TES Skyrim 0.155

[ENBSeries]

Unreal Warfare
Wolfstryder
Skyrim cpu benchmarks:
http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyr ... page7.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... 120-3.html
With increased details (iugrid... something) this difference will be even bigger. Anyway you know my opinion and modified game is not the same as standart modern games, which are optimized against bottlenecks.

ishmaeltheforsaken
Better to stay with idea to draw big object in zero position of world space, spawning it in each location, because such object will be rendered always at any camera rotation/position and less pain with camera position. I'll send you pm with my icq number later, if you accept development of such mod (not give it everybody, because in the past gtasa players bothered me via icq).

[ishmaeltheforsaken]

The shader particle geometry idea might work better, actually. I took a look at it, and the script object is pretty simple and it would be easy to apply an invisible one as soon as the game loads.

It would be possible to place an object at arbitrary coordinates every time the player enters a new level, but since in exterior zones only five cells are loaded at any given time, I'm not sure if it would be possible to have access to an object at 0,0,0 at all times.

[far327]

Haha, I knew you'd follow up on an ATi discussion :p Gotta defend your keep right?

Not really about defending anything. I'm only loyal to my wallet. AMD or Nvidia won't pay my bills, or save my house from burning down.

I simply speak from user experience, having owned a R7950 and knowing what they can do. I can run my ENB profile, with max settings (bar AA and AF which is handled by ENB), and 2k textures and not have any performance issues. Considering the amount of mods I run the R7950 deserves my recommendation. I'm pretty confident with more moderation in what I'm running I could downsample as well and still have good performance.

Sure you could argue that you don't need as much moderation with a Titan but it's a lot of money for one videogame.

It's also worth noting I run the same CPU as Wolfstryder as well (I also own a HD6870) and I think the Titan would be seriously bottlenecked by the AMD 965 BE if I'm quite honest. You really need a decent Intel CPU with that Titan to get the most out of the system. He should also get that AMD CPU up to 4ghz.

BTW UW, your blog is top notch! I need to spruce mine up a bit.

Thanks. Glad you're enjoying it.

It's true, I only play Skyrim.. LOL!! How did you know this??? Is it that obvious?

Regarding my CPU, I have a sandybridge i7 2600k. The beautiful thing about sandy bridge, they overclock like CRAZY! - 4.8ghz on air. 45c on load. Just AMAZING CPUs

Not sure if a newer cpu would do much better. I was under the impression ivy bridge intel chips didn't OC as well.

[ENBSeries]

ishmaeltheforsaken
Visibility of the object doesn't matter, because it can be achieved by several ways (model or material properties) even if enbseries not installed, but with it such object will not be drawed at all. Particle systems (rain f.e.) in center of the world will not be visible probably, because even scaled in thousands of times to make bigger bounding box (so camera always inside it) such particles may be internally optimized by engine for not drawing each quad if it's out of camera frustum, better to test this. And for such case placing at camera may be an option, but only if such particle system is strictly world aligned (only position changes as camera position) or it's exactly like camera by directions and positions. Any kind of billboard transforms are useless, of course for entire object, not each quad of it, if batched by engine to single mesh.

[Unreal Warfare]

Unreal Warfare
Wolfstryder
Skyrim cpu benchmarks:
http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyr ... page7.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gam ... 120-3.html
With increased details (iugrid... something) this difference will be even bigger. Anyway you know my opinion and modified game is not the same as standart modern games, which are optimized against bottlenecks.

Indeed.

These do show however that the performance increase by upgrading the GPU, assuming the overclock is done on his 965BE, will be bigger. On average you're looking at about a 10fps increase by upgrading the CPU, while a 30fps increase while upgrading the GPU.

An ideal upgrade would be both (I know my next upgrade I'm looking at an Intel CPU and a Sabretooth) but really it all boils down to what he wants to spend his money on really. Overall I think GPU, overall you think CPU, best would be both, realistically he won't lose out on upgrading either.

One thing he should do is start over locking that CPU though!

