Skyrim SE Stuttering.

[Church the Cat]

Greetings, I'm having an issue while wandering Skyrim with stuttering/pauses during gameplay. I tried searching Google for remedies, but to no avail. I've included screenshot of my load order and a couple from "Skyrim Performance Monitor".   I suspect one of the mods is being a memory hog, but don't know which mod to axe.  

[Guest]

Please define "stutter/pause" a bit more accurately: Do you mean reduced framerate, or outright temporary pauses?

 

Are you playing with VSYNC enabled? If yes, with or without a limiter?

 

Is the game running from a harddrive, and if yes how fragmented are skyrim's files?

 

TL/DR: Moah information please. If you're running afterburner, a screenie of Core-usage, GPU-usage and VRAM-usage may be useful - although with 8 GB VRAM on an RTX, the GPU definatelly shouldn't be the bottleneck. CPU is more likely, but the stats you showed say, no core even peaked - or is that total percentage of ALL cores? If the later, is hyperthreading enabled, and what's your iHWThreads setting?

 

EDIT: Also, in skyrim.ini, near the bottom, what are the budget-settings for papyrus? (fUpdateBudgetMS and fExtraTaskletBudgetMS)

[Church the Cat]

Thanks, for the reply.

 

1. By stuttering, I mean the game actually pauses a second or so while I'm running through the wilderness. It seems to be related to the game loading assets as I explore Skyrim.

 

2. Framerate is capped at 60, I'm not sure if VSYNC is enabled. I've forgotten how to check.

 

3. The game runs from my 2TB Hard Drive.

 

I've included screenshots of all my settings, I could think of.

[Guest]

Does it also happen indoors?

 

If yes, then it's either a mod periodically causing high scriptload, or an external problem outside skyrim (another program or system-service interfering, or possibly the CPU downthrottling by temp (the screenies only showed gpu-temp - not cpu-temp)). "External problem" also includes fucking windows update. Basically, check your taskman to see if there's any other activity going on.

 

If it only happens outdoors, not indoors, i'd check how fragmented the hard-disk is (and how fast it goes to sleep - although i can't imagine it doing that, while skyrim is running, so it seems unlikely). BTW: How much RAM do you have, and how much is free? If it's at the limit, then windows might not be caching frequently used files, which at best would result in skyrim more often loading assets from disk, and at worst swapping memory.

[nufndash]

I know I am going to be tossed to the wolves for suggesting this, because it really should have nothing to do with it, but....set res 1920x1080 and make sure vsync is on.  I was having a little skip or stutter every time I ran about 20 feet ingame.  The only thing I changed was the res and it stopped. Probably was a coincidence with something else, but what the hey, its super quick to try.

[Church the Cat]

59 minutes ago, lynak said:

Does it also happen indoors?

 

If yes, then it's either a mod periodically causing high scriptload, or an external problem outside skyrim (another program or system-service interfering, or possibly the CPU downthrottling by temp (the screenies only showed gpu-temp - not cpu-temp)). "External problem" also includes fucking windows update. Basically, check your taskman to see if there's any other activity going on.

 

If it only happens outdoors, not indoors, i'd check how fragmented the hard-disk is (and how fast it goes to sleep - although i can't imagine it doing that, while skyrim is running, so it seems unlikely). BTW: How much RAM do you have, and how much is free? If it's at the limit, then windows might not be caching frequently used files, which at best would result in skyrim more often loading assets from disk, and at worst swapping memory.

1. Mostly noticeable running outdoors, with the constant loading of cells starts stuttering after extended play.

2. Can't imagine my CPU is getting too hot. (I have four fans and a hydrocooler.)

3. As one of my previous screenshots show, I have 64GB of DDR4 RAM.

4. Defrag is done automatically. (I've included a screenshot.)

Thanks, for the ideas.

19 minutes ago, nufndash said:

I know I am going to be tossed to the wolves for suggesting this, because it really should have nothing to do with it, but....set res 1920x1080 and make sure vsync is on.  I was having a little skip or stutter every time I ran about 20 feet ingame.  The only thing I changed was the res and it stopped. Probably was a coincidence with something else, but what the hey, its super quick to try.

Thanks, for the suggestion. But, I already tried to down my resolution to 1080P with no noticeable improvement.

 Note: It shows Windows 8.1, but I've upgraded to Windows 10.

[mircislav]

4 minutes ago, Church the Cat said:

1. Mostly noticeable running outdoors, with the constant loading of cells starts stuttering after extended play.

2. Can't imagine my CPU is getting too hot. (I have four fans and a hydrocooler.)

3. As one of my previous screenshots show, I have 64GB of DDR4 RAM.

4. Defrag is done automatically. (I've included a screenshot.)

Thanks, for the ideas.

Thanks, for the suggestion. But, I already tried to down my resolution to 1080P with no noticeable improvement.

 Note, it shows Windows 8.1 but I've upgraded to Windows 10.

It's mod related - which one, I can not tell, you'll have to discover yourself... sorry.

