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Is CPU or Graphics Card the bottleneck with SMP?

TheRightDoorIsNotTheLeft

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KoolHndLuke

KoolHndLuke

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It's not just your hardware that may limit how much physics and stuff you put into the game, but also the game itself. Skyrim wasn't designed with support for any of this stuff in mind really. But I think with the help of other mods that boost or enhance it's performance, you can do more. Physics is more cpu intensive since it needs a fuck-ton more calculations per frame.

 

 

Edited by KoolHndLuke
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Guest

Guest

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Like Kool said, these days the bottleneck is almost always the engine. You can have a 4090 with a top of the line i9 and Skyrim will run at 5 FPS is you make it do too much. If you're going to be throwing a bunch of physics into your game, you should really prioritize your options and focus more on what you need rather than what you want. For example, body physics are probably more important than armor physics, especially if you're running around with BD's or TAWOBA. Hair physics might be pointless if you character has short hair (or if you use Proteus since, to my knowledge, it still doesn't play nice with SMP hair). Maybe you only have SMP enabled for your player and not anyone else. I think 3BA actually has a hotkey to toggle SMP or CBPC for player and NPCs.

 

It's a balancing act. You can't play Skyrim in 4k res with all 4k textures and everything SMP'd. The engine literally can't handle it. Focus on things that you spend the most time looking at and are important to you.

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Pamatronic

Pamatronic

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2 hours ago, 4hed said:

It's a balancing act. You can't play Skyrim in 4k res with all 4k textures and everything SMP'd. The engine literally can't handle it. Focus on things that you spend the most time looking at and are important to you.

Tha´ts complete and utter nonsense.

4k graphics will only eat up some Vram. SMP on the other Hand is a physics thing. these two require completely different resources.
The Limit is set by the hardware. Engine limitations have pretty much been overcome by SKSE(plugins) and enb.
 

To answer the original question:
SMP is more on the CPU side, but youd need a REALLY old cpu in order for this to become a bottleneck. I myself run a over 10 year old i7-4770k and never had any problems with smp.
In general, you graphics card is far more likely to be a FPS limiter in skyrim. rendering the enviroment is far more taxing then physic calculations.

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Guest

Guest

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I'm not speaking nonsense. Engine limits in heavily modded load orders are pretty common knowledge (or so I thought). If you're playing 1080p, you can go a lot further than if you try to 4k, but at some point you will hit engine limits and it will affect FPS, regardless of your hardware. I drop below 60 FPS at times on 1080p and my CPU and GPU are nowhere near 100% utilized when it happens (for reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph).

 

Resolution is related to SMP more than you think: Both of them are CPU bound. While SMP can use multiple cores (and is infamous for its CPU use), draw calls (used for telling the GPU what to draw on screen) can't. It only uses the first core due to the engine. 4k has to draw four times as much on the screen compared to 1080p. If you're using SMP on hair, body, and clothes, running in native 4k res, and running through the forest near Falkreath, you're going to have a bad time due to that first core being hit hard. Hell, you'd probably have a bad time standing outside of Whiterun and spinning around.

 

Native 4k res, with full 4k texture packs, with full SMP, and an ENB is not going to be a fun experience, even on a top tier i9 and 4090 Ti. It'll look fantastic in screenshots, but you're not going to be able to actually play it that well. You might get a decent framerate in a cave, but the outside world is going to suck. If you want to be able to play the game at a stable 60+ FPS you absolutely have to do the balancing act I mentioned in my previous reply. The engine forces you to.

Edited by 4hed
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Tlam99

Tlam99

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38 minutes ago, 4hed said:

than if you try to 4k

add 5+ followers with different hi res skins and super fine mesh clothes, then you might get vanishing walls and npc's.

Not talking about messed up scripts which do not terminate properly.

Your save will be trashed with orphaned references, quest unbounds and so on.

