Stumped: Sudden, Large stability and FPS drop

[ScatLesbian69]

Hello everyone, and I want to thank you for your help in advance. I've been trying to solve a strange and frustrating fps issue in my Skyrim SE install for the several months of my current play through, and after all the form scouring, fps patches, and resource monitoring I'm still unequivocally stumped. I'm trying to rule out if it is a mod conflict issue, compatibility issue, hardware resource issue, inadequate power supply, or potentially a corrupted save, and I would really appreciate you help in either pointing me in the right direction to troubleshoot and check or potentially provide an explanation and possible solution. In other words, perhaps there is a know apparent issue that I am simply not aware of and haven't thought to rule out in my troubleshooting.

 

I should also note that I don't seem to have these stability issues with other games; even with shadow of the tomb raider (although i have not really had the chance to play it).

 

There are several behaviors that consistently occurs with the issue and they are as follows:

1. The FPS will rapidly drop from a stable 60fps at 1080p to an unstable and fluctuating 0-5 FPS

2. The CPU does not appear to throttle clock speed but drops to around 70% utilization 

3. The graphics card drops to less than ~5% utilization and throttles down with the reduced load.

4. The CPU and GPU do not appear to be over temperature.

5. The game will not stabilize by standing still or tabbing out.

6. The game will not stabilize by saving the game and attempting to continue.

 

There are however many conditions that do not remain consistent around the FPS drop:

1. The game may remain stable for hours at a time at 60fps, and sometime it will barely remain stable for a minuet repeatedly for a random amount of time. 

2. The game experiences these FPS drops seemingly regardless of location in both populated and unpopulated areas.

3. The game experiences these FPS drops seemingly regardless of player action during both fights and simply walking along an unpopulated road.

4. The game experiences these FPS drops regardless of HDT hair physics being enabled or not.

5. The game experiences these FPS drops with or without reshade installed and RTGI path tracing through reshade.

6. The game may or may not fix by entering and exiting buildings, sleeping, or doing enough player interactions with environment or npc's.

7. The game may or may not fix by running around in the same or different areas until it stabilizes.

8. The game may or may not fix by running out of the current area you are in.

9. The game will always temporary stabilize by saving the game and quitting to main menu or desktop; however, the amount of time that the game remains stable varies as mentioned above.

 

Its right about now that you're probably wondering whats are my system specs, what are my skyrim settings, and what mods do i have installed. So here we go. 

 

System:

AMD Ryzen 9 3900x (i leave the boost up to the computer to decide)

Gigabyte RTX 2070 super (comes overclocked to 1815 MHz)

2 8gb sticks of DDR4 ram (G skills ram)

Gigabyte x570 aorus i pro wifi motherboard

Noctua NH-D15s cooler

NVME M.2 ssd 1TB

EVGA 650BQ powersupply (650w)

(according to outervision power supply calculator the system should consume about 526 W if it were ever able to clock the CPU up to 4.5Ghz)

 

Skyrim Settings:

All settings are on the highest settings (lowering the settings does not seem to improve stability) 

 

Mods (using MO2): loot has been installed and is running. Ive also removed any mods that have not worked to fix the fps issue such as fps patches.

 

 

In the end if we can't fix it oh well. My role playing and story telling is going well, and its ultimately a first world problem as its just a game and a fun pastime. Ill just toughen up and play on through or go to another game if it gets too bad. I used to play on an old laptop so the fact I can even run normal games at above 15 fps is amazing.

 

Thanks again for your time and help.

 

[coolfreaky]

the stability issue might be from mods that are not in a correct place in Load Order .

 

i believe you have run LOOT several times with no effect  :  just a test remove zaz.esm and DD from your left side , run Loot see if your Load Order have changed ( normally it has ) than re-install zaz and DD .    see if the game gain in stability !

