Is VRAM holding me back?[Skyrim MOD]

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BrokeGamerTom

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May 22, 2015
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I have an hold GTX 650 with 2GB VRAM. I have a mod that increases the amount of trees, grass etc on a town. I have noticed that this dropped my frame rates from a solid 75 to crawling around 15. However, when I have rivatuner on, in order to see the usage, the usage stays very low, we are talking about 41-50%. This made me conclude that the texture for the grasses are too much for the graphics card to hold in it's 2GB vram? If it was the case that the 650 was near 100% load I would assume that it is struggling to out as many frames. Or is it simply that the mod was un-optimized some how?
 
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Solandri

Increasing the number of objects around a town will kill your framerate regardless. you're increasing the number of triangles the GPU has to render each frame. Buildings with their flat walls are easy since it's basically two triangles to make a rectangle. A complex organic form like grass and require hundreds or even thousands of triangles, especially if you want it to wave in the wind realistically. I've even seen some mods where the model-maker went to ridiculous extremes and gave a bush nearly 100,000 triangles. Dial it back. Either use simpler models (if you're using a mod which replaces the grass and tree models), or reduce the amount of grass and...
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MART3R

MART3R

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Sep 26, 2016
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It is possible that you dont have enough VRAM, only having 2Gbs. I suggest you download a small hardware monitoring program that can check if it is at it's max, for example; MSI Afterburner can monitor that & your CPU and GPU usages.
What also seems likely is that the mods you installed are completely CPU intensive and are too much for it, causing your GPU to be bottlenecked by your CPU.

Whatever the case may be, both those possibilities cant be fixed without purchasing new hardware. Meaning, unfortunately, that those mods are too much for your computer to handle and will have to be disabled.

I hope this helps, good luck.
 
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BrokeGamerTom

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May 22, 2015
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Yea, I was using MSI Afterburner, I mentioned it as "rivatuner" sorry, but It shows that both CPU and GPU is really low usage. Cpu usage never exceed 60-70% whether the mod is on or not. I would like to believe that it has minimal to no effect on CPU.
 
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MART3R

MART3R

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Sep 26, 2016
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Gotchya, well in the Afterburner settings, under "monitoring" there is an option to view your graphics card's VRAM usage. Take a look and see if it maxes out during gameplay.
If I remember my days of modding skyrim, the authors implemented low VRAM usage options of their graphics mods. Im not sure if they do that anymore or if your specific author went through the trouble, but take a look.

I doubt itll make a huge improvement, but you might also try telling your graphics card to run at full power:
To change this setting, with your mouse, right-click over the Windows desktop and select "NVIDIA Control Panel"
-> from the NVIDIA Control Panel, select the "Manage 3D settings" from the left column
-> click on the Power management mode drop down box and select "Prefer Maximum Performance"

You can also tell your cpu it is allowed to use full power by going into control panel under the Power Options and setting it to High performance.
*Both these tweaks are safe and are NOT overclocking*

Again, good luck.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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Increasing the number of objects around a town will kill your framerate regardless. you're increasing the number of triangles the GPU has to render each frame. Buildings with their flat walls are easy since it's basically two triangles to make a rectangle. A complex organic form like grass and require hundreds or even thousands of triangles, especially if you want it to wave in the wind realistically. I've even seen some mods where the model-maker went to ridiculous extremes and gave a bush nearly 100,000 triangles. Dial it back. Either use simpler models (if you're using a mod which replaces the grass and tree models), or reduce the amount of grass and trees. As a compromise, you can reduce the distance at which grass is rendered, but that has the unrealistic side-effect of grass "popping into existence" as you get close to it.

The texture size won't really matter in that case because the textures are stored in memory just once. Every object using the same texture simply has the texture "painted" onto it every time a frame is rendered. So it's the number of triangles which need to be rendered (painted with a texture) that matters, not the size of the textures. Texture size only becomes a problem when you have so many different high-res textures loaded that you run out of VRAM. That problem is independent of the number of times a texture is used in a frame.

Also, which version of Skyrim and how many mods do you have installed? The original Skyrim was 32-bit so was limited to 4 GB of system memory. I've seen also seen slowdowns both due to running out of VRAM, or running out of system RAM. If you have a lot of mods installed, there's a lot of esoteric tweaking of the Skyrim config files you have to do to work around (optimize really) the RAM limitation.

Skyrim Special Edition is 64-bit, but that has proven to be also be a drawback. One of the biggest mods out there (SKSE) hasn't yet been ported to 64-bit. Thousands of mods, including about half the top mods, require SKSE so they will not work with Skyrim Special Edition.
 
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