Recommended mods for my rig

[NoOne[PH]]

Hello. Would like to know which mods I could run on my rig to make the game a little more "current". My rig is: an i5 - 6600 (non K), msi gtx 1060 6gb gaming, and 16gb RAM. Much appreciated folks!

[mikk011]

You can actually accomplish quite a lot with that (your setup is fairly similar to what I was running a few years ago). Generalizing, don't use an enb, 4k+ textures, dense settings on grass/vegetation mods, mods that greatly increase the number of npcs on-screen at any one time, some of the more performance-heavy tree mods, and skip body/clothes/hair physics (especially smp physics). Beyond that, just read the modpages carefully and use some caution and you can mod your game fairly extensively. Add mods one at a time and test for correct function and performance impact and you should be pretty safe.

[UsernameTaken666]

Your "rig" can handle ALL the mods!

[NoOne[PH]]

Do I need to "remaster" Skyrim SE? Or, what are essential mods that I should get? Thanks for the prior replies! :)

[CEPHY]

I used to have a similar rig once.

I'd say you can run just about any mods out there, except for the high-end ENB presets and outfits that have a hundred physics bones in them. Those two would cripple your framerate.

As for mods that you "should" get, I'd say Community Shaders. It's a newer alternative for ENB that runs a lot smoother in my experience. Perhaps some texture replacers for a facelift of the game world. Pfusher's 202X works great for that, though I highly recommend you'd stick with the 1-2K texture variant, as the default 4K would be a problem with that 1060.

[Bad Distraction Carnifex]

Originally posted by UsernameTaken666:

Your "rig" can handle ALL the mods!

Not really but they can do some minimal modding ezpz

[Bad Distraction Carnifex]

I'd suggest using Gates to Sovengarde, it's a collection aimed at lower end rigs like yours.

[Shadow Wizard Fluffy Gang]

As long as you don't buy into the 4k and above gimmick, you should be fine, 2k is plenty!
Unless you have a massive screen, it's really not going to be noticeable, especially those 8k ladles lol

[NoOne[PH]]

I'm just staying on Special Edition, so if there's a collection of mods aimed at lower rigs like mine that you could recommend, I'd greatly appreciate that. Cheers!

[Death Approaches]

16GB RAM is more limiting than your 6GB VRAM, but the horsepower of a 1060 won't tolerate complete sets of 4k complex parallax textures and community shaders or reshade+ENBseries with everything cranked up to 11 / full resolution; you'll be in the 40s at 1080 and you don't want to know at 4k, and in complex scenes with many nested shaders, volumetrics/atmospherics, crepuscular rays, clouds casting shadows, ambient occlusion and global illumination, etc. all the stuff you think "make it look current" can drop you into the 20s... so can reshade ENBs too, that's really a preference more than which is more efficient, community shaders just works within the game via .dll injection, the others are hybrid, but essentially do simliar stuff - if you're after collections, watch gameplay videos to see which you like the style of better, and go with one that uses that replacement shader setup, both are tunable for speed at the sacrifice of quality, same as vanilla detail settings levels do.

if you want collections, read about the collections, they usually list minimum requirements. and what's required for what settings... my meager ~440 mod loadout is hovering around 22GB resident but spikes to 24GB but eventually releases that mem and drops back to 22, depending. which exceeds your possibility, but a much larger modset, near 2000, takes up just over 17GB... still out of your range, even if you clean-booted and only fire up Steam client and Skyrim, but illustrates the point about how requirements differ greatly.

so pay attention to those details. nothing tanks framerate faster than running out of resources and the game has to start swapping RAM to disk, or throwing up old VRAM allocations that it's going to re-use in just a few seconds, and have to do it again... you want to stay under your capacity at all times, especially if you want to multitask, like have a browser open, even more especially if you have 3d hw acceleration enabled in said browser, it blocks off VRAM and can keep it... you pause a video int he background? well, it's still in use isn't it? so it won't ever free it up.

got to be a little bit technical to keep on top of this stuff... or, if your framerate goes great for a while then tanks, that's a good indicator of resource starvation and over-allocation. it can be kind of a nightmare, which is why you read about said collections before installing them.

[NoOne[PH]]

Would you recommend any of the animation mods? Or, even the hair mods?

[The Zanzibarbarian]

I've got a GTX 1080 Ti so it's not like I'm running anything ultra modern.
I just make sure any MOD's I use are NOT 4k. I max mine all at 2k
I have some 270 MODs running now and for me, everything looks and works well...ish.
As for using any collections. I've looked at loads and seen what MODs they're using but non have piqued my interest. So I stick to the one's I've been using for years. Just updating when needed.
But it's about every 12 months or so, I do a complete reset of the game and start from vanilla again. Though i do wonder once I've started to go back to vanilla if it's out of out right passion for the game or some evil curse that I have to endure every year!?

[NoOne[PH]]

Originally posted by The Zanzibarbarian:

I've got a GTX 1080 Ti so it's not like I'm running anything ultra modern.
I just make sure any MOD's I use are NOT 4k. I max mine all at 2k
I have some 270 MODs running now and for me, everything looks and works well...ish.
As for using any collections. I've looked at loads and seen what MODs they're using but non have piqued my interest. So I stick to the one's I've been using for years. Just updating when needed.
But it's about every 12 months or so, I do a complete reset of the game and start from vanilla again. Though i do wonder once I've started to go back to vanilla if it's out of out right passion for the game or some evil curse that I have to endure every year!?

Awesome! If I may ask, which among the mods that you are currently running with are the essential ones? I have the AE upgrade as well.