 

 

second thing is more uac ;  the way that is installed in Windows Steam/skyrim and M O  / administrator , compatibility  .  it gives issues where the game does not know where he is !  specially when you have 2 skyrim.ini and 2 skyrimPrefs.ini  one in documents/skyrim special edition/   and  one in  __ M O /profile/ .   and you could modify one of them with Bethini or manually . i would suggest you to copy and past the skyrim.ini and skyrimPref.ini from MO and past them over in document/skyrim special edition .   see if the game is more stable .

 

 

their is a third thing that can be with monitor refresh rate  and  Vsync  !

[ScatLesbian69]

13 hours ago, coolfreaky said:

the stability issue might be from mods that are not in a correct place in Load Order .

 

i believe you have run LOOT several times with no effect  :  just a test remove zaz.esm and DD from your left side , run Loot see if your Load Order have changed ( normally it has ) than re-install zaz and DD .    see if the game gain in stability !

 

 

second thing is more uac ;  the way that is installed in Windows Steam/skyrim and M O  / administrator , compatibility  .  it gives issues where the game does not know where he is !  specially when you have 2 skyrim.ini and 2 skyrimPrefs.ini  one in documents/skyrim special edition/   and  one in  __ M O /profile/ .   and you could modify one of them with Bethini or manually . i would suggest you to copy and past the skyrim.ini and skyrimPref.ini from MO and past them over in document/skyrim special edition .   see if the game is more stable .

 

 

their is a third thing that can be with monitor refresh rate  and  Vsync  !

Thanks. Ive applied the recommendations and I'm going to test it out now. You mentioned a third thing with vsync?

[ScatLesbian69]

On 7/7/2020 at 9:13 AM, coolfreaky said:

the stability issue might be from mods that are not in a correct place in Load Order .

 

i believe you have run LOOT several times with no effect  :  just a test remove zaz.esm and DD from your left side , run Loot see if your Load Order have changed ( normally it has ) than re-install zaz and DD .    see if the game gain in stability !

 

 

second thing is more uac ;  the way that is installed in Windows Steam/skyrim and M O  / administrator , compatibility  .  it gives issues where the game does not know where he is !  specially when you have 2 skyrim.ini and 2 skyrimPrefs.ini  one in documents/skyrim special edition/   and  one in  __ M O /profile/ .   and you could modify one of them with Bethini or manually . i would suggest you to copy and past the skyrim.ini and skyrimPref.ini from MO and past them over in document/skyrim special edition .   see if the game is more stable .

 

 

their is a third thing that can be with monitor refresh rate  and  Vsync  !

Unfortunately I applied both recommend fixes to no avail. In the mean time ill look up skyrim vsync issues. Thanks for your help.

 

Edit: After a longer time testing, It does appear to occur significantly less and recover more quickly when it goes wrong. 

[chevalierx]

60 fps mean powerfull intel single core cpu , and all those script heacy mod aka dd/LL mods, smp  not stable , i search to get 60 fps in 1080 with 4790+1070

with 70 mods game look great and with some tweak and get enb with 60 fps, you need try and found best combiens of tweak mods that help 60 fps

i hate play 30 fps .

[ScatLesbian69]

On 7/8/2020 at 3:31 AM, chevalierx said:

60 fps mean powerfull intel single core cpu , and all those script heacy mod aka dd/LL mods, smp  not stable , i search to get 60 fps in 1080 with 4790+1070

with 70 mods game look great and with some tweak and get enb with 60 fps, you need try and found best combiens of tweak mods that help 60 fps

i hate play 30 fps .

To clarify, does Skyrim run better on fewer cores? It currently appears to be using all 12 cores of my 3.8(base clock) amd cpu, and my cpu stays at ~4.2 GHz under load. I have a legacy mode setting with my CPU which I can turn on to virtually consolidate cores and potentially improve performance on older applications that can't handle 12 cores. It's usually more useful in their threadripper lineup though. Nonetheless, I do agree with you that I need to find the best combination of settings to get this thing to run as stable as possible. I've also heard about the unstable nature of the mods I'm using.