[ENBSeries]

Expected performance increase compared to his HD5870 will be about 1.6 times (as i see from benchmarks, but in skyrim modded can be higher, at least with nvidia, it's architecture changed much more than hd5xxx vs hd7xxx). But even now hd5970 not running at full speed (depends from quality options of the mod, display resolution, so hard to say for sure) because of cpu. And upgrading cpu is much better because it's same over many years, no progress, but videocard upgrade is better by money when it's a bit lower price than high end models. Each 1.5 year new models appear on market, games scales accordingly, so buying monsters like Titan will help only at nearest 1-2 years only, but the money lost. How many cool games which require very powerful videocard appear each year? Huh, you better go back from heaven on earth.

[Wolfstryder]

I appreciate all the heavy discussion on the topic I begun. I never expected it to go this far. I really do appreciated it, especially since it does involve spending ~$289 or ~$399 x2 computers I'm upgrading. (Two of us here in the house gaming.) I see that some feel the GPU may be more important and the CPU may be more important but when it comes down to it I'm probably not going to rip out the MOBO and chip any time soon so the video card upgrade is my best option. So when I narrow down my options I have come to the conclusion that choosing a Radeon 7870 is a waste of time and money. So, I'm left with choosing either a 7950 or a 7970. For the price/performance ratio and for the fact I have to upgrade two computers I'm leaning towards the 7950. I just want to make sure I'm not wasting my money when I could go ahead and spend the extra money now and future proof a bit more.

Any agree on my final choice of 7950? I am still leaning with Sapphire since I have them in my rigs atm and they haven't blown up on me like XFX have in the past. Or is MSI the better choice?

P.S. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 with a AM3 socket. If it could take a AM3+ I wouldn't hesitate dropping $199 and buying a 8 socket 4.0(4.2ghz turbo) Vishera and we wouldn't have to worry about a bottleneck . (unless there is some BIOS flash I don't know about)

[Unreal Warfare]

Any agree on my final choice of 7950? I am still leaning with Sapphire since I have them in my rigs atm and they haven't blown up on me like XFX have in the past. Or is MSI the better choice?

In regards to the R7950/R7970, it really depends on if you want to overclock. The MSI Twin Frozr III and Sapphire Vapor X have great cooling for overclocking and in general you should be able to hit 1ghz easily with them. If you just want R7970 performance you can overclock the R7950 and get that out of it plus a little more. If you want to stick with stock and never overclock then just get the R7970, though I think with the right tweaking the R7950 is a good choice. If you go with a MSI or Sapphire R7950 double check with the vendor whether it has an 8 pin + 6 pin socket. This indicates it has a R7970 PCB and is better for overclocking it and BIOS switching.

I would definitely steer well away from the XFX R7000's. The cooling on them isn't as good as they advertise, and I had to send back two within two weeks due to faults.

[ENBSeries]

Don't buy 7970, it's price too high and performance only 10-15% better. Also it's one of the most hottest from all videocards and most loud. Better check benchmark results from various games with and without antialiasing enabled, difference may be huge. I saw on the overclockers web site than gtx670 is faster than hd7970 "in many games", but it's depends from many things, try to find tests runned with amd cpu to compare which are faster.
Vishera have absolutely the same bottleneck (and it's same old amd with higher freq), it's almost not scales from cpu frequency on amd after 3 ghz, the problem in not in cp itsef, but the platform cpu->motherboard->pci-e, the commands flow is much slower than on intel. Google "draw calls bottleneck", it's huge pain in the ass of developers (most real time strategy games suffer from it).

[Leareynl]

Hey all,

Just wanted to say, in my first post on this forum to Boris : Thank you for your awesomeness! and I hope to see a new Skyrim ENB version to play with soon

And for the HD7970, I love this card! best buy I ever did... well... next to the I7-2600K that is.
The dual bios has saved my card from being bricked twice already.
The difference between the 7950 and 7970 might not be so much at first glance.

Both of them are OC-monsters and with huge impact on performance when OC-ed.
Imo HD7970 if you got the cash for it, you can push a 7970 further than a 7950 because the cooler is usually better at handling the 250/300 watts of heat generated.
You already get a very good bang for your buck with picking 79X0.. You can't really go wrong

And if you want to push the 7970 further, there are good aftermarket coolers out there atm (Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 for example)