Edited by Tlam99
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27X

27X

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7 hours ago, 4hed said:

Like Kool said, these days the bottleneck is almost always the engine. You can have a 4090 with a top of the line i9 and Skyrim will run at 5 FPS is you make it do too much. If you're going to be throwing a bunch of physics into your game, you should really prioritize your options and focus more on what you need rather than what you want. For example, body physics are probably more important than armor physics, especially if you're running around with BD's or TAWOBA. Hair physics might be pointless if you character has short hair (or if you use Proteus since, to my knowledge, it still doesn't play nice with SMP hair). Maybe you only have SMP enabled for your player and not anyone else. I think 3BA actually has a hotkey to toggle SMP or CBPC for player and NPCs.

 

It's a balancing act. You can't play Skyrim in 4k res with all 4k textures and everything SMP'd. The engine literally can't handle it. Focus on things that you spend the most time looking at and are important to you.

 

This is utterly trash.

 

With 7950x3d and a 4090, 8K 60 with FULL SMP with >NO< proxy objects is literally an actual thing.

Edited by 27X
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Pamatronic

Pamatronic

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3 hours ago, 4hed said:

4k has to draw four times as much on the screen compared to 1080p

No, it doesn't. Number of draw calls is affected by the amount of objects and materials on screen. Has nothing to do with resolutions. Not with render resolution and especially not with texture res -.-

High res textures CAN cause micro-stutter if you move/turn too fast and the vram fails to load in the new textures fast enough, but as long as you dont do that, it wont have an effect. And even in this particular case it would again be a GPU limitation.

 

3 hours ago, 4hed said:

I drop below 60 FPS at times on 1080p and my CPU and GPU are nowhere near 100% utilized when it happens (for reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph).

Has nothing to do with SMP, unless it happens on occasions when you have 50+ followers with  full smp on screen (and even then the problem would likely lie somewhere else.)
You might want to check your enb/skse settings to properly utilize all available resources on your system.

 

2 hours ago, Tlam99 said:

Not talking about messed up scripts which do not terminate properly.

Your save will be trashed with orphaned references, quest unbounds and so on.

I think this is a different problem than CPU or engine limitations.

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Guest

Guest

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*Shrug* Whatever you guys say. Maybe I'm wrong. All I know is you two are the only ones I've seen make the arguments you're making. If you can play Skyrim at 4k/8k native resolution with full SMP and ENB at a stable 60 FPS everywhere, I'd love to see it because literally everything and everywhere I've read says it's just not feasible.

Edited by 4hed
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Gameplayer

Gameplayer

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10 hours ago, 4hed said:

Like Kool said, these days the bottleneck is almost always the engine. You can have a 4090 with a top of the line i9 and Skyrim will run at 5 FPS is you make it do too much. If you're going to be throwing a bunch of physics into your game, you should really prioritize your options and focus more on what you need rather than what you want. For example, body physics are probably more important than armor physics, especially if you're running around with BD's or TAWOBA. Hair physics might be pointless if you character has short hair (or if you use Proteus since, to my knowledge, it still doesn't play nice with SMP hair). Maybe you only have SMP enabled for your player and not anyone else. I think 3BA actually has a hotkey to toggle SMP or CBPC for player and NPCs.

 

It's a balancing act. You can't play Skyrim in 4k res with all 4k textures and everything SMP'd. The engine literally can't handle it. Focus on things that you spend the most time looking at and are important to you.

 

I have i9 12900K and a RTX 4090,

Its been my experience that SMP hair physics with SMP/CBPC armor is fine in 2160p resolution alongside 4K textures and using Dyndolod.

 

I get about 110 FPS outdoors.

There are loads of mods on my system.

 

CPU can matter when using SMP because it uses specific improvements built into the CPU, the new version of SMP Faster has more instructions and background information on this if you want to explore what those are, I just cant remember all of it in good enough detail to write on it here.  If CPU is really old well apparently you can not even use SMP.  12th generation and up intel processor though is really good for SMP, its stupid smooth.

