CTD's/freezes with SSE - probably related to memory issues/pagefile issues

[alex77r4]

3 hours ago, phillout said:

80% of GPU usage and 80C temp mean your GPU is shitting bricks at this point, this by itself may be the cause of CTDs, like PSU not being able to supply it with enough power and then anything can happen. Purple stuff can be caused by malfunctioning GPU as well.

 

I not think that. If the computer has any problem must show it in others games.

If the PSU not have enough power the game can made CTD, yes, but only in Skyrim? Not.

If an RTX 2060 is over temp must down clock speed and give less FPS. The game must not crash.

A purple or black texture can be caused by Vram out but a nonfunctional video card must show others problems.

 

Any bad mesh or texture can cause CTD in SSE but when the texture is purple or black mean a faulting texture or a missing MipMap. I ignore it because that can not cause CTD. Normally is a fail in load order or a missing compatibility patch.

 

2 hours ago, Q2R51 said:

I've limited my frames to 59fps again, the ENB originally had it set to that. But indeed, my monitor can handle 144 and the Display Tweaks mod helped me reach higher FPS, so I had disabled the ENB's limiter. But I'm fine with 60, so I made sure that both in the ENB and in Display Tweaks the limit is set to 59 now.

 

The FPS limiter inside ENB not always work good. Some users report stuttering and erratic FPS. 

Same with the FPS limiter inside the game (iPressentInterval or iVSyncPresentInterval) because some times not work good.

I normally recommend limit the FPS in the nVidia Control Panel but some users recommend use nVidia Inspector.

 

2 hours ago, Q2R51 said:

Here's some readouts from my system load during that last test run through Skyrim, at 59fps and Ultra settings:

 

That look good for a game play with a limit of 60 FPS and your memory usage of 12 GB mean Skyrim is using 8 GB and the another 4 GB are wasted by OS, Antivirus, drivers, others running programs. Totally normal. 

Your Vram usage over 5 GB mean you have add a lot of HD texture mods. But have in mind that add textures in 4K is a waste if you not have a 4K monitor. A lot of times 2K textures is enougth.

 

If you run at super speed, of course, you go to have stuttering and frame drops because the game can not read an process cells, textures, npc's, climatology, Dyndolod and the rest of the mods at super speed. When i run at 700 speed sometimes i have locks of one entire second because i not have SSD... yes... i'm using normal HDD at 7500 rpm...

 

 

But that 80 degrees not look good. Are very near of the maximum temp.

If you play without FPS limit the Video Card generate all the possible frames, 70, 80, 90, ... and the GPU must be in a constant 100% usage. That can justify 80 degrees. But with an average usage of 80% the temp must up to 70 or 75 at max.

 

Edit -- ADD

Of course, the temp depend of the fan curve. Maybe you are using default curve and, maybe, that can up the temps a bit, but 80 degrees and 100% fan speed with an average usage of 80% is strange. 

End Edit -- 

 

Please, install GPU-Z, open the chart tab, remove the FPS limit, play a bit and look the data to get more consistent info. In the chart section of GPU-Z you can get AVG data for each graph.

 

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by alex77r4
Add paragraph

[Q2R51]

1 hour ago, alex77r4 said:

Any bad mesh or texture can cause CTD in SSE but when the texture is purple or black mean a faulting texture or a missing MipMap. I ignore it because that can not cause CTD. Normally is a fail in load order or a missing compatibility patch.

 

That's what I thought, and that's why I'm pretty confident me running Dyndolod and making a batch patch for all my mods solved that issue. I mean, the result is there, I don't see it anymore.

 

 

1 hour ago, alex77r4 said:

The FPS limiter inside ENB not always work good. Some users report stuttering and erratic FPS. 

Same with the FPS limiter inside the game (iPressentInterval or iVSyncPresentInterval) because some times not work good.

I normally recommend limit the FPS in the nVidia Control Panel but some users recommend use nVidia Inspector

 

I've set the fps to 59 in the nVidia control panel, but I kept the 60 fps limit in the ENB and Display Tweaks; I'm worried that if I turn them off/set them to their default higher values, the game will still first try to render high FPS before being throttled, which might make the GPU work harder than needed again (I'm not too familiar with how exactly the FPS limiter settings work, so my worry might be unfounded).

