Skyrim AE loading times (NOT SE/LE)

[monsta88]

Hello all,

 

I'm just curious how long is your loading time from when you hit Run in MO2 (or whatever mod manager you use) until the Main menu appears. On Anniversary Edition, on SE it was much faster for me.

 

Please also tell the number of loaded plugins, since they heavily affect the loading time.

 

Mine is 4-5 minutes with 750ish plugins on SSD.

[Predator-RJ]

i use NMM....XD.... but about 20s to get in to the "full" usable menu that you can click load save, i have 396 total plugins, game is on a nvme ssd.

[plutocene]

1:18 min with 1.800 plugins with AE. I run it from a gen 5 SSD.

[Duburgue]

5 mins with a +350 Go mod repertoire, 250 esm/esp and 1600 esl, plus ENB, OAR and Reshade loading at start (SSd 970 evo+).

[CaptainJ03]

32 seconds with 133 plugins from an SSD

[Kastagir]

NVMe SSD will be much faster than a regular SATA SSD.  Choice of ENB will influence the wait as some load more shaders and these must be loaded before the main menu appears.  Number of plugins also plays a role as these must be loaded before the main menu.  AE (assuming you purchased the AE upgrade) adds quite a few more plugins and most of them have hefty BSAs associated with them that must also be loaded.

[traison]

20 hours ago, monsta88 said:

Please also tell the number of loaded plugins, since they heavily affect the loading time.

 

I doubt plugin count has much of an effect on loading times, relatively speaking. It would be odd to optimize something that takes 1% of the resources, when you got things that take up 10-15%. Perhaps the biggest performance drains being anti-virus, shader replacers, the usvfs and whether or not Skyrim was launched recently.

 

If you want to speed it up when using MO2, reduce the overall number of files the usvfs has to handle, and disable ENB/CS:

1. Change all IMODs to remove blur, bloom, desaturation, eye adaptation and other image quality degrading effects.
2. Set bUse64bitsHDRRenderTarget to 1, and increase the fLightingOutputColorClamp* values to something high like 3333.
3. Pack all lose files into BSA archives.

Base Skyrim SE/AE doesn't look half bad even by today's standards if you clean the IMODs and edit the ini file(s); perhaps biggest issue being water but maybe there's a mod for that.

Edited December 21, 2025 by traison

[belegost]

41 secs from double-clicking SKSE shortcut to being able to navigate the main menu. That includes OAR and Reshade loading whatever it is they load at the start. The main menu appears much faster, probably something like 15 seconds, but I can't do anything until that finishes. 1000+ mods, 800+ plugins, Skyrim installation folder is 200GB.

While I was building that load order, the game would actually load up almost instantaneously until I passed 500 mods and started adding more animations and more SKSE mods. First CS shader compilation process took 10 minutes alone. Game version is 1.6.1170.

Edited December 21, 2025 by belegost

[belegost]

  

20 hours ago, monsta88 said:

Mine is 4-5 minutes with 750ish plugins on SSD.

 

That's pretty fast comparing to what I was used to until recently.

On my previous machine, it took between 4 and 10 minutes, depending on the weather, and if the stars were right, with one fifth of the load from my previous post. I got into habit of starting the game and making myself a sandwich and brewing coffee in the meantime. CS shader compilation was 3 hours back then. I had SE (1.5.97) on it.

 

From my observation SSD had nothing to do with loading times, the bottleneck was CPU. I had switched from HDD to SSD in 2020 and the loading times did not improve much. My guess is if there's a lot of mods that do their stuff at laod or at runtime (like SPID or most modern SKSE mods) this is where the issue lies. I could quite literally use that machine as a space heater during winter time.

Edited December 21, 2025 by belegost