Why people get Ultra to work on 1 GB Vram cards in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Chande]

I remember reading complaints in regard to texture quality, and one of the things I remember seeing is people stating they were using SLI 285's, 560's and the ATI equivalent. On my rig Vram usage has peaked at 1.4g, and is mostly above 1g. Is Skyrim letting people pick the ultra option, but it is not actually applying if they do not have enough vram? Is it applying it and trying to use more memory than what’s available? Could that be the source of some of these CTD's we are seeing?

[LotusN]

Just because the game uses 1.4GB on ultra doesn’t mean it have to, most games swap data between your RAM and the VRAM. I don’t see why this game would need to use that much VRAM either the texture quality and surfaces aint much different from Oblivion and doesn't look to require much more either. I am on Radeon 5870 1GB, Running game on Ultra 1920x1200 40-60 FPS no problem.

[AlisaDsa]

The Ultra settings aren't even that, ultra. I am sure this game won't use up to 1 GB VRAM on my system even if they fix the shadow problems to go to VRAM instead of CPU (If that's even possible to them to fix). Why? Because there are games with much better textures, and I mean much better, with tessellation, better HDR, better shadows and run on my system on Ultra no problem at all.

[Mollyi7]

The game is buggy in SLI as well. Most of the time I just disable it. I will get flashes on the screen and monster will be doing the dubstep. Disabling SLI fixes it. Ty for the input all I was curious. It’s only outside when my vram reaches 1400, and I doubt it’s due to data being swapped between the RAM and VRAM (I am not sure that’s how Vram usage works). In those scenes where I am getting that kind of usage the games looks amazing. Someone compared it to Oblivion earlier in this thread in regards to looks, and I have to disagree completely. Shadows and character models are done badly as per me, but the world itself looks great. If you want to center your focus on some bad textures. There are times where I am getting full usage on my SLI setup and I only get 80 frames, which shows me sometimes the game works the way it should, but most of the time it’s very unoptimized.

[Orochimaru]

This may be true, but shadows I have found are one of the most taxing items. I reset my Prefs file and set it to Ultra, turned on uGrid value of 7. At this one particular spot I get 45 FPS. If I just turn shadows from Ultra to High, 60 FPS. I cannot seem to find the right balance in Decent looking shadows and no FPS hit and it's driving me nuts.

[VazV]

The amount of ram on a card is not an indicator of a fast card. A lot of modern GPUs have lots of Vram but an incompatible memory bus i.e. a card with 2 gigs of ram but it only has a 256 bit interface rendering most of the ram redundant (buffering accepted). I find core clock and shader speeds to be of more importance. The number of pipes is important too.

[Jung]

I got the very same setup but 5870 and two HDDs, yet i get really bad visual lag even at 60fps (which i obviously don’t have in towns, more like 30), maybe it’s the resolution indeed, I am playing at 1920x1080 and all those people that have no problems seem to be using somin lower. Got to try, maybe Skyrim has a problem with 1080p; the console versions on which the whole thing is obviously based don’t support it, only 720p, maybe some coder somewhere in a dark corner of Beth’s dungeon forgot to implement somin about that very resolution.

[Nimos]

When I first ran Skyrim it recommended Ultra High for my settings based on my hardware. That mostly worked out for me. The only thing I've changed from Ultra High settings is to turn shadows to low and to turn on FXAA instead of regular AA. I run just fine, around 40fps. I'm quite confused as to why people with CPUs overclocked beyond 4.0 GHz, 8 GB RAM, and dual GPUs are having so much trouble.