Is CPU or Graphics Card the bottleneck with SMP?

[Gameplayer]

Aha, ok I understand.

 

So the thinking is like this,

 

Since Skyrim SE has specific PC spec's....

It thereby follows that "ALL mods" should also work on said specs otherwise its not optimised.

 

Meanwhile over in reality which is where I am standing, we all need better PC specs to actually get the fullest out of said mods because by the very nature of those mods they were always meant to push the game beyond its original parameters.

 

PC gamers are in denial,

On topic, bear with me.....

Just to even use SMP, you are hard locked to specific CPU's that are 2011 or newer at least and in some cases those 2011-2014 CPU's lack the encoding to actually do SMP straight up off the bat.  After that the next issue is what "encoding" will you actually use with the best encoding being locked behind BIOS tweaks besides only being available to 12th and 13th generation intel CPU's meaning your CPU is at most 1 year 2 months old.  "Bios locked" yup, if you are on the wrong kind of Motherboard, kiss getting into the real Bios Tweaks goodbye, because almost all pre-builds that typical buyer looks at are not using mobo that gives you the most options aka stuff like "Dell" looking at you "alienware."  Getting the most out of your modding experience therefore means becoming very familiar with PC hardware and building a PC must be inside your comfort zone.

 

As far as graphics cards, that is opening a huge can of worms since we then have to educate the readers about how a CPU/GPU bottleneck actually happens and we also have to consider that the Motherboard plays a massive role in this also.  Oh almost forgot, RAM modules not to be mistaken for VRAM happen to be an issue if you have too slow or too little gigs of memory to properly leverage a high end card or SLI set-up which BTW you can SLI for all of modded games by this company so far.

 

CPU matters because there is a hard limit to the FPS set by the CPU, for a specific game, as in game X will only run at YYY on game Z for CPU B.

Meaning no matter how good your GPU is, you may in fact be losing FPS because the CPU is not up to the task of running at its best just from that.

Very possible to do even on old hardware, but many new examples popping up all the time with 4090's being paired with AMD 5600 CPU's.

Motherboard is potential issue in this chain because the PCLE slot is generation specific, meaning if the slot supports generation 3, sure you can run a 4090 in there but its going to be bottlenecking at the PCLE slot before its bottlenecking again at the AMD 5600 CPU.

 

High End mods, require better hardware even having optimization is no promise that things will get better on user side, in fact it can get worse.

Because you can end up with unwanted graphical issues because its been optimized to work on lower end spec just so that those PC's will actually run the game at playable framerates.  Example, Hogwarts legacy on Ultra in 1080p actually needs 10 gigs of VRAM and 16 gigs of RAM (free and clear meaning end user has over 24) just to run without graphical pop-in's.  Meanwhile that "optimisation" of how the textures stream in allows PC gamers on lower end hardware to actually run the game at playable framerates when they were unrealistic about their graphic settings....Hence optimization is not the wonder drug gamers think it is.

 

The encoding that SMP uses is actually a perfect example of how,

IF you dont have proper hardware, you simply cannot even use the mod!

Even if you have the proper CPU, you may not be getting the best use of the mod, or have access to its best features.

All because you were hardware locked out.

Example the issue can be because you have wrong CPU.

Example you could have the right CPU, but be using an "alienware" pre-build PC, in which case you are locked out of most BIOS features to begin with.

Should have built a PC yourself using an EVGA motherboard, although there are MSI and ASUS boards that give full access to BIOS (bear in mind not all of the mobo's by those companies do, only EVGA boards give full access for the relatively few mobo's they build year to year).

 

This brings me to a key point I am making here, your hardware matters in modding...Optimization of mods will only get you so far and at some point its a dead end for performance gains.  Even understanding how to optimize it yourself will eventually hit a wall in which you are better off getting better hardware.

Most blanket statements that would fly and even be common knowledge on a gaming forum such as Steam wont hold serious water here.

AKA, "16 gigs of RAM is good enough" wont fly very far here before its shot down.

AKA, "a 4 core CPU is good enough" lol, nope not valid.

 

Good enough, and what a gamer that mods wants are two different things.

Those two view points achieve different results.

Understand that since the 30 series released playing the game at settings relegated to "screen Archery only" have been entirely realistic in 4K at 144 FPS for some time now and in fact if one were using Nvlinked 2080ti's its been possible to play in 4K but perhaps not at 144 FPS.

 

This is no small order either, 

3840x2160x144=1,194,393,600 pixels driven across the screen per each second of time passed.

