I downloaded the new texture pack expecting a bit of an FPS hit, not too much because I had seen the screenshots and while it was definitely an improvement, it didn't look like anything huge.

I run at 1920*1080 usually with AA on between 4-12 samples depending. before the HD pack I was using 989MB of VRAM with those settings. After installing the HD pack it jumped to over 1900MB used, which I don't have.

It is beautiful, but unfortunately, even with $320 worth of video cards and a system specced well above the recommended values, The performance is just too poor to leave it installed.

really a shame.

**EDIT**

Disabling crossfire resolved the vram issue, not sure how to explain that as far as I know this is just a texture pack, don't see how textures would interact with CF to cause that, but there you have it.

Runs fine on my system. Not a difference in performance whatsoever. You're using larger textures and then complaining about their size? Take your pick.

1900MB of VRAM? Well that's not right. Make sure you haven't got any extra texture mods being used or you could be just hitting a bug or some SLI issue.

My complaint is that their HD texture pack uses almost twice the VRAM that they recommend.

What video card(s) are you using?

No other texture mods at all, I'll try disabling crossfire just for giggles.

According to MSI Afterburner, I'm using between 850MB-1010MB of VRAM, depending on where I go. This is on a GTX460 1GB.

I stand corrected, disabled crossfire with the pack installed and vram use dropped to 976MB... don't really understand how a texture pack could interact with CF in such a way that it would cause more VRAM to be used. very odd indeed.

I don't know about CrossFire, as I've never owned a Radeon, but the VRAM on a second card in an Nvidia SLI setup is merely a mirror of the first card - they are not additive. If the same is true of CrossFire, then the VRAM usage could just be doubling up.

Also, if you have uGrids at 7 or higher, it will consume more VRAM assuming you've set the "uExterior Cell Buffer" to the value appropriate to the uGrids setting you've chosen. Third party texture mods also aren't terribly optimized - at least none of the ones I've looked at.

I have 6870 1GB Hawk in crossfire and game runs fine in Ultra 1920x1080 FOV 90 at 60FPS all the time besides bugged zones like stairs to Dragonsreach in Whiterun using 12.12 drivers

Since you're utilizing a dual GPU configuration, keep in mind that the textures are loaded into both your cards, before being processed. So, if 976MBs are loaded into GPU1, the same amount will be loaded into GPU2, hence the 1952MB in total, you're looking at.

Yeah lol i was to reply that to OP when i read that it wasn't "normal".. anyhow mine uses 1200MB to 1900MB most of the time without the HD pack.

At 1920x1080 I seem to use about 1900MB of VRAM. At 5760x1080 I use about 2900MB of it. Seems reasonable, I get near 60FPS constantly.

Textures are just textures. They can't be efficient or inefficient

Using the wrong resolution textures could be inefficient, but I think graphics routines scale things so well it's probably not an issue. Then it's just a question of hardware.

True but the memory allocation algorithms can be inefficient leading to memory usage bloat.

I've got a better card than yours and I'm having issues. Bloody steam, wish they got their network right. Redownloading to see if it's the integerity of the downloads.

None of which is controlled bye the textures themselves.