 

 

1 hour ago, alex77r4 said:

Your Vram usage over 5 GB mean you have add a lot of HD texture mods. But have in mind that add textures in 4K is a waste if you not have a 4K monitor. A lot of times 2K textures is enougth.

 

I know, and seems I forgot that my monitor is only 2K ?. Some texture packs I chose the 2k-4k option (mix), others I installed at 4k. I figured, now that I finally have a good gaming pc and monitor, I should try to enjoy it, but I forgot that 2k is all I could push (well, perhaps a bit more, my display officially is 'QHD'). I'll reinstall those packs again at 2K, and re-run Loot, Dyndolod and Wyre Bash after I do that. No biggy, and might save a bit of CPU/GPU load.

 

 

1 hour ago, alex77r4 said:

But that 80 degrees not look good. Are very near of the maximum temp.

If you play without FPS limit the Video Card generate all the possible frames, 70, 80, 90, ... and the the GPU must be in a constant 100% usage. That can justify 80 degrees. But with an average usage of 80% the temp must up to 70 or 75 at max

 

That's what I thought as well, that the GPU might just be trying to render so much even though it can't or shouldn't push out so many frames.

 

Here's a first GPU-Z output (avg), from 5 minutes of play. Looks pretty normal to me. AVG might be a bit low due to the first minute being startup still. It was constantly raining and thundering during my gameplay, which would tax the GPU even more, I'd think, so that makes those values extra good/normal, no?

 

 

I'll go down to 2K textures and run a game again as test, with GPU-Z. But after that, I think, I can safely and happily start playing a real game from scratch, finally.

 

Edited August 7, 2021 by Q2R51

[Q2R51]

Here's a log of about 5 mins of gameplay; averages but taken only during gameplay, no low-resource startup. Using the 2k textures now. All looks fairly reasonable to me.

 

 

I'll remove the FPS limit again now, just as an experiment, and do the same measurements. After that... I'm going to game, finally ?

Edited August 7, 2021 by Q2R51

[Q2R51]

And here's the final log; all in-game FPS-limiters set to 240, and the nVidia one was off. Ran the same path and length as in the log above. Depending on the area I had 70 to 80 fps (bit surprised, with lower textures, that I wasn't consistently getting 80+ this time). In-menu I had 144fps (my monitor's max). GPU load by the end was at 80-83%, but the temp was much lower than that one weird situation yesterday. I'm wondering whether my GPU fan settings were acting correctly then.

 

Strangely enough the log below shows a much higher avg GPU load (97%). The values of 80-83% were the ones MSI Afterburner was giving me.

 

[alex77r4]

30 minutes ago, Q2R51 said:

I've set the fps to 59 in the nVidia control panel, but I kept the 60 fps limit in the ENB and Display Tweaks; I'm worried that if I turn them off/set them to their default higher values, the game will still first try to render high FPS before being throttled, which might make the GPU work harder than needed again (I'm not too familiar with how exactly the FPS limiter settings work, so my worry might be unfounded).

 

Not, that is not correct. You must use only one method to limit the FPS.

If you have multiple programs limiting the FPS at the same time, first, they can fight one against the others, and second, you have multiple programs or mods making the same work wasting CPU. Think that at 60 FPS you get one frame each 16.6666666666666666666 ( many 6) Milliseconds and the exact moment can depend of how the program manage the decimals.

If you have it enabled in nVidia Control Panel is enough because, probably, the driver of the video card ignore the order of show the frame generated from the others programs or mods.

 

47 minutes ago, Q2R51 said:

I know, and seems I forgot that my monitor is only 2K

 

Some times is convenient have texture sizes over your resolution.

For example, i use body textures of 2k in my 1k monitor and some tats have 4k resolution because not show good in 2k.

But i have the normal textures for grass, rocks, buildings and static objects in 1k or half.

That only depend of how you want see the game and what can support your machine.

 

54 minutes ago, Q2R51 said:

Here's a first GPU-Z output (avg), from 5 minutes of play. Looks pretty normal to me.

 

The data are not conclusive because the chart is not totally filled. The AVG is computed using the entire chart.

Give more time to the next test.

 

That was a run without FPS limit?

Seems that you GPU usage is too high and that make me think is a test without FPS limit.

But the Perf Cap is Idle and that that make me think is a test with FPS limit.

