Maximum Optimization for Skyrim

[CaineChan]

Novice here. Figured I'd start a thread to help myself and hopefully help others. Lets get started.

 

What are some starting tweaks and tips you guys would recommend for getting the most out of the game? Could be some really techie stuff, or something simple like recommending we put our game on our ssd (speaking of which, does anyone notice faster load times with the game on an ssd? If so, I may have to give it a try). I usually suffer from slow load times and of course the occasional crash. I also have tons of neat mods id like to try out but have disabled because they CTD.

 

How do we organize our mods? How do we keep everything up to date? How do we prevent conflicts? MO or NMM? These are all questions that keep us noobs up at night. Literally.

[RohZima]

You should post your PC spec now, if you have old graphics card it's pointless getting the latest ENB and spending time trying to optimize that, for instance.

 

Also what are you prioritizing, performance/stability or looks? There are detailed guides for modding skyrim and optimizing so it is really just a case of knowing what you are after then people can simply link you to those tutorials.

[yatol]

maximum optimisation.....

unpacking all textures replacers to check them with textures optimiser, that's already too much for most
 

if you want more performance, you reduce the performance waste

there's a lot left to do if some have the motivation

 

- the mod that boost fps in interiors by putting occlusion lanes to not render the stuff you can't see (don't remember the name), it's very effective, why not do the same in towns or other places?

- go tfc under riverwood, that river is huge.... that's why water areas eat a lot of fps

you can make smaller variations of river nifs, to replace with the smallest that fit (huge project, there's a lot of water)

- when you click on something in worldspace, there's some x y z, that's the collision

if npc z (height) is 40 (too lazy to go check), for you to not jump thought the head of a npc, why give z 400 to some trees? how are you supposed to jump that high? reduce that to 100 it's more than enought

and the collision under the ground.... you aren't supposed to go under the ground

- all humanoids were the same stuff, beside argonian/khajit

you can delete nordvampire, breton, bretonvampire, imperial, imperialvampire.... from most armor addons by giving race armor nord to those races (now they wear what nord can wear, default race can be deleted from those armors too, there's no default race in game)

- only difference between ice bear and brown bear, it's the armor and the stats, you give worn armor icebear to npc icebear and make it a race bear, and you can delete race ice bear (if a race don't have much used, and is referenced by idles, perks, dialogs... conditions, get rid of it then delete the conditions)

- you use skimpy armors, there's 50 npcs, you have 30 npcs that have the same body x in their armor

delete body x from those nifs and add armor addon body x (with another sbp) to those armors, now you have one body x in your ram instead of 30

etc etc

[Pauduan]

3 hours ago, CaineChan said:

<snip>recommending we put our game on our ssd (speaking of which, does anyone notice faster load times with the game on an ssd? If so, I may have to give it a try). I usually suffer from slow load times and of course the occasional crash.<snip>

I cut my load time by 60-70% going from a WD 'Red' spinner (max read speed around 133MB/s) to a relatively slow WD Blue M.2 SSD ()max read 500MB/s). This helps a lot and you won't see much of an increase with faster SSDs because memory bandwidth and CPU load is a limiting factor. Startup is still very slow though, specially with ENB enabled. Not much of a difference there.

 

I have two GTX1080s in SLI and an appropriate set of texture and graphics mods - average interior cell load is about 2.5GB (measured by loading a single cell and summoning all followers). In a single hour of gaming I may read as much 60-80GB from the disk. I tend to play a bit more now, because each level loads in about 10 seconds. Earlier I would check my messages while the game loaded.

[Nazzzgul666]

I didn't recognize any difference at loading times, but they aren't really high anyways. Didn't stop time but in general i can't even read the text while loading, so maybe around 1-3 seconds?

[Grey Cloud]

All the OP has to do is read some of the many guides or watch some of the many videos that have been around for years.

[Lostdreamer]

On 5/8/2019 at 11:27 AM, Nazzzgul666 said:

I didn't recognize any difference at loading times, but they aren't really high anyways. Didn't stop time but in general i can't even read the text while loading, so maybe around 1-3 seconds?

I'm jealous. Mine are several orders of magnitude longer than that!

AND they are loading from a monster SSD (To answer other questions, yes. an SSD will potentially/probably improve load times.)

But the size of my game is ridiculous these days, and this is of the prices i pay to have all the weird/interesting/etc mod content in my game.

 

 

On 5/8/2019 at 12:06 PM, Grey Cloud said:

All the OP has to do is read some of the many guides or watch some of the many videos that have been around for years.

Yes. And that learning process can help devlop the understanding to run a heavily modded game even if you don't write mods yourself.

 

The STEP guide is always a good place to start, and I seem to remember a helpful one on the nexus.

 

That said, I can see a valid case for wanting to turn the dozens of guides / hints and tips etc out there into a coherant whole.

 

For my part, my suggestions are:

ENBoost. Don't be afraid of not running an ENB profile at all - you can get pretty good graphics without it. But the core ENB magic can do wonders for the stability etc of your game.

 

Watch the graphics. It all adds up, lots of mod authors like to use 2/4k textures and/or add a billion extra objects to the area and the graphics are a big part of the engine load.

 

Ordinator Textures. USE WITH CAUTION. This is a tool that is capable of mitigating some of the graphics issues mentioned above by reducing texture sizes. it's also capable of thorughly corrupting things. Read the manual & back everything up - but it can help a surprising amount.

 

Just use less mods. Easy to say, i know. But the bottom line is a build with 100 carefully chosen and well proven mods is WAY more stable than one with 400+ random gimmicky ideas. Now, the cool and interesting ideas are a part of what makes a modded skyrim game fun - but, again, if you are struggling with stability, be aware how easy it is to have too much of a good thing.

[Nazzzgul666]

2 hours ago, Lostdreamer said:

Watch the graphics. It all adds up, lots of mod authors like to use 2/4k textures and/or add a billion extra objects to the area and the graphics are a big part of the engine load.

I think that's a big difference. Textures are the huge files that need to be loaded, i probably have even more weird stuff than you but scripts are small. Probably the reason for my short loading times either, i always wanted to try better textures but there are soooo many and in the end i never had the patience to go through all and see what i like best. Plus my graphic card isn't very strong, so i can't add that much anyways.

2 hours ago, Lostdreamer said:

Just use less mods. Easy to say, i know. But the bottom line is a build with 100 carefully chosen and well proven mods is WAY more stable than one with 400+ random gimmicky ideas. Now, the cool and interesting ideas are a part of what makes a modded skyrim game fun - but, again, if you are struggling with stability, be aware how easy it is to have too much of a good thing.

I would differ here a bit and say, even 400 carefully chosen mods are way more stable than 100 random gimmicky ideas. It's always good advice to read descriptions carefully and think if that's a nice addition that works with everything else than just adding up stuff. Especially because uninstalling mods mid game isn't the best idea. The raw numbers on the other hand don't really seem to matter that much.