Random FPS drops that occur every few minutes

[DSXX]

Posted this in the LE section by mistake.

 

I'm trying to work out the cause of some random FPS drops in my game. I've got a load of mods and I have yet to properly play because I'm testing and sorting out stuff still. However, in my tests I keep noticing that at some point in my game something triggers random FPS drops whereby it can go from around 40-50 FPS down to 1 and the freezes last for a good few seconds. This can take place both inside locations (such as even small trader shops with nothing going on) and outside in the wilderness. When I have tried some runs it takes a while for the FPS drops to kick in but whenever they do, they end up being there to stay. I did wonder whether it's something to do with the weather effects/scripts of RASS (as with one period of slow down I still had a wet shader but that may be the ENB talking) but I'm unsure through my testing.

 

Recently I tried a new game after doing XYZ, didn't have any problems and then went to my problem game and the FPS drop kicked in there but that could mean anything as it could be baked into that save and won't budge.

 

My nearly up-to-date load order is here if it helps and people do want to see. While I understand it is a big load order probably with some issues, I get the impression there may be a script or function running which triggers and is then causing these slow downs opposed to my PC having CPU/VRAM issues simply due to the circumstances whereby the slowdowns are not present initially, but eventually start up. It is hard to pin down exactly a moment where it is 'Ah I had this happen in my previous bugged game and this happen in my current, this must be the cause' as there is defintely stuff running in the background.

 

Does anyone have any points or suggestions outside of just trial and error of my turning esp's off in my load order? The most I am hoping for is finding out if there's some sort of way to see what scripts/mods are running in the background at that exact point just when this FPS drops as that would hopefully rule out whether it is indeed a script/mod.

 

Hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction as it's one of the key issues I'm trying to nail down in my neverending quest of trying to finally play this game modded.

[Shadowbroker3495]

Since your FPS drop is random, it is most likely caused by memory issues. With so many mods, sooner or later you are going to run out of memory, either system memory or VRAM. Windows starts to free memory by pushing data to harddisk/SSD pagefile, which is rather slow thus resulting in frame drop for a few seconds.

 

Your hardware specs are unknown and you don't specify which resolution you are using. With 930 mods you should have at least 32 GB system memory. Depending on your GPU VRAM, performance (high, mid or low end GPU) and monitor resolution, you should probably avoid 4K textures when possible. Since your fps is not constantly at 60 fps (even without fps drop), your CPU is working hard to keep up with handling scripts and feeding GPU with data. Script engine has a limited capacity, no matter how fast a CPU you have. For every npc near player character there is a script running. Maybe consider reducing number of mods and/or number of custom npc's a bit.

 

Concerning mods. Considering the varying technical quality of mods, getting 930 mods to play along nicely is quite a challenge. E.g. Legacy of the Dragonborn mod is a massive overhaul of the whole game. Very likely mod is going to conflict with other mods. Beyond Skyrim mod has a number of bugs reported at Nexus site. Max number of ESM/ESP mods is 255. Limit for ESL mods is quite high (4096 i think) but not all ESP mods may perform nicely when forced to be an ESL mod.

 

Is your save game size bloated? It could be an indication of a mod conflict. 

 

AFAIK there is no way to monitor script threads but you could monitor system memory and VRAM usage during gameplay.

 

[DSXX]

Hmm I see. I don't think I use many 4K textures at this rate as I wanted to avoid such issues. If I do (outside of water as I've gone for 4k there and seemed to have no issue) I've used it either on a few weapons or armours I like. I wasn't sure if it could be my specs simply due to how my FPS did just generally stay around the 40 FPS mark inside cities and outside - depending on how dense it became - so I figured it was more of a mod/script issue.

 

What obvious goto mods should I be trying to remove first outside of potentially textures? The only real NPC's I have which ups the anti would be Dragonstone and the 3DNPC/Interesting NPCs which is generally inconsistent in some of its placements. I'm hoping I have most LOTD covered with patches at this rate and yeah, definitely got some conflicts going on but wanted to see how gameplay was before I tried cracking down on this kind of stuff. I could ditch Bruma and other Beyond's but because I've hardly played BS mods I've wanted to see whether they were always worth it but with mods, opposed to going backwards and forwards, so hoped to incorporate it into the gameplay.

