Not sure if serious.

Let's try this again: Because of this mod my FPS in CPU stressing situations goes up, way up (32->50 in dragonreach). Because I'm okay with anything above 30 this means for me that I can go into the init files and raise the values even higher. Understand what I'm saying now? Net result is by raising those values the FPS goes down again of course but again I don't mind anything above 30.

ED: Oh wait you're suggesting that the video settings aren't already maxed out eh? Sorry bud those were maxed a long time ago, now I'm fiddling with things like draw distances and the like and yes these things are still taxing the CPU and my GPUs are still barely getting used so its a valid trade off for me to aim in this direction.

Aye at this point I've run into the LAA wall, 4GB isn't enough I'm typically sitting at 2.6GB of vram and 1.4GB of system ram. If I push the ugrid any higher then 11/144 for instance the game won't load because between the two its trying to allocate more then 4GB total, doh! So I also agree you can add a tremendous amount of instability by blindly editing those values directly like I am but meh this is fun, I keep a good record of save games and I'm fully prepared to accept any instability I introduce through this experimentation.

So what's point of 16GB if you can't use more than 4GB?

You better give back this rig to NASA at least they can use more than 25% of it...

Well... Just because Skyrim can't allocate more than 4GB, doesn't mean other applications can't

Ramdisk Well I don't actually bother with the ramdisk anymore but I had it setup so that there was an 8GB virtual disk living in system memory and that's where Skyrim was loading from. I'll be honest I only bought the 16GB because I was building a ESXi host(a computer devoted to hosting virtual machines) out of my last gaming rig and wanted it to have 8GB which my current rig had and saw that for 90$ I could just give my current rig a new 16gb kit and trade the 8gb kit down that way.

Hm i used that on Amiga 1200 on game Frontier but diden't notice any noticable speed improvemnt no joke

Honestly this ramdisk is it really usefull? i have crappy 5400rpm + readyboost(no idea if it helps) and my loading times are 3-10 sec so if you have 1 sec congratulations.

On serious note i plan to buy SSD but with new laptop i don't see need for it now.

Any way can you post some screenshots from this cosmic rig i want to see how much you pushed ugrid...

Gotta remember with these sorts of settings *alot* of stuff is getting loaded so this is where load speed helped for sure, I'm just loading skyrim from the vertex 2 SSD at this point but it'll still take somewhere around 5-15 seconds to initially load a save game from the main menu, after that load times are much faster. Here's a random one I just took now:
http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/6439/bigloads.jpg
please keep in mind though that I had to crunch the image's quality down twice just to make imageshack host the darn thing so its suffering pretty badly, for instance there's a white tree off to the right near the center right? See that brown blob behind it? In game that's actually a mammoth roughly 10 grids out and looks quite good in-game at this distance along with his two giant tenders.

ED: Here we go another one with only one pass of jpg quality vs size reductions.
http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/6774/tesv2011123111183886.jpg
Right at roughly head level of Lydia and I and off to the right is a camp and again you can see a mammoth through the haze, that's about a full 11 grids out. Also note how far out the grass is loading along with objects in general. My grass settings are currently 28K starfade/ 56K maxstarfade and my various draw distances are 90.0 (vs ultra's 15.0)

Wow screen is amazing also you took arrow to the feet

Honestly i think it's awesome but preaty sure you watch the middle screen for 90% any way

Edit: Just noticed water looks funny like no reflections and all...

You are absolutely right, with almost all triple screen gaming you are indeed focused on the center screen most of the time and the two side ones are more peripheral vision pleasers, don't get me wrong though the level of immersion they provide is phenomenal On the water: Yah I was trying to find a nice one with some reflections but stupid time of day etc, lemmie go find a good spot for that, east of ulric's city there will do nice I think, sec.

ED, here we go:
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/4600/tesv2011123112515752.jpg

Took a while, still fighting with the water reflection tearing/flickering issue. Raising the reflection map to 2048x2048 has helped but its still a very annoying element of this engine.

Hm if it works for you great but i think it would bother me that insted of having 5760x1080 i have 3x 1920x1080 and empty spots betwean them that's why i did guess you mostly look at center screen since it's easier to concentrate on one spot.

Hm second screenshot is better and im not sure if this blob is mammoth oh well nevermind.

Any way i need to go tommorow i post screenshot and keep in mind that im not even close to ugrid 11

You get used to the bezels pretty quickly and that's also why I actually play at 5922x1080 (the extra is to draw what's 'behind the bezels'), just taking screen shots in that mode doesn't work right since its some sneaky trick of the nvidia drivers that fraps I guess can't compensate for. But yah bezels would make 2xscreen gaming a pain in the butt and that's why way back when I switched from two to three pretty quickly and haven't looked back. Ultimately I will shift to the bezelless 3x1080p projects on a big curved surface...but I don't have that much disposable income...yet

From the top of the stairs at Dragonsreach:
Vanilla Skyrim 16 - 19
Skyboost r3 25-29


A pox on the house of Bethesda! Modders make this, and all most other Bethesda games, playable.

Holy shhh....

Amazing... BTW what's your ugrid setting? I'm desperately trying to improve distance visual quality and yours is beautiful....