 

Now yes I can have 144 FPS outdoors but I would rather have SMP outfits, SMP hair, SMP capes on as many as 16 actors....So I make due with ~80-110 FPS.

I could replace my i9 12900k with an i9 13900KS (pray I won the silicon lottery here) and the uplift computationally would be an average increase of about 20-25% if the literature is true....And the next thing I would do is get my hands on some Hynix A die memory modules in 2x32 kit and overclock that up to around 7200 but could feasibly if lucky on my motherboard silicon drive it to 8200 memory speed.

At some point I just have to accept that I have enough FPS to play the game fully modded in 4K at decent framerates.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Gameplayer

[t.ara]

11 hours ago, Gameplayer said:

Aha, ok I understand.

 

So the thinking is like this,

 

Since Skyrim SE has specific PC spec's....

It thereby follows that "ALL mods" should also work on said specs otherwise its not optimised.

 

Meanwhile over in reality which is where I am standing, we all need better PC specs to actually get the fullest out of said mods because by the very nature of those mods they were always meant to push the game beyond its original parameters.

 

PC gamers are in denial,

On topic, bear with me.....

Just to even use SMP, you are hard locked to specific CPU's that are 2011 or newer at least and in some cases those 2011-2014 CPU's lack the encoding to actually do SMP straight up off the bat.  After that the next issue is what "encoding" will you actually use with the best encoding being locked behind BIOS tweaks besides only being available to 12th and 13th generation intel CPU's meaning your CPU is at most 1 year 2 months old.  "Bios locked" yup, if you are on the wrong kind of Motherboard, kiss getting into the real Bios Tweaks goodbye, because almost all pre-builds that typical buyer looks at are not using mobo that gives you the most options aka stuff like "Dell" looking at you "alienware."  Getting the most out of your modding experience therefore means becoming very familiar with PC hardware and building a PC must be inside your comfort zone.

 

As far as graphics cards, that is opening a huge can of worms since we then have to educate the readers about how a CPU/GPU bottleneck actually happens and we also have to consider that the Motherboard plays a massive role in this also.  Oh almost forgot, RAM modules not to be mistaken for VRAM happen to be an issue if you have too slow or too little gigs of memory to properly leverage a high end card or SLI set-up which BTW you can SLI for all of modded games by this company so far.

 

CPU matters because there is a hard limit to the FPS set by the CPU, for a specific game, as in game X will only run at YYY on game Z for CPU B.

Meaning no matter how good your GPU is, you may in fact be losing FPS because the CPU is not up to the task of running at its best just from that.

Very possible to do even on old hardware, but many new examples popping up all the time with 4090's being paired with AMD 5600 CPU's.

Motherboard is potential issue in this chain because the PCLE slot is generation specific, meaning if the slot supports generation 3, sure you can run a 4090 in there but its going to be bottlenecking at the PCLE slot before its bottlenecking again at the AMD 5600 CPU.

 

High End mods, require better hardware even having optimization is no promise that things will get better on user side, in fact it can get worse.

Because you can end up with unwanted graphical issues because its been optimized to work on lower end spec just so that those PC's will actually run the game at playable framerates.  Example, Hogwarts legacy on Ultra in 1080p actually needs 10 gigs of VRAM and 16 gigs of RAM (free and clear meaning end user has over 24) just to run without graphical pop-in's.  Meanwhile that "optimisation" of how the textures stream in allows PC gamers on lower end hardware to actually run the game at playable framerates when they were unrealistic about their graphic settings....Hence optimization is not the wonder drug gamers think it is.

 

The encoding that SMP uses is actually a perfect example of how,

IF you dont have proper hardware, you simply cannot even use the mod!

Even if you have the proper CPU, you may not be getting the best use of the mod, or have access to its best features.

All because you were hardware locked out.

Example the issue can be because you have wrong CPU.

Example you could have the right CPU, but be using an "alienware" pre-build PC, in which case you are locked out of most BIOS features to begin with.

Should have built a PC yourself using an EVGA motherboard, although there are MSI and ASUS boards that give full access to BIOS (bear in mind not all of the mobo's by those companies do, only EVGA boards give full access for the relatively few mobo's they build year to year).

 

This brings me to a key point I am making here, your hardware matters in modding...Optimization of mods will only get you so far and at some point its a dead end for performance gains.  Even understanding how to optimize it yourself will eventually hit a wall in which you are better off getting better hardware.

Most blanket statements that would fly and even be common knowledge on a gaming forum such as Steam wont hold serious water here.

AKA, "16 gigs of RAM is good enough" wont fly very far here before its shot down.