 

One saved game of however long (think maybe 45 minutes, potentially more as it varies throughout my testing, but this one I think I've done stuff on) which I believe had the slowdown is 16MB. Some others are 9 or 10.

 

My general specs are (probably read as old):

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 14261 MB - Running at 2560 x 1440 (32 bit) (144Hz) with a g-sync monitor

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz   4.00 GHz

16.0 GB RAM

Three disk drives, one's SSD and the other two are HDDS (the game and mods are on these two HDD's)

 

I appreciate the reply, even if my OP was limited in information.

[Shadowbroker3495]

16 GB system memory explains why you get fps drops. 930 mods use memory quite fast. There is no right number of mods but modders seem to use between 200-500 mods.

 

You actually have a lot of VRAM but unfortunately GTX 980 TI is quite old. Skyrim graphics engine is rather crappy (Skyrim LE is from 2011, SE from 2016 but same engine + Bethesda not exactly known for their technical excellence) so it requires a lot of GPU power to reach 60 fps at 1440p resolution. 1080p resolution should be no problem. You can probably play other games at 1440p without much problems, but those games are optimized for performance, which Skyrim is certainly not.

 

Your CPU is also old (4 cores/8 threads but at 3.6 GHZ. Newer CPU's are above 4 GHZ). Should be enough to play Skyrim with a moderate number of mods at 1440p, providing you are not having a lot of tasks running in the background (like streaming music from internet etc).

 

So due to Skyrim being a less than optimized game, i would suggest you try to reduce number of mods quite a lot. Visual mods should not be a big problem but mods with scripts should be reduced.

 

Finally i would suggest to change perspective of playthrough. Instead of including all mods you like (especially quest mods), be more selective and choose a fewer mods. Next playthrough you can exclude some of the mods from previous playthrough and add some new mods. Probably shorter playthroughs but spices things up so it doesn't feel like repeating the exact same gameplay.

 

 

[anjenthedog]

On 9/22/2021 at 10:55 AM, DSXX said:

I get the impression there may be a script or function running which triggers and is then causing these slow downs opposed to my PC having CPU/VRAM issues simply due to the circumstances whereby the slowdowns are not present initially, but eventually start up. It is hard to pin down exactly a moment where it is 'Ah I had this happen in my previous bugged game and this happen in my current, this must be the cause' as there is defintely stuff running in the background.

 

Does anyone have any points or suggestions outside of just trial and error of my turning esp's off in my load order? The most I am hoping for is finding out if there's some sort of way to see what scripts/mods are running in the background at that exact point just when this FPS drops as that would hopefully rule out whether it is indeed a script/mod.

FWIW, I run with a far smaller VRAM card (6G 1060SC) and yes, I get a little fps stumbling here and there,  but far less than I used to do... One thing that I've found helps reduce script bottlenecking is to stagger any status loop times in MCMs and trying to use numbers for their values that don't divide by 2, 5, or 10 (where possible... ex: use 11 instead of ten, but only for one of the loop cycle durations, use another number for any other, even 13 if you just "have to have" ~10msec-ish response time. prime numbers are optimal if they're lose to the values you're already using, and the longer you can tolerate between checks the better).

 

I have about a dozen different loops from various mods, and adjusting their values so they don't overlap has helped me. 

[alex77r4]

On 9/22/2021 at 4:55 PM, DSXX said:

Hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction as it's one of the key issues I'm trying to nail down in my neverending quest of trying to finally play this game modded.

 

First, learn to monitor your machine to know if really your game is limited by your hardware.

Configure your game to play in window without pause = Always Active.

Install GPU-z, open the chart tab and left it open.

Open the windows task manager and left it open.

Open Skyrim in window mode and play until your game stall.

Look your CPU usage, RAM usage, hard disk activity, GPU usage, Vram usage....

 

If you see high peaks in any graph you may have a hardware problem.

If not your problem is related to a mod causing problems.

Probably, some skeleton problem or a bad configured HDT.

[DSXX]

Thanks all. I'll see if I can try and nail/reduce the FPS drops with the advice given.