Getting a GTX 970 4GB soon and was wondering if 4GB is enough for heavy modding in skyrim, and please let me know what graphics card you have, how much vram is on your card, and what is your performance like with skyrim mods and/or any other games that you mod, whether it is heavy modding or light modding.
And I also was wondering if this is how vram works: if a graphics card has 4GB of vram, the game will use up however much vram it needs to run and whatever amount is left over is what can be used for modding. Am I right with this?
My specs:
i7 4770k @3.5GHz (overclocking soon)
ASUS Sabertooth Z87
ADATA XPG 16GB @1866MHz
128GB ADATA SX900 SSD & WD Black 1TB HDD
Seasonic 750W
1080p TV
Skyrim literally can't handle more than 4gb of vram usage, last time that I checked. It crashed when the game tries to use more than that, regardless of how much ram you have left over. That said, there is a possibility that it has since been fixed via a patch or some mod which allows for more ram usage. It has been a while since I have been in the skyrim mod scene.
EDIT: Forgot to address your other question. Any video game will use whatever resources it needs. If you are playing minesweeper, it isn't going to use much of anything. If you are using Crysis 3, it will use a ton. With the Skyrim modding thing, the mods just change what the game is doing. So if you have a texture mod, it replaces the textures in the game with the ones in the mod. If the next textures are higher res, then the game will require more vram to store them all. The game then (theoretically, but the efficiency of this various from game to game) swaps out the textures stored in teh vram as needed. You don't really need the textures of a wall that is a mile away from where you are, but when you get to it, you need it, so the game swaps in and out what it has stored based on need. That is all affected by draw distance and can lead to texture pop/pop in if done poorly by the game. So, yeah. The more you know.
Thanks for clearing that up, everything makes a lot more sense now.
Im pretty sure there is a mod that fixes that restriction.
Considering the amount of mods there are for Skyrim, I would be shocked if there wasn't one by now.
You shouldnt have any vram problems with 4 gb at 1080p.
I have 200 mods installed and my vram usage stays around 2 gb with a 3 gb 280x at 1440p.
With workshop mods its still 60 fps pretty much all the time, if I go crazy with the ENB mod It can go down to the high 20s