Additionally, the temp are very low and that match with a run with FPS limit.

 

I want you make a large test without FPS limit to test your video card. If you want, of course.

That must put the video card in a constant 100% usage and, when the temp up, the fans must be at max speed and the GPU temp must be near 80 degrees. That is normal.

 

Of course, when you make normal play with the FPS limited at 60 you never must get 80 degrees.

 

[Q2R51]

3 minutes ago, alex77r4 said:

 

Not, that is not correct. You must use only one method to limit the FPS.

If you have multiple programs limiting the FPS at the same time, first, they can fight one against the others, and second, you have multiple programs or mods making the same work wasting CPU. Think that at 60 FPS you get one frame each 16.6666666666666666666 ( many 6) Milliseconds and the exact moment can depend of how the program manage the decimals.

If you have it enabled in nVidia Control Panel is enough because, probably, the driver of the video card ignore the order of show the frame generated from the others programs or mods.

 

 

I've disabled all frame rate limiters now, except the one in the nVidia control panel. Thx for the tip!

 

 

4 minutes ago, alex77r4 said:

That was a run without FPS limit?

Seems that you GPU usage is too high and that make me think is a test without FPS limit.

But the Perf Cap is Idle and that that make me think is a test with FPS limit.

Additionally, the temp are very low and that match with a run with FPS limit.

 

I want you make a large test without FPS limit to test your video card. If you want, of course.

That must put the video card in a constant 100% usage and, when the temp up, the fans must be at max speed and the GPU temp must be near 80 degrees. That is normal.

 

Of course, when you make normal play with the FPS limited at 60 you never must get 80 degrees.

 

 

My first 2 charts were both with the FPS frame limit on (first one with some 4k textures still, the second one with the 2K textures).

 

The third and last chart above this post is with the frame limit off. The GPU load there is about 100% according to GPU-Z, but as I said, strangely enough MSI Afterburner reported a lower instantaneous load of around 80-83% all the time.

 

The chart not being full doesn't matter in this case I think; I used the 'reset' button once I was in game, and that cleared the graphs. That's the empty part you see before the red bars. But I don't think it's taking that into account; if you look at the last screenshot, GPU load is at 97%, on average, while almost half of the bar is empty. So that couldn't be 97% if it takes the empty space into account, it would be closer to 55-60%. If you hit reset, I think it also resets the 'time' that the avg starts counting from.

 

 

[alex77r4]

18 minutes ago, Q2R51 said:

The chart not being full doesn't matter in this case I think; I used the 'reset' button once I was in game

That is correct. Normally, i write a lot because i not want bad interpretations but this time i write a bit less of the necessary.

As you say, the AVG value is computed using the filled chart, not the entire chart as i write. Use the reset button is the best method to clear the chart and get correct AVG data.

 

22 minutes ago, Q2R51 said:

The GPU load there is about 100% according to GPU-Z, but as I said, strangely enough MSI Afterburner reported a lower instantaneous load of around 80-83% all the time.

 

That perfect explain why you get 80 degrees while you the see 80% of GPU usage.

You are getting 80-90 FPS and that mean the FPS limit are not active and, of course, the GPU are really at 100% and logically the temp up to 80 degrees. Totally normal.

 

But why you get bad data from MSI Afterburner? Maybe you have an old version? That is really strange.

[phillout]

What's the point of this discussion anyway? 

 

Unless you've got a faulty hardware, the game will not crash if you have the GPU running at 100% and hot- GPU will throttle and the game will run slow, but won't crash.

 

If your game uses a lot of memory, it won't crash, SE isn't LE and its heap size is practically unlimited - you'll unlikely to ever hit address space limit of 2TB on Windows 10 Pro or even 128GB on Home. There was a person here reporting problems with the game, it was a conflict of SL Defeat and several NPC mods IIRC. The game used up 24GB of memory, it was hitting the swap non-stop and lagged - but still wasn't crashing. It's almost impossible to crash SSE by using up resources, and this extends to Papyrus as well - I had 20k of threads running, crashing and freezing thanks to the shitty KS Dragon Overhaul 2, the script lag was about 40 seconds, but the game didn't crash even once.

