Weird Latency (Papyrus scripts?) [Plea for help]

[Eladano]

I'm out of my depth (not hard to do: I mod a lot, but don't know much about how it all works under the hood). I haven't  had this kind of issue before.

I have this weird latency/input delay going on in my game. Normal stuff (weapon swing, magic cast, talking, searching containers, level up) works just fine, but certain mod features have horrible delays (list below). I expect it to an extent, but not nearly this bad (previously has been half a second to a full second, now it's like 5 seconds or more). The thing is, while these delays are going on, the rest of the game seems to function perfectly (NPC's walking around and such, assuming the mod doesn't bring up a pause menu). I installed Elephant's Script and Latency Tester, and I was usually getting around 80-100 highs, but the game would occasionally jump to a ridiculous number like 25000. I'm not even sure if that's showing me where the problem might be, because latency/input delay was taking place even when the readings were normal.

Delayed stuff:
Sexlab scene start (yeah, its usually not instant, but 10 full seconds of standing inside each other each time I start a scene is weird)
Sexlab Tool menu (I think its called Sexlab Tools... it lets me advance or regress the stage, change the animation, or even disable it without going into Mod Configuration)
Dress Up Lovers menus (I expect a brief delay, perhaps one second. These were more like 5 seconds, the game had time to run between the pause menus)

GS Poser (same deal as Dress Up Lovers)
Simple Item Spawner (when attempting to access a mod's inventory, transferring from the mod selection to inventory browsing there was a remarkable delay. I'm used to larger inventories taking 5-10 seconds (Cosplay Gala pack for example) but it was doing that with single outfit mods. Didn't try larger ones, I assume I'd have to wait for a minute or more)
I'll Take The Display Model object placing and NPC assignment (this is the mod that prompted the post. Moving objects had a 1 to 10 second delay; object placement was unmanageable. Similar story for assigning NPC's. This one bugs me the most because Elephant's Latency Tester was giving normal readings during these processes)

I have returned to my game after a decent hiatus (6 months or so). As far as I know, my game wasn't doing this previously. Would a graphics card upgrade and a bigger monitor resolution potentially cause this? It's not like the frame rate is dropping.

Does anyone know what issue I might be having?

[traison]

Papyrus in SE/AE is 400 times slower than it was in LE. Install Papyrus Tweaks. It increases the Papyrus ops budget 5x by default.

[NymphoElf]

5 hours ago, traison said:

Papyrus in SE/AE is 400 times slower than it was in LE.

 

Is this exaggeration or proven? Genuinely curious.

[Swe-DivX]

Try disable MuDynamicNormalMap

[Swe-DivX]

Just now, NymphoElf said:

 

Is this exaggeration or proven? Genuinely curious.

Yes, Papyrus Tweaks NG increases speed, but far from the same as LE.

[NymphoElf]

Just now, Swe-DivX said:

Yes, Papyrus Tweaks NG increases speed, but far from the same as LE.

 

That's not what I asked

[traison]

21 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

 

Is this exaggeration or proven? Genuinely curious.

 

Proven as far as you can trust a reddit poster. 400 times or not, you can feel it. It's insane how quickly the Papyrus performance wall is hit in SE. This was hardly a problem in LE.

 

20 minutes ago, Swe-DivX said:

Yes, Papyrus Tweaks NG increases speed, but far from the same as LE.

 

That's why I have my ops limit set to 10,000. I try not to recommend anyone use that value though, especially starting out at it, because increasing the value will eventually eat into the FPS performance of the game. Increasing the ops limti is not a fix for badly made mods. It's a case of do as I say, not as I do.

[NymphoElf]

10 minutes ago, traison said:

Proven as far as you can trust a reddit poster. 400 times or not, you can feel it.

 

Interesting. They tested on AE, which I classify differently than SE because of CC.

 

I'm of the opinion that AE is slower due to all of the CC stuff that may be running in the background, but this is purely a guess. I'm curious to get to the reason why this may be the case, and also if SE has the same issue as AE because SE only has the DLC.

 

Additionally, it could be at least partially the fault of the DLC as well, which may be why vanilla LE runs faster as well.

 

Again this is all speculation.

 

Lastly, this user's PC specs were not included which will likely have significant impact on results (significant merely meaning "important", not necessarily meaning the results will be drastically changed).

[traison]

6 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

Lastly, this user's PC specs were not included which will likely have significant impact on results...

 

Less than you think, if at all measurable. If we assume vanilla Papyrus has an obs budget of 100 operations (ops) per frame. On a 300 Mhz system, these 100 ops complete in 1 ms, leaving 15 ms for the game to do other stuff (60 fps). Script performance seems slow, so you update your cpu to a 3000 Mhz one (10x). Now 100 ops complete in 0.1 ms, leaving 15.9 ms for the game do other stuff.

 

See the problem?

[NymphoElf]

19 minutes ago, traison said:

 

Less than you think, if at all measurable. If we assume vanilla Papyrus has an obs budget of 100 operations (ops) per frame. On a 300 Mhz system, these 100 ops complete in 1 ms, leaving 15 ms for the game to do other stuff (60 fps). Script performance seems slow, so you update your cpu to a 3000 Mhz one (10x). Now 100 ops complete in 0.1 ms, leaving 15.9 ms for the game do other stuff.