AKA, "a 4 core CPU is good enough" lol, nope not valid.

 

Good enough, and what a gamer that mods wants are two different things.

Those two view points achieve different results.

Understand that since the 30 series released playing the game at settings relegated to "screen Archery only" have been entirely realistic in 4K at 144 FPS for some time now and in fact if one were using Nvlinked 2080ti's its been possible to play in 4K but perhaps not at 144 FPS.

 

This is no small order either, 

3840x2160x144=1,194,393,600 pixels driven across the screen per each second of time passed.

 

Now yes I can have 144 FPS outdoors but I would rather have SMP outfits, SMP hair, SMP capes on as many as 16 actors....So I make due with ~80-110 FPS.

I could replace my i9 12900k with an i9 13900KS (pray I won the silicon lottery here) and the uplift computationally would be an average increase of about 20-25% if the literature is true....And the next thing I would do is get my hands on some Hynix A die memory modules in 2x32 kit and overclock that up to around 7200 but could feasibly if lucky on my motherboard silicon drive it to 8200 memory speed.

At some point I just have to accept that I have enough FPS to play the game fully modded in 4K at decent framerates.

Yes-in principle it means that the modders and creators with high-performance computers create their mods without taking notice of their results being able to run also on old systems. The updates of mods become mostly more complexer, the display´s resolutions decrease to a minimum of UHD or 4K/8K and the game is allowing some tweaks that are even not possible in some other games. The ZAP world I made simply with a higher performing computer with an easy-to-run ENB-version, so that many people can´t go there and look around inside of this world. It´s only possible to enter the zap-world by tweaking the system to an optimized ENB-set-up and by using the memory-hacks. I made it by using an i7-don´t know anymore which one it was, 3ghz, 6 cores-nothing wild. I used a 1080 -gpu during that time-a basic nice gpu. All together with an old 32" apple cinema display with 2650x1600 pixels, totally outdated and on max. 60Hz. The picture has been very smooth and soft scrolling, which I have known always only from skyrim. This smoothness came from the older ENB I used-it has not been ideal but it has been fun to work with old skyrim. It´s settings  have benn not optimal and the night was too dark and there were no reflections and no rain effects. It only has been a sharp and analytical picture without further effects. Only using a simple grass mod and some weather-changers , COT and fog destroyers.  That set up could togay be reached easily again by using the older enbs of skyrim and by switching off hundreds of mods which add graphic exchanging files (texture-optimizers)..I only used an old SMIM-one of the first versions.

Later, I dropped the weather mods as I cold not really see an serious advantage of those stuff within my gameplay. Same for water-mods. Water could be tweaked quite well by editing some enb-parameters all alone. DOF I never liked, same for lense-use or picture-frame effects.

But if now this moderner setups meet my mod, they get issures even with the pumped up systems with latest hardware, depending on the versions of their enb and depending on huge and long mod-lists. This is a stopper for what I did inside of ZAP´s world. And this shows you do not need to buy the latest hardware for skyrim for getting a fine game on screen. Modding means here really to experiment with the possibilities of the hardware and the available features of all the different mods.

It´s really not always the best to use the latest versions of mods. Some stuff like the ram-optimizers of skyrim have got screwed within their latest versions and simply can´t be used for a smooth gameplay. This may depend on hardware-in my case I found quite the optimal setting which I try to get even more effective and more nicer from time to time.

I don´t think that this all is "education", it´s simply all depending on different hardware and some experience during the years. And we all have different preferences, when it comes to Skyrim at all.

 

At least I can tell that with SSE, ZAP-world will be NO problem anymore to become visited because SSE got this graphical power and opitmization to use the mem-buffers like a charme without any issures. ZAP world there is running like tamriel open world-no differences. This also will be for the "new-world mods" like goma-pero and lot of others, which have been made/created in the past.

 

I personally like this smoothness of picture, which is happening by using that older ENB´s of oldrim with not more than 60FPS with the limit on-switched, so to get a best smp and PE effect on screen. I did not see/get that by using SSE, but maybe I can find a way to get there with SSE, too.

Edited May 31, 2023 by t.ara

[t.ara]

The optimization, which is offered by using Creation-Kit really should become studied. And also I will try to learn to add additional objects into the skyrim-world, which also add their new LOD-object for an optimal appearing in game. Also inside of cells there are this portals and optimizations, all explained in the bethesda videos on youtube. I think this is the best way to learn to create professional mods, same for the lightning different new areas. And this is helping to make a mod become a serious one.

Also the navmesh is an important point: if I add new trees I should also edit the navmesh !!!