LT Roarke's PC and the Incredible Resource Consuming Physics Mod (or I learned to stop complaining and love HDT-SMP)

[Roarke]

Hello there. Stick around and let me tell you a story. A story about how I went mad and nearly broke my Skyrim SE setup over something silly. It all started when I caved in and bought a new GPU.

 

For months I've been looking to upgrade my pc with the latest and greatest. My GTX 1080 FE was showing it's age and I really wanted to play Control Ultimate Edition and Horizon Zero Dawn on max settings without losing frames. I've scoured the wasteland known as online retail stores for a two generational upgrade for my pc. None could be found anywhere I looked. RTX 3080's are sold out everywhere and the only place I could find them was in online resellers for triple the price. Even trying to join a raffle for one is impossible with the amount of bots picking the websites clean.

 

So, I did what any pc gamer does, and buy a GPU from another brand. The RX 6800 XT isn't the upgrade I wanted but one I could use for older and newer games. AMD doesn't beat Nvidia in ray tracing but it certainly does without it, and some games that advertise ray tracing aren't all that good anyway (Looking at you Cyberpunk and BFV). That card's 16GB of VRAM is nothing to scoff at. I might even buy Red Dead Redemption 2 just to see how far I can max the settings and take extreme close-up photos of wildlife. I dunno; I'm tired waiting for stores to restock the good GPUs and desperate for that silky smooth 60+ fps.

 

I placed the order, waited a week, got the new GPU and swapped out the old one. Let me tell ya, the RX 6800 XT is a fat one. I had to reorganize my cable management just to make it fit. Once I got it working, I began checking every game I downloaded to update graphics settings. I had to disable Nvidia hair works on Witcher 3 (sorry Geralt); remove Nvidia Physx from Borderlands 2 (no more debris and gooey slime); it was a chore to make sure every game was ready since Radeon's Adrenalin software doesn't pull settings and optimizes games like GeForce Experience. I'll have to go back to the old school way of changing settings and checking performance. Oh, well.

 

 

It was after a long night of looking at webpages to see if I could get away with leaving some Nvidia based settings on, that I thought I was ready to check how Skyrim fared with this beast of a graphics card. I know Gamebryo is an old engine and just getting a new GPU won't change much, but I didn't care; it was my hubris to think a powerful GPU would change anything.

 

And here's what happened next:

 

Spoiler

 

DA FUCK?

 

Hmm... maybe I just need the new driver without WHQL? Yeah, let's try that.

 

No changes? Ok, then. Maybe it's a papyrus dealie; I've heard those things are RAM hogs but I got 32GB RAM. Let's try resetting some mods in MCM and see if that helps.

 

Nothing?... How the hell is this game not trying to max out the frames with the limit on?

 

There aren't that many NPCs in Morthal and it's not like I got a lot of mods that change AI or anything. And if it's this bad here, I don't want to fast travel to Whiterun or Riften. Skyrim SE sometimes CTDs for no reason other than getting my character decapitated!

 

How was I getting 30-40 fps (max 60 fps in interiors) with an old card only to be brought down to this garbage?! HOW?!

 

I was starting to get delirious. I was pointing fingers at mods that are still in development and I knew had nothing to do with my problem. Was it you Fertility Mode v3 Fixes? A replacement for Beeing Female that seems too simple to be without fault. Maybe you've got something to hide?

Or maybe it was you Sexlab Approach Redux? I have to keep an eye on you because you keep breaking quests from another mod and half the time I'm trying to fix parts of you in xEdit. Should I completely gut you out of my Skyrim mod order? Get rid of your brethren BaboDialogue and SLHH as well?

 

I was going crazy! I wasn't about to spend an evening trying to fix things that shouldn't have been a problem! I started attacking Morthal's residents out of frustration, and at level 50 with max armor perks, the guards could barely do any damage to me, even with ASIS giving them player perks. I started removing equipment just to give them a fair fight; their puny strikes couldn't save the town from a dragon on easy mode anyway. "Become my amusement and relief for a problem you didn't cause!"

 

And then it happened. As I removed gear, my FPS started to come back. I enable ENB overlay to check as I fought the town and sure enough, there was an improvement. But why?

It dawned on me that the equipment I was removing had HDT-SMP enabled physics. Each one I took off stabilized my game more, I even removed my companion's gear just to see that sweet 60 fps again. Was HDT-SMP always this bad?

 

 

I knew HDT-SMP was a resource hog but I never knew how bad as my GTX 1080 FE had minimal problems trying to run multiple instances of physics based equipment. The only times I encountered CTDs was when I played for too long or ran from city to city. Maybe Nvidia's Physx could carry such a burden, but I wouldn't know since I never bother checking how to optimize Skyrim and I was content with having anything above 30 fps. That was my console years; not going back to that.