[Church the Cat]

33 minutes ago, mircislav said:

It's mod related - which one, I can not tell, you'll have to discover yourself... sorry.

Thanks, for your reply.

[Guest]

I'll just throw this in, although Church really should've mentioned it, if that's the issue - but hey, whatever:

Since you strongly suspect it's cell-loads, have you changed uGridsToLoad in the ini? If yes, to which value and did you increase iPreloadSizeLimit accordingly?

 

Otherwise, it really sounds like a mod-issue, although from the plugin-list i don't see anything unusual. There's a few i don't know, but most i recognize and they're all fine. In fact, it's a rather light and efficient setup, compared to what some are running.

 

.....

 

EDIT: This really should be enabled by default, but hey, it's an idea: Skyrim.ini, [BackgroundLoad]. Please post the settings in that section. (Why that matters? Well, if for example the cellLoader is set to not stream assets in the background, the game will just pause whenever cells are loaded.

 

[Church the Cat]

3 minutes ago, lynak said:

I'll just throw this in, although Church really should've mentioned it, if that's the issue - but hey, whatever:

Since you strongly suspect it's cell-loads, have you changed uGridsToLoad in the ini? If yes, to which value and did you increase iPreloadSizeLimit accordingly?

 

Otherwise, it really sounds like a mod-issue, although from the plugin-list i don't see anything unusual. There's a few i don't know, but most i recognize and they're all fine.

1. I haven't messed with "iGridsToLoad" or "iPreloadSizeLimit".

2. I figured it was a mod, but I was just hoping that someone would've had the same issue and would've been able to tell me which mod eats memory so I could give it the boot.

 

Thanks, for the assistance y'all. ?

[mircislav]

7 hours ago, Church the Cat said:

Thanks, for your reply.

Try with generating fresh ini files without "exotic" settings.

[Church the Cat]

1 hour ago, mircislav said:

Try with generating fresh ini files without "exotic" settings.

Thanks, for the idea. However, the only changes I made to the ini was to remove the "You cannot go that way." invisible walls, make projectiles not fly through targets at far range and make NPCs use ammo (arrows).

[phillout]

Judging by the description of a problem, it could be your antivirus program. Add Skyrim directory and everything related to the exclusions list, add SkyrimSE.exe to the exclusions list, the usual stuff.

 

And use BethINI to change your settings, dont' fiddle with the ini files yourself. It will clean up the most questionable settings you could have introduced.

[mircislav]

8 hours ago, Church the Cat said:

Thanks, for the idea. However, the only changes I made to the ini was to remove the "You cannot go that way." invisible walls, make projectiles not fly through targets at far range and make NPCs use ammo (arrows).

Also it's not advisable to fiddle with papyrus settings... But, as phillout suggested, it might be your antivirus.

Other thing you can check - if your swap file is on the same partition as Steam folder or your mod folder, move it to another partition or disk,

 

[Church the Cat]

Thanks, for those ideas. But, I'm suspecting it might be "Sexlab" or "Sexlab - Defeat" eating up memory. I was in the Ratway Warrens, shot a Vagrant with an arrow that didn't kill her. She ran off and stumbled into a couple Skeevers that easily defeated her, in her weakened state. When one of the Skeevers started raping her, I pulled a sneaky archer and killed all three. After that, memory usage spiked up over 60GB. I figured it was caused by me ending the scene early, by killing them all. For now, I disabled the "NPC to NPC" option in "Sexlab - Defeat" in attempt to remedy this.

[Church the Cat]

The yellow line shows a memory spike, after killing the female Vagrant and male Skeever while she was being raped.

[mircislav]

Last thing, if you use BethINI, try to make changes as in attached pic and lock the frame rate to 60 in your graphic driver.

[mircislav]

58 minutes ago, Church the Cat said:

Thanks, for those ideas. But, I'm suspecting it might be "Sexlab" or "Sexlab - Defeat" eating up memory. I was in the Ratway Warrens, shot a Vagrant with an arrow that didn't kill her. She ran off and stumbled into a couple Skeevers that easily defeated her, in her weakened state. When one of the Skeevers started raping her, I pulled a sneaky archer and killed all three. After that, memory usage spiked up over 60GB. I figured it was caused by me ending the scene early, by killing them all. For now, I disabled the "NPC to NPC" option in "Sexlab - Defeat" in attempt to remedy this.

SL is not eating your memory that's for sure and those monitoring spikes doesn't mean anything beside that you have heavy load in some scenarios - those can be caused by some other mod altogether and not necessarily related to Sexlab or any Sexlab dependent mod and CAN be related to FPS .

BTW, those monitoring thing that runs in backgroung is also eating your memory and CPU - nothing runs on it's own. In my opinion that is useless for anything - only on MacOS those tools have meaning because they are running constantly in background and do not affect any of the usual work in any way.

[Church the Cat]

30 minutes ago, mircislav said:

Last thing, if you use BethINI, try to make changes as in attached pic and lock the frame rate to 60 in your graphic driver.