 

See the problem?

 

No, I don't see the problem. (Actually maybe I do if I'm understanding your response better?) In this scenario you shouldn't see any performance difference (good or bad) because the operation budget is completing within the allotted time. It should simply feel the same.

 

If you're noticing a performance impact, then clearly the operations are no longer completing within the allotted time or there are too many operations to perform for the budget to handle.

 

Also, just to clarify, I'm not arguing whether or not the default papyrus budget is too low. I agree that it is. I'm simply curious as to what is ultimately causing the performance impact in newer versions of the game, and my suspicion is primarily going over the ops budget.

 

EDIT: I see why the specs don't matter as much in this scenario though. However this is also assuming the computer only runs Skyrim and does literally nothing else (no OS or other applications running in tandem)

Edited November 3, 2025 by NymphoElf

[traison]

20 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

No, I don't see the problem.

 

The problem is that Papyrus is artifically limited, bound to the FPS. A new CPU makes sense when there is not enough time to complete all the tasks for each frame. As it is now however, all a new CPU will do is have the new CPU spend more time idling. Upgrading your monitor to a 144 or 240 hz one on the other hand, will increase Papyrus performance. But it will also make cheese fly unless you get the patch mod for physics.

 

Back in LE there used to be this "problem" where, the higher your FPS was during the game load screen, the faster the game resources would load. So basically there was a similar system there, as we have in Papyrus. Hypotetically, lets say the load screen had an ops limit of 1 MiB per frame. On a slow CPU (i.e. a normal system in 2011) and a regular spinning HDD this perhaps made sense (60 MiB/s). Upgrading to a 16 core threadripper and the fastest M.2 won't make sense however, since you're still on the 1 MiB ops limit.

 

Apparently this load screen thing is no longer there in SE/AE though, so uncapping your fps to have it hit 10,000 while loading no longer provides any benefit - only a hot or dead GPU.

 

Edit: Why do these ops limit exist, wouldn't it be easier to make do without them? In a single-threaded environment, you have to limit how long certain things can take in order to have the process move forwards towards a completed rendered frame. Sure, the game could simulate the Papyrus scripting of the entire Skyrim civil war in one frame, but you'd be down to a PowerPoint slideshow now - no good.

Edited November 3, 2025 by traison

[NymphoElf]

2 minutes ago, traison said:

The problem is that Papyrus is artifically limited

 

22 minutes ago, NymphoElf said:

Also, just to clarify, I'm not arguing whether or not the default papyrus budget is too low. I agree that it is. I'm simply curious as to what is ultimately causing the performance impact in newer versions of the game, and my suspicion is primarily going over the ops budget.

 

[traison]

Wouldn't it be funny if Bethesda limited Papyrus performance because someone brought up "the creeps over at LL"?

 

"Make it just enough for us to run DLC. We don't endorse or aknowledge large horse ****s, nor Thomas the Tank Engine dragons."

 - Management

[Eladano]

12 hours ago, NymphoElf said:

Lastly, this user's PC specs were not included which will likely have significant impact on results (significant merely meaning "important", not necessarily meaning the results will be drastically changed).

Yeah, I should reveal that. 
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700 3.60 ghz

RAM: 32 GB

GPU: RTX 3050

18 hours ago, traison said:

Install Papyrus Tweaks

Already present. I have no doubt it's helping, but it was installed prior to issues arising.



So, is Papyrus Script overload the most likely culprit, or should I keep looking for the source of the problem? I'm wondering if there's some .ini setting in base skyrim that got jostled by moving from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440.

Edited November 4, 2025 by Eladano

[NymphoElf]

In my opinion this DOES sound like your game is EXTREMELY script heavy. So it's very possible it's papyrus lag. A papyrus log could help confirm that, if you know how to get it.

[Eladano]

I would grab a papyrus, but some testing revealed some interesting info. In short, its probably normal "too many scripts" and I'll just live with it.

I tried my old character from 6 months ago, and it was mostly fine. The placement of Display Model furniture was better than the new (problem) character, but beyond that there wasn't a huge difference between the old (not a problem) character and the new character. I booted up the new character to make sure, and its a little slower than old, but not to the extent that my earlier post said (I was definitely representing the worst cases, I was annoyed). The tests were done in the Whiterun Market area, which is fairly busy with NPC's and such, so I think I've seen the worst of it. The phrase "rose tinted glasses" comes to mind.

The old character is male, current character is female, which is the only significant change between the two. I hadn't played a female character with that mod setup, so it could be that this is entirely expected of my load order.

Now that I know something didn't magically change my game while I wasn't looking, I think I'll close the topic and move on. This load order is more for screen archery than gameplay, so being a little slower isn't the end of the world.


Huh, I thought I would be able to alter the title to have [Closed] at the beginning. Do I just add that as a tag, or do I delete the whole topic?
 

Edited November 6, 2025 by Eladano