 

The most popular reasons of SE crashing would be

1. Broken assets (meshes, textures, animations) - those are responsible for probably 80% of problems. Not shockingly, .Net crash dump you've posted has a lot of mentions of textures as well. Pink textures would be a dead giveaway if you wouldn't ignore the issue and tried to hide it under the rug with Bash and Dyndolod. The thing is - they are still there in the game, and the game may load them even if they are not rendered - simply referenced by some ESP.
2. bugs in various mods, both SKSE64-based, and others - there are known mods making your game crash-prone, but unsurprisingly, more than half of problems in those also related to #1
3. mod conflicts - such as one mod trying to change a reference deleted in another. But this type is quite rare these days.

But it seems you have no interest in fixing the issue, it's almost as if you want someone to confirm your brilliant hypothesis "it crashes because memory/swapfile". 

 

P.S. and why on Earth you'd have both ELFX and Lux in your load order? This alone could create shittons of conflicts. Lux needs only assets from ELFX, and its installation manual specifically mentions removing the ESP.

Edited August 7, 2021 by phillout

[Q2R51]

10 hours ago, phillout said:

What's the point of this discussion anyway? 

 

Unless you've got a faulty hardware, the game will not crash if you have the GPU running at 100% and hot- GPU will throttle and the game will run slow, but won't crash.

 

If your game uses a lot of memory, it won't crash, SE isn't LE and its heap size is practically unlimited - you'll unlikely to ever hit address space limit of 2TB on Windows 10 Pro or even 128GB on Home. There was a person here reporting problems with the game, it was a conflict of SL Defeat and several NPC mods IIRC. The game used up 24GB of memory, it was hitting the swap non-stop and lagged - but still wasn't crashing. It's almost impossible to crash SSE by using up resources, and this extends to Papyrus as well - I had 20k of threads running, crashing and freezing thanks to the shitty KS Dragon Overhaul 2, the script lag was about 40 seconds, but the game didn't crash even once.

 

The most popular reasons of SE crashing would be

1. Broken assets (meshes, textures, animations) - those are responsible for probably 80% of problems. Not shockingly, .Net crash dump you've posted has a lot of mentions of textures as well. Pink textures would be a dead giveaway if you wouldn't ignore the issue and tried to hide it under the rug with Bash and Dyndolod. The thing is - they are still there in the game, and the game may load them even if they are not rendered - simply referenced by some ESP.
2. bugs in various mods, both SKSE64-based, and others - there are known mods making your game crash-prone, but unsurprisingly, more than half of problems in those also related to #1
3. mod conflicts - such as one mod trying to change a reference deleted in another. But this type is quite rare these days.

But it seems you have no interest in fixing the issue, it's almost as if you want someone to confirm your brilliant hypothesis "it crashes because memory/swapfile". 

 

P.S. and why on Earth you'd have both ELFX and Lux in your load order? This alone could create shittons of conflicts. Lux needs only assets from ELFX, and its installation manual specifically mentions removing the ESP.

 

To be honest, I don't understand why you are being so aggressive towards me. I've consistently tested things that were suggested to me, including from you (like checking and changing the fan curve of the GPU). The only thing I didn't do is dive deeper into the 'purple pebble' issue that I saw appear once.

 

I think the fact I have spent over 10 days now, 6 of which were nearly full-time, in solving my issues shows that I have plenty of interest in fixing them. I also have never pushed the idea of a memory/swapfile issue as my own; it was the conclusion of another forum, where several members acted just like you tbh, and I shared that here as I have shared every bit of information that I thought could be useful. That's called being methodical and complete, which can only benefit those trying to help me. Do you prefer me posting 'I have CTDs, tell me what is wrong'? It's also the exact reason why this discussion is still ongoing ("what's the point of this discussion anyway?"). It is being talked about because both Alex and me do really want to understand the issue, even if somehow it seems solved. Which again points to the fact I'm more than open to testing and investigating.
I also made it clear I am not knowledgeable in plenty of the deeper functions of such things. Claiming I'm trying to get 'my brilliant hypothesis' confirmed really can't be further from the truth and is a voluntary mischaracterisation on your part, for whatever reason.

 

Lux, which I'm no longer using, indeed has the requirement to have the assets from ELFX. As I pointed out several times, I've done exactly as the installer says: ELFX is installed still, but the esp is disabled in the plugin-section of MO2. Afaik, disabling an esp has the exact same effect as removing it. Is that not correct? Either way you'll be happy to know I have ditched lux and went with ELFX for the interiors in my latest install. Don't worry, this noob wasn't dumb enough to also install the exterior part of ELFX.

