Questions about drawcalls, performance, and hardware

[moody132]

Recently i bought 3060ti, because my old gpu died. on 1500+ modlist without enb i have no problem with sustaining 60fps, but looking at jk riverwood or in jk rifren, (with smim, 3ba bodies but without smp, additional npc, prettier npcs etc, propably most of you have simlar modlist), frames drops to 20-30. with enb 60 is still for most of the times, but thoose dense with objects/npcs areas are getting even lower fps. I checked drawcalls on riverwood bridge, looking on riverwood is 10k+, looking other side is about 3k

 

Rest of my hardware is old af, i have 2nd gen i5 2500k, 8gb ddr3 whitch are 1600mhz but works on 1333, and i believe my pci-e slot is 1.0 or 2.0

 

Now, we all saw ultra modded Skyrim on yt, that works good with enb, even on worse gpu.

I am upgrading rest of my setup in month or two, and I wonder, if this will even make a difference?

Heard that singe core performance is important, i was planning to get 13600k, but for my gpu its most likely overkill. nonetheless, that is highest as i can go.

Other than that 32gb ddr4 3600, and nvme

 

The thing is, a few months ago i builded pc with i3 10100f, rx5700 and 16gb ddr4, and on exactly same modlist performance was pretty simlar, bit better, but way worse than i expected.

So, how is it? getting to too 10/12k drawcalls always means shitty fps, no matter what rig i have? If I remember correctly Mern said something like the CPU can tank this, if is powerful enough, on Upscaler Video.

 

You have yours modlists, share your experience.

[traison]

Well first of all, you make no mention of texture packs, yet it seem like what you're going for here is some photo-realistic visuals ("ultra modded"). Also your monitor size is going to be essential, and whether or not you have dynamic resolution enabled, and how dpi scaling affects games. Lets say for instance that you're running a 4K monitor and actually rendering Skyrim in 4K, for that I'd say you'd already want a minimum of 6 GiB of video memory. Does your 3060 have that? The larger the textures, and the larger your monitor is, the more demanding its going to get.

 

Secondly, 3060 on pcie1? That's a bit optimistic don't you think? pcie2 is fine as long as it's truly 16x. A 2nd gen i5? What is the top speed on a single core on that? 2.3? 2.5? Skyrim does not appear to be the kind of game that knows how to utilize cpu power, I mean you can easily lock up the papyrus engine with a few script heavy mods regardless of what kind of cpu you have. But still, these days you should hit 4 Ghz on a single core without turbo, as this was already achieveable 10 years ago. Ram is low, and slow compared to today's standards, but I game on 1333 as well and skyrim is not a modern game. As long as its good ram with a low CL time its fine.

 

And finally, regardless of what kind of a computer you get there is enb presets that will break it. Do not expect to run a preset intended for screen-archers at 60 fps on any kind of machine.

[moody132]

16 hours ago, traison said:

Well first of all, you make no mention of texture packs, yet it seem like what you're going for here is some photo-realistic visuals ("ultra modded"). Also your monitor size is going to be essential, and whether or not you have dynamic resolution enabled, and how dpi scaling affects games. Lets say for instance that you're running a 4K monitor and actually rendering Skyrim in 4K, for that I'd say you'd already want a minimum of 6 GiB of video memory. Does your 3060 have that? The larger the textures, and the larger your monitor is, the more demanding its going to get.

 

Well I think as long as VRAM isn't bottleneck this isn't really important in the case. I have 8GB VRAM, as soon as textures/models/graphics/stuff that goes to VRAM starts to exceed it limits, it will start sturrering.

I am using 1080p monitor for now, but planning to with 1440p with future.

And in case of Dynamic Resolution Scaling, this again seems to not be really important, if the drawcalls are the bottlenck. Right now changing res from 1080p to 720p does almost nothing for me, same thing with new DLSS/FSR mod.

16 hours ago, traison said:

Secondly, 3060 on pcie1? That's a bit optimistic don't you think? pcie2 is fine as long as it's truly 16x.

I find this also not true, I think (may be wrong tho) that even PCI-E 1.0 16x have enough bandwith to handle newer games. I played RDR2 on this PC on Max settings in 60 fps, it drops only when CPU starts to be bottleneck. Also, this, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcsRKF8xmec  or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvBovtT4Vf4

Aaaand i have PCI-E 2.0, i checked. But still, seems to be irrelavent. Differences are way smaller than i expected, when I bought gpu.

