Skyrim AE 1170 - How many ressource will it take?

[Tinkering Solderbro]

This is interesting, because there are many threads about used ressources of the game. Found also tips for cpu optimization and stuff for the memory, so let's have a peek for real.

 

 

For the CPU we can see, that the load is distributed to all 16 cores, this is from running to a city like Solitude at night with lots of glowing lights. On the left we can see a moment, when i walked from the palace out in the city, only few cores handle the door animation. On the right corner a NPC stopped and talk to me, here again a spreaded load jumps up on all cores. Seems the SE to AE with creation engine updates is much more intense than thought before.

 

Let's talk about the memory, Zorin-OS with MO2 clamp around 4Gig, so the game put 4,7gig on top. Maybe Zorin make a point here, because linux keep stuff in memory for a while, so they must not be loaded from disk again.

 

For the GPU i have not screenshot at the moment, but can say that Sykrim AE take 4.5Gig of VRAM and runs with 50 watts of energy on my Radeon 6700xt.

 

Your ideas? Have same values?

 

[traison]

2 hours ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

For the CPU we can see, that the load is distributed to all 16 cores,

 

That is done by your OS and not specifically by the game. Its a single thread that bounces from core to core, spreading the load. Skyrim is most likely still a game that heavily favors one thread. You can usually see this sort of load balancing if you have a single thread that runs at full speed on (for example) 4 logical cores: each core runs at 25%. If you add up the load on all logical cores you get 100% (out of a maximum of 400% i.e. 4 logical cores).

 

2 hours ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

Let's talk about the memory, Zorin-OS with MO2 clamp around 4Gig, so the game put 4,7gig on top. Maybe Zorin make a point here, because linux keep stuff in memory for a while, so they must not be loaded from disk again.

 

This is correct. Unfortunatrely a very common misconception is that, take your web browser for instance, when Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Buttplug uses 30 GiB of memory on a system with 64 GiB total this is considered a bad thing and that the browser is badly optimized. The reality is quite the opposite in fact. If no other application needs memory, the running processes should hog all they can/want. Its when something is using excessive amounts of memory and the OS is not able to free it up (because its actually in use) that the issues arise.

 

 

 

Now with all that said, you need to keep in mind a few things when evaluating performance:

1. Skyrim is from an era where single-core was still king. I'd even argue that that's still mostly true today as we're only just starting to get out of it. DirectX 12 if I remember correctly was the first one to properly support multithreading; this was touted as unlocking the ability to finally make properl multithreaded games, but I'd say the idea took off slower than it should have.
2. Skyrim, like most games, uses frame based timers. This means among other things that some stuff will run faster the higher your fps is. This is most likely why cheese starts flying (physics break) when fps goes too high, and why loading screens go by faster when you're up in the hundereds of fps.
3. The papyrus engine is artificially limited: bound to the fps in a similar fashion as above.

In a nutshell, every game engine is different. They all have their weird little quirks and limitations. So don't go making decisions based on what you see in Skyrim. If you want to separate boys from men when it comes to single core performance, try Supreme Commander 1 (FAF). Factorio is apparently quite good at bringing out RAM performance issues. 7-Zip with LZMA2, ultra compression and set to use all cores is going to test the thermals of your CPU, as well as give you an idea of how fast it really is. Obviously these examples are 1) not based on any scientific research and 2) practical and real-world examples rather than benchmarking software.

 

It would be silly to go buy a new storage device to get a game to load faster, only to realize the game is artifically gimped to only perform 10 load "actions" per frame and your existing device was already capable of doing 50; or to get a new CPU to try to boost Papyrus performance only to realize it too was artifically gimped to only do 100 ops per frame.

[Tinkering Solderbro]

Pretty interesting, let me add the same test for Skyrim-LE. Here the CPU usage show one master process and few little performer around. My point is, did Bethesda pushed a Creation Engine update into the latest Skyrim-AE Versions? Starfield show the same like Skyrim AE-1170, place an equal load on all cores. Do we have someone, who can show Skyrim 1.5.97 or 1.6.640?

 

Found a statement about an updated engine for Starfield

 

Bethesda Engine Update

 

Do we have someone, who can show the chart with even more cpu cores? This is a stunning research, i like that.

 

 

Papyrus is really a crazy thing, on consoles Starfield and Skyrim is limited by Bethesda to 30FPS, to gather enough time for scripting. Whoppers like sexlab tend to papyrus process minutes until something happens. In Fallout 4 you can initiate a sex scene, make a fast travel across the map and get teleported back for the scene. If someone pack to many script excessive mods into a Beth game, it will result in trouble.

 

 

 

[traison]

1 hour ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

My point is, did Bethesda pushed a Creation Engine update into the latest Skyrim-AE Versions?

 

Yes, but its very difficult to split for instance game logic that was made to run on a single thread, into multiple threads so I very much doubt they've done that. What they may have done is give Papyrus more threads, maybe separated physics into its own thing if it wasn't already, something that's a bit more "its own thing" to start with. Maybe on LE you didn't have CBPC/SMP, these have their own threads. Any SKSE dll can add worker threads basically.

 

1 hour ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

Do we have someone, who can show Skyrim 1.5.97 or 1.6.640?

 

You'd need someone using the same kernel version as you, or at the very least Ubuntu Debian (is Zorin Debian-based?) or just Linux. If I'm not mistaken, the scheduler in Linux is vastly different from the one in Windows.

 

1 hour ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

Whoppers like sexlab tend to papyrus process minutes until something happens.

 

We can fix this on PC. Consoles... well consoles be consoles I guess.

 

1 hour ago, Tinkering Solderbro said:

In Fallout 4...

 

I'm not aware of a similar "fix" for Fallout 4, though I'd definitely download if someone knows of one.

Edited July 27, 2024 by traison

[Tinkering Solderbro]

On 7/27/2024 at 11:39 AM, traison said:

 

You'd need someone using the same kernel version as you, or at the very least Ubuntu Debian (is Zorin Debian-based?) or just Linux. If I'm not mistaken, the scheduler in Linux is vastly different from the one in Windows.

 

 

It's a 6.5.0-45 kernel and yesterday i got hands on Proton-GE 9-10. There are many things about dll processing that is much compatibler with Proton-GE. Zorin-OS is a ubuntu package base on 22.04lts, but with updated packages for drivers and gaming.

In the process list, a proton game appears as one box that eat ressources. There is much work at wine too, maybe the last flight mod at the nexus will work now😁

 

Really nice are game developers, using vulkan instead of directx, these things are on the right way.

 

Incredible is, that the mesa-vlk driver for Radeon deliver more FPS than amdgpu-pro from AMD🤩