TES Skyrim 0.279

[ENBSeries]

Jafin16
I'm afraid what users writing about radeon 7850, 7870, 7950, and all their rebranding versions. BLack screens on youtube, dead cards after several days or months. Don't know if it's per vendor issue, but i saw such reports several years ago when did my previous decision. Atm i see lot of reports about gf960 issues "driver stopped responding" with many drivers and it's not very nice thing to have when expecting no support in future nearest drivers for WinXP.

[Jafin16]

One good card to look at would be the R9 270X. It has the same GPU as the 7870 did (a card I had and loved, but didn't have enough power), but with some tweaking. That GPU has actually gotten better over the years from reports I'm hearing. I would definitely stay away from the actual HD 7xxx cards because of physical age in some cases and also because the rebranded cards seem to perform better and more reliably than the originals (again, from reports. My GPU was actually new when it released, not a rebrand). They also use slightly different drivers and I will admit that with the 7870 I had I did feel a bit more limited by the drivers and almost thought about going to Nvidia for my next card... then the R9 290 came out and I don't regret it. Nvidia does a lot of rebranding too, with much of the 700 series being reworks of the 600 series in one way or another.

The only issue I see is that from Nvidia you really only have the GTX 960 as an option and, if that's the case, it sounds like there's some driver problems. With AMD there are a few more cards to choose from (all the R7 and R9 2XX cards) giving you more options. I will admit I don't know a lot about the GTX 700 series cards or if that will help solve your issue, but I'm sure someone on here with one can tell you more if you don't already know. I also didn't check if they still support XP. I would guess they do, but I haven't checked.

EDIT: Regarding vendor, I only trust a few. Nvidia I only really trust EVGA and Asus. For AMD I trust Asus and Sapphire. I hear some good things from Powercolor and MSI but my experience with other vendors than those I trust has been bad (dead on arrival, poor performing cards, etc.)

[JF049]

Jafin16
I'm afraid what users writing about radeon 7850, 7870, 7950, and all their rebranding versions. BLack screens on youtube, dead cards after several days or months. Don't know if it's per vendor issue, but i saw such reports several years ago when did my previous decision. Atm i see lot of reports about gf960 issues "driver stopped responding" with many drivers and it's not very nice thing to have when expecting no support in future nearest drivers for WinXP.

Goddamn, there is always a possibility of hardware being broken or drivers working bad. It's not predictable if you'd have problems or not. Don't be afraid and buy whatever you want. Just don't fuck your warranty up.

For example, many users reported in the past that some of GTX 260 had VRM chokes whistling under load or overheating issues. As a user of LEADTEK gtx 260 in the past I had no problems with it except drivers. If it gets hot, I just increase fan speed, but it is not really necessary because it is still stable.
Users report that 290x with hynix memory can show black screen in 2d mode when AMD windows driver repeatedly change memory clock when aero effects or flash video are in use. Many users don't have such issue, but I do. Too bad I lost checkout check after the purchase to sell it back, so I just turned off nearly all effects of aero and disabled super power saving feature, and everything went fine.

[DaemonWhite]

Well, i'll do clear xp installation again and snapshots of every changes. If not helps, another videocard is the only solution. Goddamned nvidia, i don't like amd because of drivers, but my old personal experience is very positive about amd and very shitty about nvidia, because of too many cards dead for no reason and fixing all incompatibilities with my old hardware cost me around 1500$ of useless upgrade which i don't need at all. Now another videocard purchasing in the end of the tunnel... F*!!!

Have you thought about trying Windows 10? Sorry, if it's been asked before, I haven't been around for a while...


As for AMD cards, I've been running a Sapphire 7870 for the past few years now without any issues. Although, it is rapidly becoming outdated by the r9 300 series and Fury X. Perhaps one of the r9 cards would be a better fit, instead of buying into the latest ones? 7900 series isn't too bad from what I've seen in benchmarks either. I can't really say about NVidia since I've actually never used one (Is that bad?).

[benhat]

@boris
you know about effect lighting (weather RGBs in esms/esps) and skystatics (volfogs on mountains). effect lighting affects particles like fogs, fire smoke etc.
so both things can't be set in ENB, have to be altered in esps. i would normally go ahead and just set them all to whitish values across the board, because they are just weird in most weathermods when you tweak for ENB (especially when you include working with curves and intensities). manully tweaking them in the CK or Tes5 for colorful RGBs is a tedious endevour.
what do you think about adding colors of actual ingame values for effectlighting/skystatics, meaning current Sky colors, Sun color etc... mixing them together (maybe give multiplier for each influence) would produce real visuals? at least better then "shiny green fogs in the morning" like COT has

[ENBSeries]

JF049
I can't ignore low frequency mode of videocards, because it works 99.99% of time in 2d mode and i need as much silent card as possible (some gf960 and gf750ti models switch off coolers on low load). It's very important to not have any stability issues, because any error leads to headache of looking bugs in my own code, so any single issue unacceptable.

DaemonWhite
No, i hate win8+ and MS company. Their entire job is just based on making money and to foolish casuals. I'm not the person who insterested in useless fancy glam thingy, OS is environment which must be comfortable for using other applications, not itself. People, who thinks that it's normal to broke support of old software and force developers to waste billions hours for develop compatible versions, must be shooted down immediately, their existance is the pain for the planet. To be part of someones race for profit at any cost is not my life priority and i don't see anything else behind new MS creations (same regarding other companies with per year release of cosmetic changes).
Radeon 79xx require a lot of power on load from reviews, it just a matter of time when it dies, but i need videocard for very long period, because soon they will dissapear completely from the shops and searching for XP compatible will be problematic (even planning to downclock via bios to increase it's life).

benhat
I don't understand. Do you ask about replacing game values instead of multiply them like this is done now?

[benhat]

yes i mean replacing effectlighting and skystatics RGBs of gameengine completely. maybe give option to switch on/off feature (because of compatibility with old ENBs)

[ENBSeries]

benhat
I thought about this, but for gta5. Don't know if skyrim worth it, any installed weather mods will be replaced and if they have more weathers than defined in preset, result also would be very wrong. Editing every weather by simple copy-paste values is much simpler than tweaking hundreds of parameters per weather in the mod. Also all these tweaks are wrong in general, the only important thing is sky and sun and all other lighting parameters must be computed automatically based on such data in good engine. I can't answer now, this is not to hard too implement, but editing on user side...

[Spock]

The r9 380 might be a good choice. Pretty good performance per dollar, better power efficiency then older gcn versions and some models are cooled passively when idle. You could dive into compute shaders with gcn 1.2.

[Jafin16]

Except the R9 380 doesn't have XP drivers and Boris doesn't like any of the new Windows versions... esp Win 8+ Otherwise that would've been the first card I'd recommend. The R9 3XX series has some interesting stuff going on but it's mixed with rebrands of older tech making it an odd release. AMD is definitely banking on Fiji w/ HBM taking off here. Atm they can't really compete with the efficiency of Maxwell which Nvidia is really advertising (performance-wise AMD is doing just fine though.) Hopefully they release some mid release cards on the higher end, kinda like they did with the R9 285 to replace the aging hawaii cards (not that hawaii is bad, I love mine, but for this release it's a bit old.)