 

Maybe AMD wasn't all what I thought it was out to be. Sure, I can run most games on max settings without ray tracing (didn't like it much on Control anyway) but not being able to handle a physics based mod is kind of a deal breaker. I really like how the hair flows as my character pirouettes and the slight peek of her underwear when her ass bounces the skirt up when she runs. What's the point of running mods on Skyrim otherwise?

 

 

I've searched the forums for a fix but nothing has been made yet. The original mod author for HDT-SMP has retired and abandoned the mod. One guy, Karonar1, has taken it upon himself to try to fix the mod's dependency on CPU from the ground up but it's too early to tell if there's proper development for existing problems. Maybe there will be a fix in the future as many cultured gamers can't live without bouncy boobies and butts that move with realistic force. I can only hope the fix will come soon, until then:

 

[27X]

So much work explaining nothing and wrong section. Sensing a pattern.

 

1. SMP physics are not and NEVER were all in one. Ever. Anyone and ANY PATREON that tells you they are is both an idiot and a liar. SMP has to be tailored directly to YOUR system, setting by setting. This includes each and every xml, and if your response is either "what xml" or "where xml" or "Notepad++ is difficult to install and all I see are weird symbols" You should not be using SMP. Ever. Even after you learn what all the word in there mean.

 

Quote

But there's only like 6 settings

 

A. Wrong and B, Did you actually try to change any of them? Did you make an objective test suite? Do you know what an objective test suite is?

 

The original SMP entry clearly stated user operated settings and the phrase "do-it-yourself" and while that phrase was the chinese equivalent, it translates pretty damn directly.

 

If you've been jamming random xmls into skyrim, well no shit your framerate is hosed. None of them were crafted for your exact system specs and timing. OpenCL is literally dependent on such. Literally how the API is written.

 

2. AMD hasn't supported OpenCL since 2018. AMD is pretty infamous for starting open source shit and then promptly finding something else shiny to gawk at and parade around in tech circles as the new hotness and promptly abandoning when a gnat in Madagascar farts. Like Vulkan. The everybody everyman render API for all the peoples of the world, god bless us everyone.

 

You know who's been killing it at updating Vulkan and getting it to work with all kinds of shit like Android and APUs and custom SoCs so everybody can has shiny pichurs? nVidia. You know why you can now run Left for Dead, a game made in 2009 on Vulkan and get 500 billion fps? nVidia. Where is AMD? Good question. The API they literally helped Kronos establish is nowhere to be found in their SKU line up. You know who still supports OpenCL? nVidia.

 

What you should be doing if you're actually serious about SMP is tailoring each and every controller file and registry file entry to your EXACT specs.

 

That starts with first using CBP on a single body and tailoring those results until you get exactly what you want. Once your happy with that, you expand to the rest of whatever meshes you're going to use and see exactly what kind of hit you're going to be taking.

 

Then you install SMP in the exact same way. On ONE character. And then you read, and read a lot. and then you alter the xml entry and the controller file thereof to be optimal for your system, which also includes being honest about how much of a hit you're actually taking outdoor and in crowds versus what effect/affect you actually intend to have, including every point of self-collision. At no point until well after xml is satisfactory should a single piece of armor be installed, because the next step is running that xml on any other npc you intend to include. Why? Because each character is capable of having their own xml tailored to their exact body, that's why.

 

When those actually run correctly long term, then and only then do you even consider using any armor. What applies to bodies also applies to armor, no matter how many more or less collision nodes are present.

 

Even if Karonar gets 100% AVX removal AND 100% GPU utilization, these rules will still apply. You want it to work right, it has to be done manually.

[donttouchmethere]

?‍♂️

[Roarke]

@27X This is just me ranting about how I thought SMP was some kind of plug n' play system that users could use for hair and armor mods. I've never bothered to see how Nvidia and AMD are comparing to each other industry wise, and I don't know enough about OpenCL to make a good argument. As you said, SMP is tailored for experienced users who know how to change settings to fit their builds, and I don't know how to make sure the plugin works efficiently. I just realized I have a lot of reading ahead of me if I want to fix it on my end and getting a new video card wasn't gonna fix anything.

 

I just never knew how bad optimization was and figured it had something to do with some buggy mod or aging video card (which I was going to replace soon). I jumped the gun at getting something shiny and new, and now I merely resigned myself to dealing with a borked setting that I wasn't gonna try to fix. I had enough dealing with Nvidia Physx constantly crashing Borderlands 2 when it wasn't an issue before RTX updates and I wasn't gonna miss hairworks on Witcher 3 if it meant I could run max graphics on anything I wanted.

 

I'll look into getting SMP to work right again someday now that I know Karonar's fixes won't work the way I thought it.