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Graphics Upgrading. Requesting advice.


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Posted

Hi everyone, 

I'd appreciate a word of advice in regards to Skyrim. I'm upgrading my graphics card because it's god awful and playing at 15 fps with a few not particularly intensive mods is painful. I'm not entirely sure what I wish to upgrade to. If anyone has any recommendations of graphics cards that are reasonably budget and also give a reasonable performance I'd appreciate it. In addition, I'd like to run Skyrim (when upgraded) with ENB. Does anybody know quite how intensive ENB is? It seems to have such a great boost to appearance. Basically it makes everything pretty :D.

Thanks.

 

Posted

It depends on what ENB you use some take about 15 fps but some take a whole lot more. 960's are kind of cheap they run around $230. If you can though save up about 100 bucks more for a 970 it can have 20 fps more in certain games. If you want ENBs chances are you will need something like these two. I run a 760 and I only hit average 40 fps with lower quality Enb's and the higher end ones drops it down to the 20's. In my opinion going something cheaper might not be worth it if you want quality ENB's. You could look at some of my images in my blog to see how my game looks. It's a 760 running at around 30 fps.

Posted

You need to take into account how many features you're going to run, what features you want and what ENB you expect to keep, not try out, and what resolution you're running at.

Posted

I had a single 280x 3gb and ran a moderate enb at 1920 x 1200 and had an average of 50 fps. Now I have 2 of them, run a high end enb and turned up the draw distances and increased Ugrids to 7 and still get 40 fps outside and 60 inside.

Posted

270x can run 60fps on normal skyrim with 4k textures at 1080p. It doesn't take much to run skyrim.

 

Once you add an enb like seasons of skyrim w/o dof or realvision performance version, it goes down to about high 30/low 40s outdoor. K-ENBs murder it down to low 20s. Don't even think about adding grass.

 

With 390 at 1440p, I get 40 outside with seasons enb. Moderate grasses from verdant brings it down to 30. 4k textures and parallax don't seem to affect performance graphics wise.

Posted

Wow. Thanks for all the help. And in your guy's/gal's opinions is ENB worth it? Most screenshots I've seen show a huge improvement but I'd appreciate hearing from users. Also I was wondering just how much RAM is recommended nowadays? 

Posted

Since no one mentioned it, and since Flaming didn't say his system specs. Make sure your PSU is good enough to power a high end graphics card if you do decide to upgrade.

 

As for RAM, you mean system RAM? I'd say 8GB as a minimum is good enough.

Or VRAM which I'm not very knowledgeable on, but try to get at least a 2GB card? I guess... :P

Posted

I would say ENB is worth it. I want to upgrade to a 970 just to run higher Skyrim settings even though I don't play Skyrim anymore. I only get on to take screenshots once in a while.

Posted

Since no one mentioned it, and since Flaming didn't say his system specs. Make sure your PSU is good enough to power a high end graphics card if you do decide to upgrade.

 

As for RAM, you mean system RAM? I'd say 8GB as a minimum is good enough.

Or VRAM which I'm not very knowledgeable on, but try to get at least a 2GB card? I guess... :P

Are we talking wattage with the PSU? It's 400W if so. And I've got 4GB of RAM so upgrading that looks like a cheap-ish upgrade I can make. 

Posted

 

Since no one mentioned it, and since Flaming didn't say his system specs. Make sure your PSU is good enough to power a high end graphics card if you do decide to upgrade.

 

As for RAM, you mean system RAM? I'd say 8GB as a minimum is good enough.

Or VRAM which I'm not very knowledgeable on, but try to get at least a 2GB card? I guess... :P

Are we talking wattage with the PSU? It's 400W if so. And I've got 4GB of RAM so upgrading that looks like a cheap-ish upgrade I can make. 

 

 

With a 400w psu that's going to limit how far you can upgrade, unless you get a new psu as well.

 

As you see here the 960 gtx recommeneded to you in this thread already says the *minimum* you should try to get away with is the 400w you have and the 970 gtx wants you to minimually have a 500w.

 

So smart call on llabsky's part asking about your psu.

Posted

 

 

 

With a 400w psu that's going to limit how far you can upgrade, unless you get a new psu as well.

 

As you see here the 960 gtx recommeneded to you in this thread already says the *minimum* you should try to get away with is the 400w you have and the 970 gtx wants you to minimually have a 500w.

 

So smart call on llabsky's part asking about your psu.

 

Yeah it does seem like it was great advice. I'm definitely going up in PSU, probably to 500W unless more is better and a greater amount of watts would set me up better for the future. Now obviously wattage matters but between 2 500W PSU's is there that much difference between them that I need to watch out for?

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