“The exact VRAM:RAM ratio is not known, but one metric reported was a texture pack taking up ~500MB VRAM would consume approximately 430MB physical RAM.
Skyrim mirrors its active textures in memory, and since it is a 32-bit application with a 4GB memory limit, this constrains the total size of modded textures that are viably usable,” the post says. “Skyrim will crash at or around a reported 3.1 gigabytes of RAM usage, which is fairly widely known.
(There is an upper limit, but it's so high as to be pretty much meaningless at this point in time and technology.)Īn old, but still relevant, post on the Nexus Forums explains the practical impact of that limit in somewhat greater detail. In Skyrim you need to set the body slot used by a piece or armour in two places: In the Dismemberment data of the nif file In the Armor addon and Armor items in the Creation Kit IMPORTANT: The body slot you set in the nif file and in the CK must be the same, or your armour will be invisible in game. I will cop to not being intimately familiar with the technical side of things, but simplistically, 32-bit applications can use a maximum of 4GB of RAM, a part of which is reserved for the OS, while 64-bit effectively does away with that restriction. Skyrim Special Edition 1.5.97 would need the Creation Kit version previously available through the Bethesda Launcher or the newer Steam version with the 'downgrade patcher' applied. But in the long run, being a 64-bit app will almost certainly have a much greater impact on the game's long-term future. Skyrim Special Edition 1.6+ and Skyrim Anniversary Edition 1.6+ are the same executable and would use the same Creation Kit version (the one just added to Steam). The ability to import saves is nice, especially for players like me, who never finished the original and might be tempted to come back for this new edition.