Hey,

I have checked around and can only find a little information about what uses vram on our GPU's. All I know for certain is that texture mods increase Vram usage and ugridstoload.

With tonnes of texture mods and ugridstoload=7 I have constant maxing my 1.5GB GTX 580. I am using between 1500-1536mb all the time and it causes stuttering.

I've tried using lite versions of texture packs but the vram usage remains the same. I started a new save for testing purposes and changed my ugridstoload to 5 and this reduced vram usage to around 1330mb which is about a 200mb saving and now I don't have any stuttering. However, I don't want to reduce my ugrids because then I would have to delete my old save with ugridstoload=7.

Anyone know of any other ways I can reduce vram usage?

Thanks!

Shadows and AA use a lot. 2048px textures kinda, especially if you have a lot of them. Especially if the normal map is 2048 as well.

4096 use a ton of RAM.

Also, distance objects, things like that use VRAM of course. Not sure how much, but depends on the texture and detail level. LOD uses much less, that's what its for.


What are you using to monitor VRAM?

Textures naturally uses a lot of vram, but I think that one of the easiest way to reduce vram usage is to lower AA, take a look at this:

http://www.yougamers.com/articles/13801_video_ram_-_how_much_do_you_really_need/images/oblivion_ram/

As you can see AA at high resolution can really kill your vram

Thanks for the help.

I use MSI Afterburner OSD.

I believe that there's a method to follow in order to change the ugrid setting within save files so you don't have to start fresh. I've seen others do this constantly on the boards but I don't have any direct info. Just a heads up that you might want to look a bit further into that instead of out-right dismissing it as a possibility.

This is great.

I was using combined 32xS (2x2 SS by 8 MS), but now reduced it to 8xS (1x2 SS by 4 MS). Game feels a lot smoother but the vram is still maxed. Seems like I have too many texture mods.

Can I recommend to not user super sampling in any combination and just resort to the others? SS is the most memory intensive of all the AA methods and by a very large margin. SS's method is to draw the frame literally 'x*x' larger then your real resolution and then downscale, so a 1080p means 1080x1920x32bits or 8MB/frame roughly is now 2160x3840x32 or 33MB of vram at even 2x2SS settings). So like yah 2x2 isn't 'brutal' when you're talking about having a gig and a half of vram but even that starts to get a hurtin' if you head into 4x2 or 4x4 turf.

Btw unless you're doing the watching within the first few minutes of playing you may not get an accurate 'this is how much skyrim needs' vs 'this is how much skyrim is just going to leave in there since there's room and it might need it again'. To get the best ideas of current wants you'll pretty much need to enter/exit the game in various spots and see how much it allocates then and there before you move around too much. I'll also join in on how the 4096x4096 textures are just a big hit to vram usage vs their ability to make things nicer looking then a 2048x2048, to each their own though but each of those is going to add in the same sort of exponentially higher need for memory vs the step down in resolution's equivilant. I don't even bother with most of the 4096x4096 except for a few rare ones that I can't resist (that latest rock one is pretty sweet looking, I must say). Some tricks as well is using the negative AF LOD bias to force some detail out of the textures that the game does not normally show without needing to resort to higher resolution textures themselves, you can do this through the Nvidia Inspector tool's profile for Skyrim, even at -.5 its quite a difference.

The move from ugrids 5 to 7 is a pretty big impact. For me, about 10fps on average, and that's with a 64fps cap. And that's on an oc'd 590. Along with Bumps recommendations (which are dead on), I would take a serious look at the ugrids 5-7 difference, and ask whether it is worth the push into stutter-ville, or at the least if it eats up too much headroom for other goodies. For me, I run ugrids default, but push my grass view/fade distance further...alot less cost, not quite as good, but adequate to fool my eye during actual gameplay.

These things use vram

FSAA (the higher the FSAA.. the more vram used)
Textures (larger textures uses more vram, and more textures use more vram obviously)
Geometry Data (more objects to draw... more vram.. although this information generally isn't to large)
Buffers (triple buffering uses a lot)
Display Resolution, the larger the resolution, the more vram used.

Ugrids has a huge impact on vram usage because it has to draw/load textures that may not be used in one grid vs another grid.... and it's an exponential value.... every ugrids value higher than the previous increases the amount of detail/stuff to run by a big factor.

You can convert a save from any larger ugrids to a smaller one so you don't have to start from scratch again...

Math lesson alert.

Why would it be an exponential increase with uGridsToLoad. It is a power 2 increase, because uGridsToLoad = 7 means a square of 7 grids in x and 7 grids in y direction, giving you a total of 49 grids in memory. The deault uGridsToLoad = 5 require 25 grids in memory. Since each grid is roughly going to be about the same, a 40% increase in uGridsToLoad over default results in a 96% increase in the amount of memory needed for this data over default (because 1.4² = 1.96). An exponetial increase woud be e^1.4= 4.06, which would be a 306% increase in required memory with a 40% increase in uGridsToLoad over default.

You can revert your uGrids to a smaller size. Check out the link below and scroll down to near the bottom of the first post, to where you see "HOW TO REVERT A SAVE/GAME TO A PREVIOUS/LOWER UGRIDSTOLOAD VALUE"

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1274926-ugridstoload-skyrimini-comparisons-and-explanation-default-57911/

You misunderstood what i ment..

what i ment is that for every jump in ugrids you make... makes a significantly higher amount of data/stuff to draw for the video card and for the computer to calculate..

while the ugrids is a squared result... the increase is fundamentally larger each step (obviously). I was using expontential loosely not entirely litterally.

Thank you!