Gtx970 Vram and Skyrim

Hey guys,

So I purchased an MSI twin-frozr gtx970 about a week after it came on sale, which was some time ago (about a year ago now) and all this time I had no problems with this badboy, it's a great overclocker, it holds the temperature very nicely and it's certainly had no trouble with any game that I could throw at it.

But about a month or two ago I've gone back to playing Skyrim, just to check how it'd run on this beast of a card at first and well... I got the modding bug, so slowly building up textures and ENBs and all kinds of weird stuff..well you know..after a month of modding when my texture mods alone exceeded 20gigs, I've noticed that my Vram, over a course of a few minutes of gameplay (in the open world!), would build up from 2, then 2.5 then 3 and then get stuck at 3.5 gigs and then i'd get weird stutters and dips in FPS..so i'd save the game, exit it and load the exact same spot where FPS dips and stutters were happening, but because it's a fresh load the Vram had no time to absorb all other textures, except the ones that are exactly around me and Vram usage would be sitting about 2-3gigs area, so at this exact moment there are no stutters and there are no dips in FPS, it's a steady 60 fps and the game plays perfect! But once I run or fly around around for a few minutes and with my Vram at 3.5gigs again, I would go back to the same spot and I'd get the dips at stutters again... which is really freaking annoying, because it was running perfectly at this exact spot just a few minutes ago when I loaded the game.. This only happens outside of zoned cities and buildings and dungeons, any zoned area runs absolutely fine, yes Vram builds up from when you first enter the zone like Whiterun, but I guess there just aren't enough textures to hit 3.5gig limit and as an example, Vram used sits at around 3.2gigs for Whiterun, 2.4gigs for any dungeon and about 2 gigs for Dragons Reach. But once i travel outside and run around for a bit, i just hit 3.5 gigs Vram and start stuttering.

As i've never experienced this before, i started reading on this whole vram limit thing and it turns out that it's exactly the problem that I'm having, once the game hits it's Vram limit, the game will start to stutter and get dips in FPS, which is a nightmare and for Gtx970 Vram limit seems to be around 3.5gigs area. So, on one hand, it's a very specific issue, for me it has only manifested itself once in about a year of playing games and it's the kind of issue that could've happened even if the card had full 4 gigs of ram, you are kinda bound to run into the Vram wall sometime anyway, right ? But something doesn't sit right with me, the box that's sitting in my drawer says 4gb on it in huge letters and beautiful font and yet here I am, playing Skyrim capped at 3.5gigs and stuttering like crazy...

So I called the shop and told them that due to only now, finding out about the whole gtx970 not getting full 4gb Vram scandal and experiencing the problem for myself for the first time since I got the card about a year ago, I would like to return it and pay the difference to get 980TI from them instead...Well, long story short.. they refused..saying how it's not an issue for which they accept returns and I should contact Nvidia instead.

I have 2 questions

1. For anyone that has done heavy Skyrim graphics modding, would it matter at all if I had 6 gigs or 4 gigs or 3.5 gigs of Vram ? Does anyone who have more than 4 gigs of Vram and very heavy texture mod usage ever run into problems like mine ? I've noticed that in the outside world the game does fill up Vram really quickly, is there any amount of Vram where it's not an issue at all, or does it get filled up regardless ? If it does get filled up, does it become an issue that translates into FPS loss and stutters ?

2. Do I take a loss, sell the card on ebay and get a better one ? Do I start removing mods to accommodate for Nvidia lying marketing techniques ? Or should i just take a chill pill and deal with reduced Skyrim performance in this scenario, since it's only like one game out of millions ?