What GPU for Skyrim SE ENB at 1440p - 2160p

[op3nt4ctic]

(Since Boris seems to read most of this) I want to thank you for making my favorite games look so great.
My question is: What GPU would be recommendet for using Skyrim SE with min. the following mods:

A mid to high range ENB preset | like Aequinoctium ENB
Mods that add flora | like Skyrim 3D Trees and Plants
Some 2k textures for everything important | maybe also some parallax textures by Pfusher

min. 1440p res.

The guy at my local hardware store told my a "GeForce GTX 1660 Super Gaming OC 6G, 6144 MB GDDR6" would be enough.
I currently have a GTX 970 with 4 (3,5) gigs vram. Somehow I think he ist wrong and that this is more of an RTX 2070s (or GTX 1080ti) thing.
But hey, i am just a guy that wants FPS not RGB-lights. If I can save money so be it. What would you people think.

[Anubis]

For comparison - I have 3840x1600 resolution and heavily modded game with my own ENB preset. Everything set to ultra settings. 1080ti gets me between 30-40 fps.

[op3nt4ctic]

Thank you for your answer! That already helps me quite a bit. So I should probably aim for a used gtx 1080ti or a similar card. Would a RTX 2070s be similar in terms of Skyrim? Or are these 11 gigs of Vram important?

[ENBSeries]

Video memory size will be important for future games, but not that near as long as you have enough ram (ram and vram are shared by driver). 1080ti is good thing, but i think it do not worth to buy now when more recent cards are available, which are less hot, no need much strong PSU, so on. The key is to have videocard with highest number of texture and rop units, plus as much video memory bandwidth as possible, so 1080ti is good at this no doubt, but there are synthetic tests which are better than some scenery like demos and games. This is specific to full screen effects which are the worst about performance and the higher resolution, the slower they are. Depth of field, ssao/ssil, screen space reflections, msaa, various rays - these are first culprits which heavily dependent on performance with textures and vram speed. If you can wait, then better buy 3xxx generation when it will be released.

[Anubis]

11 Gigs of vram is important with modded game and high resolution - my game is constantly using between 8,5G and 10,5G vram. Sometimes (not very often) it goes above 11G and then the game instantly crashes to desktop. (CTD)
RAM amount doesn't seem to help - I have 32G of it.

ENBSeries is right - the best option would be waiting for some 3xxx graphics card. But if you don't want to wait, then a used 1080ti shoud be somewhere between 400-500 $

[ENBSeries]

Don't listen Anubis about vram, it doesnt matter how much it is used for performance if you have enough ram and vram is not something tiny. As i said, memory is shared almost as vram+ram = usablevram, game do not use all those 11 gb at same moment, so it doesnt matter if data reside in ram or vram if it is not rendered. Transfer data from ram to vram happens by driver when resource is used, but this introduce microstuttering when you go to some new place, which happens anyway cause game do it, but fps is the same. Only future games with raytracing can change this, because casted ray may need to hit something very far from camera, so that thing must be loaded in memory. But still, it is just a dream, developers will not do this any soon, they rather introduce tons of optimization tricks to support customer's hardware and raytracing in general still such a slow thing, like it's the Voodoo graphics accelerator of 199x. If you have a choice to buy faster videocard by at least 10%, then choose it instead of x2 bigger vram. Fun thing, gtx1080ti can be faster than gtx2080 with full screen effects which i mentioned earlier just because of raw power, but this better to check on practice, maybe they did more efficient algorithms to work with memory and cache.

[Anubis]

Boris - can you explain to me why Skyrim SE uses maximally the exact amount of vram and crashes when it's exceeded ?
I have done a clean install for the game, all drivers are updated, but still the same behavior.

I have 11G of vram, 32G of RAM and system properties shows me that I have 28,3G of total graphics memory. But Skyrim SE does not use it all.

Why does Skyrim SE use only the amount of memory that I have on the graphics card ? When I had older graphics card with 8G of vram, Skyrim SE used max 8G, now I have graphics card with 11G vram and Skyrim SE uses max 11G. (vram and ram usage is shown on the OSD, using Rivatuner, and I can also monitor resource usage from a different display, using Aida64)
System RAM usage remains about the same.

This shows that Skyrim SE uses all available vram and when this amount is exceeded, for a moment there is a spike in system RAM usage and then the game crashes. (Looks like the game does not want to use system RAM for rendering. After all - it's much slower)
I used to have Skyrim SE crashes all the time with my old graphics card with less vram, now, with more vram, it crashes very very rarely. (system RAM amount is the same)
My experience: more vram = more stable game (and with more mods, effects and higher settings). And more vram is also important with higher resolutions.

[ENBSeries]

It is not about experience, it's about knowledge of how things work. Dx11 and dx9 games do not have access to physical vram, it is driver and os do, hiding real numbers from applications. You can get videocard with 1gb of vram and it will run the game, just will have stuttering, but never crash, unless you set too high resolution so render targets can't fit in to video memory. Why your game crash is not cause of 3d graphics specific or something like that, this should not happen normally, so it is caused by some other applications which try to use vram. This thing is not much different to virtual memory which allow to run heavy applications even if you do not have ram that much, simply swap file is used.

[Anubis]

Well, I don't have anything else that uses vram at the same time with the game. And my experience can be repeated, so it's confirmable. After getting a card with more vram - no more crashes. (The rest of the system remained the same)


Also, I suggested a graphics card with more vram, because OP asked about playing at high resolutions and that's where the extra vram comes in handy. That's why these cards exist.

[op3nt4ctic]

So according to techpowerup.com
A 1660 super 336.0 GB/s bandwith and 88 TMUs and 48 ROPs
A 1080 ti has 616.0 GB/s bandwidth and 272 TMUs and 88 ROPs
A 2070 super has 448.0 GB/s bandwidth and 160 TMUs and 64 ROPs
A 2080 super has 495.9 GB/s bandwith and 192 TMUs and 64 ROPs
A 2080 ti is about the same es the 1080ti

So if we only look at these values, you said are important I should get my hands on a 1080ti as soon as I can right?
According to the specification rumors about the RTX 3xxx series they will be also slightly worse then the 1080ti exept the 3080 stuff.

Does base and boost clock speed play any role?