Vurt's). Average fps was 30-40. Fps at the stairs in Whiterun was 24 fps. Indoors often hitting 60 fps.

Then I upgraded my videocard to a gtx680. My fps increased by 50% or more. So I got 35ish or so fps at the stairs in Whiterun. Fps in Markath and Riften went up as well. But I expected my rig to be "cpu limited". So I started to enable more eyecandy features. Features that make the videocard work harder, but that didn't depend on the CPU. I now use 8xMSAA, plus 4xSSAA Transparency, very high SSAO (Ambient Occlusion, I love that now), Ultra settings, official high-res texture pack, and a few more graphical mods. My fps dropped in Whiterun dropped from 35 to 32. But the graphics quality (the eyecandy) increased really a lot. My game looks beautiful now.

I checked the load on CPU and GPU (with a tool called nvidia inspector). I saw both my CPU and GPU running at close to 100%. That means that my old E8500 is able to drive the gtx680 to work at it hardest. Next week I will buy a new CPU (an i5-3570K), and I expect my framerates to go up a bit, of course. But the bulk of the work is being done by the gtx680.

That is only true if you run Skyrim with very little eyecandy, you care about absolute framerates, and have a low-resolution monitor.

If you have a 1080p monitor, you want to run with high Anti-Alias settings, install the official texture pack, install a bunch of mods, use SSAO (Ambient Occlusion, I love it now), etc. Then the performance also matters.

I use a gtx680. See my post above. My E8500 is able to drive my gtx680. But only if I enable lots of eyecandy. The E8500 of course does have decent single core performance. But still, Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge cpu are 50%ish faster, I expect. I will be able to tell you the impact of a faster CPU next week, when I upgrade to a i5-3570K.

Videocards are much more important than CPU for games. Even for Skyrim. In the first months, Skyrim was ridiculously taxing on CPUs. But since the patch that included the recompiled exe (with optimization), the dependancy on CPUs is a lot less.

Thanks for the replies and good discussion guys

http://www.gamesas.com/user/739724-gryz/

What you say about the VRAM being important is very very true. That is why I feel 2GB is not future proof enough....I want to wait until the 4GB version of the GTX680 comes out. 4Gb IMO is the ticket to making sure i can run these games will the latest texture packs etc. I might even be able to run GTAIV with the ICENhancer mod at 60fps

i beleive that you are correct here. iv'e already seen that i can hit the vram limit with little difficulty. i can run the card with 8x msaa, 4xssaa on transparencies, 4096 shadows, highest ingame settings basically, but that puts you at the cap right of the bat in certain areas of the game. 4gb is going to be preferable for sure if you can handle the waiting game.

Personally I was thinking about getting a 3gb 580 but if there is a 4gb coming soon I will probably wait it out. Any idea how long of a wait it will be?

Nobody knows. Yesterday nVidia made a new product announcement. People had hoped it would be "the big kepler" (the real high-end card with a huge GPU in it). Or the cheaper gtx660 or gtx670. It was not. It was the announcement for the new gtx690. Which is basically 2 gtx680 chips on one card. I suppose that also means than nVidia's next announcement is at least a month off. Or more. Or maybe manufacturers might release a 4GB gtx680 by themselves. Nvidia themselves don't need to be involved there. But fact is: nobody knows when a 4GB gtx680 will be here.

The AMD7970 has 3GB vram. That might be an option. (But for Skyrim, the gtx680 is really better).

I checked my vram-usage a while ago. I was in Whiterun, Riften and Markath. It seemed my vram usage was stable at 1.5-1.6GB. For me that means I have a little headroom to use more mods. It doesn't even mean I am close to the 2GB limit. It might be that the Skyrim engine (or the drivers) will start freeing vram more aggressively. As long as there is no thrashing between ram and vram, that's fine with me.

Skyrim is one of the game that requires the most vram currently. At least, that is my belief. Because you can keep installing more and more texture mods. And because it's an open world game. And still it fits in 2GB of vram. Therefor I think I am safe for the next 2 years. Usually people that need a lot of vram are people running 2560x1600 or people with multi-monitor setups. I am happy with my 2GB at the moment. But if you can wait 1 or more months, and if indeed there will be a 4GB gtx680, then it might indeed be smart to wait a bit. Your decision.

Last remark: I would not consider getting a gtx580 now. 20-25% slower than a gtx680. Still not cheap, it seems. (400-450 Euros in my country, compared to 480-500 for the gtx680). And runs a lot hotter and makes more noise. Noise is important for me.

They're already here. Both Gainward and Palit have them.