SMIM System Requirements

[Royleston]

Hello there,

I usually stuck to QoL when it came to modding SSE, but since me having a little bit of time to spare I want to get myself invested into improving the visuals of this game.

I am a bloody starter in regards to that topic, so here is my problem: I wanted to improve those meshes and (of course) I am installing SMIM for that, but I do not want to run in blindly to see what of those options I can select will stick.

I am a Full-HD player and of course I know the difference between texture resolution and screen resolution, but honestly I am not sure about those hunderds of thousands of polycounts I can add.

My question is, if somebody within the community has made the effort of creating somewhat of a spreadsheet to determine the ideal choices 4k, 2k and HD players can make and what estimated system requirements are connected to it.

I know the OG SMIM is more than ten years old so it can not be that much of an issue, but if there is someone who already crunched those numbers without me unnecessarily fiddling around and messing up the game in the process, that would be nice.

Anyway thanks in advance.

[Foxtrot39]

well im using a GTX 3060 (12gb Vram) 32Gb RAM and a i7-11700KF 3.60GHz (16 CPUs)

Unless I run mods like Jk city rework I don't really see any dip for SMIM alone

[-={LG}=-]

I don't think you'll need anything above 2k for a 1080p display. I haven't done any spreadsheets, that's just my opinion.

[matt]

SMIM shouldn't affect performance in any noticeable way.

With texture mods, as long as you don't run out of VRAM, it shouldn't matter. Just keep adding high resolution textures until you see your VRAM dipping low. With probably somewhere around 50% of the textures replaced with 4k versions, Skyrim used 6GB VRAM at 2560x1440. This was mostly just creatures, clutter, and architecture.

I installed another batch of 4k texture replacers that was mostly landscape, more clutter, armor, and weapons. By this point, I would guess I replaced 80% of all textures. To conserve VRAM, I didn't install any skin/hair/body/etc mods. Skyrim typically used 10GB VRAM. Peak usage, in scenes where there was lots of clutter or enemies, was closer to 12GB at 2560x1440.

I don't think I tried running modded Skyrim at 3840x2160. Maybe I'll try it later, after I reinstall the game and redo my mods. However, heavily modded Fallout 4 used 14-16GB VRAM at 3840x2160. That was with several performance-killing tweaks, though, so it'd probably be less crazy for other people.

Running out of VRAM is bad. Your GPU will try to use RAM instead, and that will kill performance. What I did was run a program my second display to monitor my VRAM usage. I see no point in VRAM that isn't being used, so I was a bit extravagant with the number of mods I installed.

[SpeedFreak1972]

I mean I run smim for YEARS on several pc's and never had an issue. Last pc was an I7 4790 GTX1080 and 16 GB ram and it ran fine and that was with hundreds of mods and textures installed