Some of your theories and knowledge also seem to be contradicted by Alex. He's been consistently giving me good, thorough information, patience and support in tackling my problem and seeing this through. If you feel people are ignoring your advice, or doubting it, try being kind for once, rather than acting like a hurt know-it-all after 1 single post that you feel doesn't do exactly what you suggested. People might actually listen.

 

And now I will go and enjoy my crash-free game; the fact you don't seem content I'm enjoying it rather than trying to solve issues I no longer see tells me enough about why you're here.

[phillout]

10 hours ago, Q2R51 said:

 

To be honest, I don't understand why you are being so aggressive towards me.

 

 

Not towards you, but towards those endless walls of irrelevant text and graphics that make it kinda hard to comprehend what's actually going on for anyone trying to figure out what's the problem - including myself.

 

Quote

Some of your theories and knowledge also seem to be contradicted by Alex.

 

What makes you think I care? I'm not "Alex", I'm not obliged to sing in chorus with anyone.

 

Quote

Claiming I'm trying to get 'my brilliant hypothesis' confirmed really can't be further from the truth and is a voluntary mischaracterisation on your part, for whatever reason.

 

Again, this is from the title of the post you've made. Have you looked at your own post's title? The one saying "probably related to memory issues/pagefile issues"? Oh, someone from other forum, as evil as me, made you do it.

 

And now you blame me for "mischaracterisation".

 

Have fun with Alex, I'm not intervening anymore.

Edited August 8, 2021 by phillout

[BillyG]

On 8/7/2021 at 4:16 PM, alex77r4 said:

Any bad mesh or texture can cause CTD in SSE but when the texture is purple or black mean a faulting texture or a missing MipMap. I ignore it because that can not cause CTD. Normally is a fail in load order or a missing compatibility patch.

 

 

I've got some purple textures, but very far in between (rocks at the compfire, chains on a bridge). I ran CAO on the folder, didn't help - but I didn't unpack every bsa yet.

 

Question: You're saying the purple textrure might be because of missing mip maps. CAO has the option to generate these, but it says performance will suffer ... which is not something my current system can take.  But out of interest: Did someone generate mip maps with CAO, did it help with purple textures, and how's the performance? Thanks!

[alex77r4]

2 hours ago, BillyG said:

 

I've got some purple textures, but very far in between (rocks at the compfire, chains on a bridge). I ran CAO on the folder, didn't help - but I didn't unpack every bsa yet.

 

Question: You're saying the purple textrure might be because of missing mip maps. CAO has the option to generate these, but it says performance will suffer ... which is not something my current system can take.  But out of interest: Did someone generate mip maps with CAO, did it help with purple textures, and how's the performance? Thanks!

 

Purple textures can not be solved by CAO because a purple texture is a missing texture. When the game show a purple texture is because the DDS file referenced by the ESP or inside the NIF not exist in the specified path. That never can cause CTD because an un-existing file can not cause any problem except, of course, show a purple color.

 

To solve yours purple textures revise your mod list, verify the correct installation of the mods, reinstall the suspect mods, revise your load order and verify that your have all the necessary compatibility patch.

 

 

Black textures, normally, are caused by missing mipmaps because the game has been designed to use textures in DDS format with MipMaps. Every vanilla texture has MipMaps and every texture file from any mod must have MipMaps  because, when the texture not have MipMaps, the game generate it on the fly, using CPU and pure RAM. The game need it and generate it at run time.

 

2 hours ago, BillyG said:

but it says performance will suffer

 

Seems that you misunderstand this paragraph:

• Generate Mipmaps - Generates mipmaps for textures, improving game performance at the cost of larger file size and increased VRAM usage.

Generate MipMaps increase the performance because, as i said, if the texture not have mipmpap the game must generate it on the fly, at running time. But use mipmaps have a cost in hard disk space and Vram.

Mainly, is strongly recommended use MipMaps because reduce stuttering and frame drops.

 

If you have an old video card with only 2 GB of Vram, as i have, you must select yours mods careful to not over fill your Vram and, if necessary, reduce texture size. But, please, run a tool to create MipMaps because the gain in performance perfectly justify the Vram usage.