I'm experimenting between 10/121 and 11/144 right now. It seems I need to take inventory of the 3rd party textures at this point and take out some of more ridiculous ones to safely stay at 11x11/144. Like without any 3rd party textures but all of these settings I'm only using 1.8GB of vram in places like Whiterun but with them all in play its anywhere from 2.6 to the full 3GB occupied which is rubbing up against the amount of system ram needed to get the landscape loading further and further out (increasing the ugrid)

ED: What I did want to mention though if you haven't played with them is the three LOD settings for the distances that things load at along with the grass ones. For instance here's where I've got mine:
fGrassStartFadeDistance=28000.0000
fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=56000.0000
fGrassMinStartFadeDistance=0.0000

fLODFadeOutMultObjects=90.0000
fLODFadeOutMultItems=90.0000
fLODFadeOutMultActors=90.0000

Default ultra has the grasses at 7K start & 14K maxstart and each of those others at 15.0, I found raising those puppies gave a much fuller feel to the landscape since things are showing up much further out then traditionally. The grass I found really didn't impact much performance wise either since its basically just putting more of the same stuff out there. Still looking for a happy medium on that though, I tried pushing them to like 10x those values but it seems unless the ugrids themselves are loading further out the grass won't load (makes sense) so my focus has been pushing out the ugrids instead.

just curious if certain virtual memory settings help anything in skyrim , Im on xp and sadly have only 2 gigs of ram .right now Im using system managed size . Skyboost is giving me a nice boost in fps . Im getting 25-35 fps in whiterun and average between 30-45 outdoors , and 35-50 indoors . Im actually using a sad comp at the moment A 3.4 ghz pentium d , 2 gigs ddr2 , and a 9800 gt with 1 gb ram, Im using skyboost , enb antifreeze , a batch file to force my processors to run at high , and am using the mods , serious textures , xce , enhanced night sky , and realistic waters ,my settings in game are mainly medium except textures high and forcing 16 af through the control panel . Im using the lighter versions of the mods , but considering my comp is over 4 years old the game looks and plays great with these mods

I'd say you're already playing at about the best of that machine's abilities and it sounds like you've got a good mix of performance enhancers and settings for it too. Virtual memory in your case would be swapping out to the HDD and that's nothing but a pit of performance consumption. Shifting to 4GB of system memory would be a benefit for you but not sure it'd be worth sinking money into that computer vs just getting enough together to get a more modern one in general.
ED: Another thing you've probably got working against you if you upgraded to 4GB of system memory is bets are that XP is a 32bit and between the 1gb on your card and those you'll be wrestling with hacks and annoyances trying to get the OS itself to play nicely with the then 5gb total memory it'd have to map.

Thanks
Right now I'm using grasstartfade 14 but never changed the maxstartfade... what's the differecence between the two? And I think that I can't go beyond ugrid 7 with my poor pc unfortunately.... it's already desperate now with ugrid 5

I went down the 3x 1920x1080 24inch panel path for about 3 months and completed new vegas twice with them. It was immersive and you do get used to the bezels. The reason I ended up going from my 3 monitor setup to a single 2560x1600 u3011 monitor was because I would rather sigificantly more detail in a space I am always looking at.

Both options give me about the same framerate.

I would go for 7680x1600, but I find there is overwhelming detail @ 2560x1600 already. So my attention would still trying to wrap my head around the center screen 95% of the time.

Also, to power 7680x1600 would require about x3 7990's.

I'll be honest I haven't a freakin clue between the two I'm hazarding the first one denotes when grass is allowed to be drawn at less then its best and the second denotes when its allowed to be drawn very poorly since at that distance its not easy to spot the lesser quality. That along with many other mysterious settings are why I hang around these forums, hoping someone figures them out I just find keeping that same ratio within a family of settings has done a good job at keeping general stability intact so its mostly just guess work and trial/error

ED: If you haven't tried this mod, doooo eeet! http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3288 It edits the grass mesh and amplifies how much of it loads at each instance, end result is lush fields of grass instead of random patches of the stuff. Someone who lives in such a climate mentioned its actually less realistic to the terrain but honestly in a game with dragons and magic and stuff I think the realism of how much grass exists in the game world can take a back-seat to cooler looking terrain.

I bet strategy games are nicer on the single bigger/taller resolution too eh? I made sure these monitors I've got can do the swivel thing so when I'm playing a more overhead mappy type game I'll fiip them over to portrait and play 3240x1920 mode.

pushing the generation of draw calls higher (comes as an affect of increasing the gfx settings) increases load on the CPU. in skyrim, this is what causes ultra shadows to cause low gpu usage issues.

Off Topic:

To those just starting to experiment with uGrids, be aware, once you go past a value of 7, expect problems to arise later on in your game, it varies from user to user, seems most start experiencing problems past the 40 hour mark, I managed to get to 170 hours with a smug grin that soon got wiped off my face when I could not complete a quest because the game crashed every time I went near the quest location.

Sorry for the off topic, just thought people should be aware.

How do i install this?

what is skyrim dir?

The directory where your TESV.exe is located. It's usually "C:\Program Files\steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim" IIRC. I Moved mine and i really don't remember.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1326816-skyboost-topic-3/

close this one plz

Why don't you have a job at Bethesda? This is incredible! Fixed all the framerate issues I've had since install. Thank you!

"Do I like, give you money or something?" - Stewart Griffin