Well, I deleted all my mods and I jumped back into my old save game… I was getting some horrible frame rate freezes when I played last. Which, I found out, was probably caused by adding too many mods that ate my VRAM (nVidia GTX 470 with 1.25GB). So I started anew and tried to be a little more careful this time. So maybe this will help with some tips for people that have a video card that's a few years old, like mine.
Unfortunately, I think I can't run vurt's Flora Overhaul or any of the city overhauls. Combined with the rest, if just eats up too much. However, a bit win for me was turning off AA and using FXAA instead. It's cheap and saves some memory. I also didn't use any of the 2k or 4k texture packs, but installed the Bethesda Performance Textures mods and Skyrim Performance mods, that are geared towards improving performance while minimally affecting visuals.
The Skyrim Performance Monitor tools is also handy: it attaches to the Skyrim executable and shows frame rate, CPU usage and memory usage in-game, among a few other things, and shows them in a graph after you quit.
The
Guide to Performance Minded Modding gave me a lot of good ideas, while still offering an impressive list of mods to add.
Moving on, I'm a little surprised that no one mentioned any audio overhaul mods here (or maybe I missed it). I've downloaded Sounds of Skyrim and the newer Skyrim Audio Overhaul. I have yet to try the latter myself, but I've seen (or listened to) YouTube videos of it; it seems to be a little more in your face and does some interesting things with the reverb system. I look forward to trying it on my next start up.
Anyway, I'll leave my contribution to the thread with a few more mods (some I have yet to try myself) that add great content to play through that are just examples of impressive amounts of work and quality. You have to stand in awe at the dedication and passion some (groups of) people have for this kind of thing.
- Moonpath to Elsweyr
- Wyrmtooth
- Falskaar
- Civil War Overhaul
- Helgen Reborn
P.S. I think modding has always been kind of the point of The Elder Scrolls, well, at least for the last three games, anyway. Some people have spent thousands of hours building their mods, much more than the vast majority of player will ever spent actually *playing* the game. I can't fathom not making use of the vast selection of mods, carefully categorized and community-rated for your convenience. It's like playing around with Barbie's Dream House, except I feel slightly less weird after I'm done.