From what I can recall, there is a function built into the mod that can limit the amount of SMP objects on screen, and also picking a method of encoding that the CPU will use to render.....Going to the max can really drop the frames, I think was able to drop my FPS down to the 80's in fact.

 

I was playing some Fallout 4 tonight and all I could think was wow, SMP and CBPC are way better than the physics Fallout 4 modders have offered.

Edited by Gameplayer
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donttouchmethere

donttouchmethere

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14 hours ago, Pamatronic said:

High res textures CAN cause micro-stutter if you move/turn too fast and the vram fails to load in the new textures fast enough, but as long as you dont do that, it wont have an effect. And even in this particular case it would again be a GPU limitation.

Fu..... I need a new graphic card ?

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t.ara

t.ara

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For this game you do not need the latest hardware-it´s mostly very expensive and for skyrim all alone not worth to own. Instead you need experience to gradually be able to learn to ballance the engine-recource in a suiting way, by feeding your game with the suiting mods and not blindly install unnecessary stuff.

Enb seems to be able to use multiple threads of the processor but enb is been not made always working ideal with the suiting game´s features and enb often handles unnecessary parameters and lot of not really necessary content, which in latest versions of enb simply are always present and which are rendered within the gpu/cpu without effects and without need. The problem seems to me that only adding more parameters into a newer version of enb is laking and there are versions of enbs, which simply let skyrim become an unattractive and too much recource-consuming game. The game has a wonderful engine which is able to show 2K or lower texture-resolutions in an uncomparable quality and depth which no other game engine is offering. 4K is a suspect choice for skyrim, specially in those cases, if the pics are not in highest quality. Mostly skyrim takes it profit of the seemless texture-techniques, which can not being used on skin and on different other stuuf, like mostly structured clothing-and this is all made to spare resources. And now lot of mods want to break this opimized technical tricks and begin to add mods which mostly all screw up the engine of skyrim in different directions-the results are simply to get issures with different aspects of the game-and also sse will not become prevented by using 64bits on top. The same is meant to be for the version of an suiting enb: the last version of enb doesn´t meant to support your choice of the enb, you have made your descission for. And also it is possible to use an actual enb by using an older version of enb, which is not supporting all the latest parameters of the choosen enb-creation, which you have choosen to be the best one for your gameplay.

 

The SMP is one of that hacked side-physics which needs to use this skse-plug for skyrim and it is of course no ideal way to represent an additional game physics at all, which shall support mainly cloth-physics gravitation-behavior herewith. Lot of stuff is coming up with additional bones, which all have to become computed thru this little hole of SKSE. For the game it is comparable like you get feeded with food by using the anal way. This is working, but of course not ideal.

SMP depends of the cpu-speed, combined with the other stuff, which is coming all as a hacked sidechain (SKSE/FNIS/NEMESIS) into skyrim.

You can let die skyrim very easy by using too high resolutions for textures or by using hq-meshes brainless and unnecessary-always loaded and used by mods.

GPUs should be bought in relation to the display and in relation with the cpu-power of your computer to offer together a suiting system.

Edited by t.ara
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ldrifta

ldrifta

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OK, so can someone answer this, I have a 4790k processor and a gtx970 graphics card and 16g ram on an old msi gaming 5 mobo, what are somethings that will help me if i use things like 2k/4k textures and lots of smp armors for my followers, granted i usually only have about 3-4 followers max at a time. but i do notice the more smp enabled objects i have on screen the slower my framerate gets.. i dont have a good enough understanding on OC settings or just things I should set up as far as windows itself or using afterburner etc.. are there certain ini settings i should be changing to get the most out of my "dated" hardware? lol

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t.ara

t.ara

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6 hours ago, ldrifta said:

OK, so can someone answer this, I have a 4790k processor and a gtx970 graphics card and 16g ram on an old msi gaming 5 mobo, what are somethings that will help me if i use things like 2k/4k textures and lots of smp armors for my followers, granted i usually only have about 3-4 followers max at a time. but i do notice the more smp enabled objects i have on screen the slower my framerate gets.. i dont have a good enough understanding on OC settings or just things I should set up as far as windows itself or using afterburner etc.. are there certain ini settings i should be changing to get the most out of my "dated" hardware? lol

framerate for the game with smp is for best fixed by the enb onto 60 Hz refresh, limiter on.