 

17 minutes ago, mircislav said:

SL is not eating your memory that's for sure and those monitoring spikes doesn't mean anything beside that you have heavy load in some scenarios - those can be caused by some other mod altogether and not necessarily related to Sexlab or any Sexlab dependent mod and CAN be related to FPS .

Thanks, I'll give those BethINI settings a try. But, must I use 1920 x 1080? I'd much rather stick to 3840 x 2160, if possible.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, mircislav said:

SL is not eating your memory that's for sure and those monitoring spikes doesn't mean anything beside that you have heavy load in some scenarios - those can be caused by some other mod altogether and not necessarily related to Sexlab or any Sexlab dependent mod and CAN be related to FPS .

It's SIXTY GIGABYTES!! Unless the monitoring-app is reporting bullshit, that DOES mean something - be it sexlab-related or not. You don't allocate 60 fucking gigabytes without a hickup. Do you understand the role of a memory-allocator, and how much time a program spends just managing memory?

 

If he didn't have 64gigs of RAM, his OS would probably just BSOD - that's how big of a deal this fat-finger is. And how is it "for sure", that there is no sexlab-mod in the universe, that could in certain combinations cause an infinite alloc-loop? Can you vouch for every version of every sexlab mod ever released, and every combination with other non-sexlab mods? No? That's what is thought.

 

EDIT: Church, i just took another look at your plugin-list, and noticed the scrollbar. Could you post your full pluginlist in a spoiler-tag? If you're using modmanager, you can find it for easy copypaste in "YourModmanDir\Profiles\Something\loadorder.txt". Close modman before opening it. The other interesting file in that same dir would be "modlist.txt", since it contains all installed mods - not just ones with plugin.

[mircislav]

14 minutes ago, lynak said:

It's SIXTY GIGABYTES!! Unless the monitoring-app is reporting bullshit, that DOES mean something - be it sexlab-related or not. You don't allocate 60 fucking gigabytes without a hickup. Do you understand the role of a memory-allocator, and how much time a program spends just managing memory?

 

It might not be sexlab related, but unless the measurement is BS, allocating 60 gigs does have consequences. If he didn't have 64gigs of RAM, his OS would probably just BSOD - that's how big of a deal it is.

Sorry than, my bad - I wont be suggesting anything anymore. Be well.

[mircislav]

1 hour ago, Church the Cat said:

 

Thanks, I'll give those BethINI settings a try. But, must I use 1920 x 1080? I'd much rather stick to 3840 x 2160, if possible.

I was referring to window mode and FPS, and as I said I wont be interfering here anymore. Best regards.

[Church the Cat]

18 minutes ago, mircislav said:

I was referring to window mode and FPS, and as I said I wont be interfering here anymore. Best regards.

No worries, thanks for your help. Take care.

35 minutes ago, lynak said:

It's SIXTY GIGABYTES!! Unless the monitoring-app is reporting bullshit, that DOES mean something - be it sexlab-related or not. You don't allocate 60 fucking gigabytes without a hickup. Do you understand the role of a memory-allocator, and how much time a program spends just managing memory?

 

If he didn't have 64gigs of RAM, his OS would probably just BSOD - that's how big of a deal this fat-finger is. And how is it "for sure", that there is no sexlab-mod in the universe, that could in certain combinations cause an infinite alloc-loop? Can you vouch for every version of every sexlab mod ever released, and every combination with other non-sexlab mods? No? That's what is thought.

 

EDIT: Church, i just took another look at your plugin-list, and noticed the scrollbar. Could you post your full pluginlist in a spoiler-tag? If you're using modmanager, you can find it for easy copypaste in "YourModmanDir\Profiles\Something\loadorder.txt". Close modman before opening it. The other interesting file in that same dir would be "modlist.txt", since it contains all installed mods - not just ones with plugin.

The only mods that weren't showing in my previous mod list were the official plugins. (Skyrim, Dawnguard etc...) Here's my updated load order, after I trimmed it up before starting a new playthrough. Thanks again, for your help. 

[Church the Cat]

My SKSE mods, also. 

[Guest]

Thanks! Okay, two more easy things to check, before we delve into searching for the needle in a haystack....

 

"Your Windows Documents Folder/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition"

 

Please take a look around in the subfolders, looking for excessively large files including logs. In the "saves" subfolder, what's the average size of your saves? What we're trying to do here: Instead of blindly searching for what might cause that spike, we're looking for clues. For example, a giant logfile tells us there are probably tenthousands of repeating error messages in it, in which case we could check what those repeating messages are. But one step at a time: For now, just take a look around, to see if any file in there seems out of whack.

 

Next up: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/5031/

 

Get this unless you already have it and launch "ReSaver.exe". I don't remember how exactly it works on first launch, but it'll probably ask you for your skyrim saves folder. It's just where we already looked for large files: YourDocumentsFolder/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/Saves.

 

Then load your most recent save, and compare the numbers to mine:

 

Again, we're looking for completely abnormal numbers. Especially look if there's a large number of suspended stacks. It would be really great if we could find the culprit in there, because..... this program allows filtering data by mod ? But more on that later - for now, just compare to see if anything is completely different on your end.