Edited August 8, 2021 by alex77r4

[BillyG]

27 minutes ago, alex77r4 said:

Seems that you misunderstand this paragraph:

• Generate Mipmaps - Generates mipmaps for textures, improving game performance at the cost of larger file size and increased VRAM usage.

If you have an old video card with only 2 GB of Vram, as i have, you must select yours mods careful to not over fill your Vram and, if necessary, reduce texture size. But, please, run a tool to create MipMaps because the gain in performance perfectly justify the Vram usage.

Actually, I'm on only 1 GB of dedicated VRam :-\ that's why I remembered the CAO tooltip as "not a good idea" (for my setup). But of course you're correct, and with any more modern system this should be selected in CAO...

 

Thank you for your helpful response concerning the missing textures! I had never figured this out and at some point just ignored it, but you gave an excellent description of the causes and fix.

 

Edit: Concerning "check your load order" - is there a load order guide for all the LL mods? I see plenty of guides around for generic Nexus stuff, but I'm rather clueless where to put Sexlab, FNIS/DAR, Chargen (COT, Skins, ...), DD, Armor/Clothing, Followers, Quests, ... except that a lot of description pages state "when in doubt, put as low in your load order as possible" which isn't possible to do for all at the same time.

 

Edited August 8, 2021 by BillyG

[alex77r4]

2 hours ago, BillyG said:

Actually, I'm on only 1 GB of dedicated VRam :-\ that's why I remembered the CAO tooltip as "not a good idea" (for my setup). But of course you're correct, and with any more modern system this should be selected in CAO...

 

How many years have your video card?

My old GTX is 6 years old but, at least, allow me play in full hd with 2k textures on body and some textures in 4k at 50 FPS average.

Of course, some times i have frame drops when change cells but is totally normal because i know what can make my machine.

 

About the MipMaps i only can repeat my words. The base game has it and every mod must have it. If you found a mod whitout MipMaps you must alert the developer because the missing mipmap cause a lot of strange situations like bad textures yesterday but but good textures today.

 

2 hours ago, BillyG said:

Edit: Concerning "check your load order" - is there a load order guide for all the LL mods? I see plenty of guides around for generic Nexus stuff, but I'm rather clueless where to put Sexlab, FNIS/DAR, Chargen (COT, Skins, ...), DD, Armor/Clothing, Followers, Quests, ... except that a lot of description pages state "when in doubt, put as low in your load order as possible" which isn't possible to do for all at the same time.

 

The magical tool that you are searching exist from a lot of years ago. Is called LOOT.

Some users hate it and strongly recommend never use LOOT but after 8 years playing Skyrim and 5 years developing mods i can assure you LOOT is one of the best tools ever made.

LOOT is not perfect, of course, not always order yours mods in a perfect order, sometimes have fails and put a mod in a bad position causing problems. But that have a very easy solution:

https://loot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/app/usage/plugin_editor.html

 

I normally play with 230 or 240 plugins, more than 300 mods, half of them from this web site, but i only have 4 or 5 personalized rules to order, in a manual way, the mods that LOOT put in a bad position. For example, one of my rules say Put Beastess after Untamed.

The description of the mods say they are incompatibles but that is not true. The reality is:

If you put Beastess before Untamed, as LOOT made, the mods are incompatibles.

If you put Beastess after Untamed, as my personal rule made, the mods are compatibles and work good.

 

Not worry about the load order of the plugins because, in the majority of the situations, is absolutely indifferent where the mod appear in the plugin list. Normally, no matter if you put DCUR at the start or the end of the list. If DCUR not works, probably, is caused by a problem in the installation of the dependencies and not by their position in the plugin list.

But some special mods require a special order of their plugins, like Yiffy Age, and LOOT make a very bad work when order their plugins. Practically, every user of Yiffy Age know it and you only need add some rules inside LOOT to solve the problem.

 

About put the plugin in the last position is a simple measure to win all the possible conflicts and determine if the problem, really, is caused by a conflict that come from a bad load or from a bad compatibility path. One of the mods that is recommend put very low in the plugin list is Virgin because can have a lot of conflicts with others mods.

 

Finally, i use Vortex, that have integrated LOOT, and every time i add or change a mod, Vortex execute LOOT to order the plugins.