 

2500k is 4x3.3ghz on stock, mine works on 4.3. Though, GHz and cores suprisingly arent determinant if cpu is faster or slower, i builded PC with 13-10100f whitch is 4x 3.6ghz on stock, and on stock is waaaaaay better than my CPU on 4.3. but still, doesnt resolve this drawcall issue.

 

17 hours ago, traison said:

And finally, regardless of what kind of a computer you get there is enb presets that will break it. Do not expect to run a preset intended for screen-archers at 60 fps on any kind of machine.

I mean, you can see videos of people playthrough of ultra modded skyrim with Ruby, NAT, Re-enganed, etc, most popular ENBs. I want nothing more, right now i do not use any ENB, so everything will be progrss

 

I think you missed my point. Or maybe you didn't read all of my post (to be fair, it is a long post). Or maybe i wrote it incoprehesibly.

 

To simplyfy it, i wanted to know yours Skyrim players experiences, to know if you are able to maintain 60fps in thoose demanding areas, with simlar modlists; if this hipotetical new rig will be able to beef this drawcall issue, if there is any sense in buying expensive CPU. 

[traison]

Your post seemed more like a long version of "I have an old pc, and I'm planning to upgrade. Recommendations?"

 

Yes pcie bandwidth is a funny thing, despite what most people think you do not need pcie3 to run the newest and best cards. pcie1 sounded a bit optimistic though, pcie2 is fine as long as the 16x port actually has 16 channels available; this is not always the case.

 

And yes cpu ghz is obviously not telling of what the cpu will perform like. If this was true we would have hit peak performance back in the early 2000's when the first 3 Ghz cpus released.

 

Ruby is not a screen-archers enb preset as far as I know. It had the best visuals to performance impact ratio back in LE when I last used it. I guess our definitions of "ultra modded" is different.

 

As for fixing the low fps issue: Skyrim has no built in performance diagnostics that I know of. I suppose the first thing I'd do in this case is make sure it is actually Skyrim that is the issue, and not the entire machine. Once that is out of the way it's time to start dropping mods until the problem goes away I suppose.

[bnub345]

It's hard to say exactly without knowing what your mod setup is, but my guess is your CPU is bottlenecked. With a 3060ti you should be able to run easily 200+fps without a graphics mod like ENB. Mainly things like high poly meshes and lots of objects in the same area are more CPU intensive. This makes sense, as JK cities mods are notorious for the amount of junk they add into a single cell. If you use mods like SMIM and high poly project, they will make things worse. Lots of NPCs also bog down the CPU, so things like high poly heads/bodies and extra NPC mods will hurt. SMP physics is also notorious for CPU hogging. Even if the bodies don't use SMP, physics enabled clothes or hair still do. 

[alex77r4]

6 hours ago, moody132 said:

To simplyfy it, i wanted to know yours Skyrim players experiences, to know if you are able to maintain 60fps in thoose demanding areas, with simlar modlists; if this hipotetical new rig will be able to beef this drawcall issue, if there is any sense in buying expensive CPU. 

 

If the overall usage of your 4 cores is over 80%, your CPU is probably doing everything it can. That usually means bottleneck.

 

If you know what is a draw call you must know is a mono-thread process. As only one thread can make the draw calls the mono-core turbo speed is critical.

Your i5-2500K have 3.3 base and 3.7 turbo mono-core but as you have overclocked it we can't know if you have turbo.

Probably not because have 4.4 constant in all cores is better than 3.7 mono-core.

 

You ask if whit a new cpu you go to have more frames: YES
Because the main diference in the new CPUs not was the speed or the number of cores. Is the IPC = Instruction Per Call.

We are reaching spedd limits and nanometers limit. Have more cores not help mono-core task. But increase the IPC increase the computer power.

 

If you want more FPS with your actual CPU remove JK to reduce the number of objects and that reduce the number of draw calls = CPU work.

Some vegetation mods are famous by reduce FPS in old machines, because the trees have more leafs and more branches = more draw calls.

Some cities like Markarth, Riften and Solitude have a lot of objects and, if you add JK, more and more objects = more draw calls.

 

Additionally, DirectX 11 suport multi-thread render but is the game that must use it. Multi-thread render is a capacity that only some games use.

Skyrim, of course, not use it. The render engine in Special and Aniversary is the same as in Legenary. Only change the creation of the window.