The framerate is dropping also and not only by adding or playing with more cluttered area, for example a whiterun-city and landscape mod. NON LOD objects are only switched on and off during their represented loads of an area of the world and then also become unloaded again....this is not working perfect and the screen is sometimes little actualized by a shuttering....additional clutter needs to have space from each other...optimizations inside of cities and open area-world is probably only the space between different objects...a larger world maybe is helpful for this way of loading and unloading objects. And if now you play with some followers and your character there all together, the game has to compute the smp-stuff aditionally. SKYRIM has this headroom and it is possible to make lot of additions, edits and also this extra cool injections of additional physics...for some few npcs this is fine but for a "football" team this might be too much then...

 

I think you can set some texture-overhauls to switched off to compare the results then on your screen. You will try to find out which is the optimal set-up for your computer-set-up.

 

The ini-settings might have also impact on the overall framerate when it comes to grass-mods and maybe distant-view-but honestly: what has skyrim in distant-view to offer seriously?. ....There´s only the LOD cluttered trees and some very few stone-constructions between mountains, with shape mountain silouhettes.

Mostly the distant view means to look onto fog and clouds....means you maybe concentrate your gameplay onto the nearfield scene...too much and too high grass can be also pretty much boring....

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Gameplayer

Gameplayer

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Not sure what posters are thinking...

A lot of the mods that you want to run on your PC, were put together by people who often can comfortably run said mod.

 

Back when Skyrim Legendary was a thing, there were people using SLI 980 Black's!  Meaning they had two GPUs.

 

When skyrimSE came out, 10 series be ame the thing, was not out of the ordinary for people to use 1080 or even 2 1080's, some did 1080ti.

 

When ENB in fo4 and SE became a thing, something not quite covered anymore is that you actually need enough Ram to get the most benefit from ENB.  Not talking about only having 16 gigs of ram not enough, but 32 or 64.

 

SMIM was not made for low end spec, lot of stuff like ENB, smp and so on clearly run better on more modern PC.  These are things that whole threads in some places knowingly demonstrate that these are problem mods without the context of having appropriate gear.

Edited by Gameplayer
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t.ara

t.ara

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2 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Not sure what posters are thinking...

A lot of the mods that you want to run on your PC, were put together by people who often can comfortably run said mod.

 

Back when Skyrim Legendary was a thing, there were people using SLI 980 Black's!  Meaning they had two GPUs.

 

When skyrimSE came out, 10 series be ame the thing, was not out of the ordinary for people to use 1080 or even 2 1080's, some did 1080ti.

 

When ENB in fo4 and SE became a thing, something not quite covered anymore is that you actually need enough Ram to get the most benefit from ENB.  Not talking about only having 16 gigs of ram not enough, but 32 or 64.

 

SMIM was not made for low end spec, lot of stuff like ENB, smp and so on clearly run better on more modern PC.  These are things that whole threads in some places knowingly demonstrate that these are problem mods without the context of having appropriate gear.

ENB-installations are no serious scale of messure for a GPU or a computer. ENB is not a professional industry standard, it´s also a graphical-hack with some very bad downsides. It´s better compared with some other injection-files-but it is also a typical "thru the little hole"-mod which could be opimized by trashing endless hundreds of nonsence parameters, followed by programmable single dx-file to run all alone without it´s nonsence "tail".

Edited by t.ara
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