That mean i'm executing LOOT practically every day without any problem. But of course, i have my own rules to correct the fails of LOOT, because i said, LOOT is not perfect.

 

Let my ask... If LOOT is so bad as some people say... Why is integrated in Vortex?

Edited August 9, 2021 by alex77r4

[BillyG]

2 hours ago, alex77r4 said:

How many years have your video card?

It's a 2013 laptop with a dedicated nVidia DX11 GPU, combined with 8GB system ram.

 

I've been able to play everything at ok-lowish settings so far, last one I played was Dragon Age Inqusition. When I thought about getting a gaming deskop I was hindered by too high power consumption for regular work (the lower-powered 35-65 Watts CPU/APU are just being released now), so I'm still using the laptop.... gaming laptops are way out of my pice reach. And/Or integrated graphics didn't seem to be worth spending a lot of money on yet, plus dedicated GPU prices skyrocketed.

 

Well, if I ever get FO4 and Skyrim modded with the mods I like, I might upgrade. I'll run the mipmaps and hope it'll help some.

 

2 hours ago, alex77r4 said:

Let my ask... If LOOT is so bad as some people say... Why is integrated in Vortex?

 

It's integrated in MO2, too - and I run it all the time, based on a rough grouping in MO2 "x depends on y patches z". LOOT does basic dependency sorting and has some helpful output "esp x is optional" or "if you use esp y, then deactivate z".

 

As you know, no one should dare to admit using LOOT in a forum though, it's frowned upon a lot. The the true way is said to be a manual sort order combined with hand-edited bash/xedit patches. Well, what can I say - I'm running Mator Smash, too, but don't tell anyone :-p

 

However, whenever something doesn't work I'm getting a guilty concience because I'm using LOOT... because I still don't really know what mod conflicts result in. If it's a missing texture I don't care, if it's one armor overwritten by another I don't really care either. 

 

If it's essential quest dialoges not being available, quest items not available at merchants or in chets, or scripts going bersek, getting me stuck, I do care - but alas, I don't know if these problems are general mod overload, mod conflicts, mod positioning or simply buggy mods :-\

 

I agree the mod positioning should not be that important if you have a look at the conflicts in xedit. Just now I'm still having a rough look at mods and am diciding what to use at all, so I'm not budy with fine tuning yet on Skyrim. I had an ok FONV setup running.

Edited August 9, 2021 by BillyG

[alex77r4]

7 hours ago, BillyG said:

However, whenever something doesn't work I'm getting a guilty concience because I'm using LOOT... because I still don't really know what mod conflicts result in.

 

Sometimes the problem can be caused by LOOT but only in a very specific groups of mods, like Yifi Age, where LOOT make a bad work.

The rest of the situations, normally, not have any relation with LOOT or with the order of the plugins.

 

Why the game has problems is the question that everybody want know but the answer vary a lot depending of the situation.

Skyrim has different levels to give problems and, sometimes, is not easy locate the problem.

 

The first level is at file level. We only can have one single group of files to show an object, mesh and textures, and that level is the left pane in MO. Depending of how we order the mods in the left panel we make different replacements of the files. That is the first point to look in case of problems.

 

The second level is at ESP level. We only can have one single record inside the ESP's referencing one object and that level is the right pane in MO. Depending of how we order the plugins in the right panel we make different replacements in the ESP's. That is the second point to look in case of problems.

 

The third level is at mod level. We only can have one single mod making a specified work in the game, like climatology or illumination, and depending of what mods we install, their exact mod order and their exact order in the plugin list we can get a mix of the different mods working.

 

The four level is again at mod level but related to a fail in the mod. Sometimes we made everything in the correct way but the game continue having problems and the mod not work. We can end bald looking for the problem because we can not solve the problem.

 

Know exactly why a mod cause problems is not an easy task. Sometimes we install things in a bad way. Others times the mod order is not correct. Others times we have collisions and conflicts at ESP level. But others times the solution is out of our hands.

The best way to locate a problem is disable mods until the problem disappear and slowly enable mods to have it again. That give us the two problematic mods and, at this point, we can start investigate where is the problem: File? ESP? Incompatibility? Bad mod?

 

As i said, the only real way is have patience and make investigations until locate the problem.