In the past few months, we’ve seen a respectable number of HD Texture Packs for Skyrim Special Edition. However, these packs were not compatible with the original version of Skyrim. Thankfully, modder “kartoffel” has released a massive 19GB AI-enhanced Texture Pack for those that are still playing the original Skyrim.
Going into more details, the modder has cleaned of compression artifacts all the textures of Skyrim Legacy Edition. In order to achieve that, kartoffel used AI-enhanced techniques. To be more precise, he used ESRGAN’s BC1smooth2 mode.
According to the modder, this HD Texture Pack requires 0.6-1.6GB more VRAM than the original version with Bethesda’s HD Textures. Thus, and if you stay below the hard VRAM limit of 3.5GB, there will be no performance impact.
Do note that Skyrim Legacy Edition is a 32-bit game. As such, the game cannot use more than 4GB of VRAM. According to reports, an up-to-date version of ENBseries mod for Skyrim can use all of your GPUs VRAM. However, I haven’t tested it myself so I don’t know whether this is indeed possible.
Lastly, this mod HD Texture Pack comes in two versions. The first version features only the normal maps and is 10GB in size. The second version features everything, and is 19GB in size. Both of these versions feature uncompressed textures.
You can download this ESRGAN HD Texture Pack for Skyrim from here. You can also find some comparison screenshots below. Vanilla version is on the left, whereas the modded version is on the right.
Have fun!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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