How long are your loading times? (any tips to reduce them?)

[DeepBlueFrog]

After many moons of cleaning and tweaking, I have a stable game with a quite large load order. I still experience CTDs but they are far and few between , and overall tolerable.

 

My one major issue remaining now is the very log loading times. They can take up to several minutes.

 

I play in windowed mode so I don't have to force shut down my PC in case of certain brain freezes (bad for drives and video card).

 

What I tried so far to no effect after reading several resources online:

 

- I have Steam on an SSD

- I tried running steam, SKSE launcher and TES5.exe as administrator. No result, so I went back to regular user.

- I do have ENBboost and the memory patcher for 64 bits

 

Did anyone come across additional tips to reduce loading times?

[AgentCarolina]

I just run Skyrim from my SSD, My load times aren't long. running 2k mods everywhere and an ENB

[AgentCarolina]

Oh, I also use OneTweak.

it's basically fake fullscreen with other features 

[SassaAria]

35 minutes ago, skyrimll said:

 They can take up to several minutes.
 

Are you including reloading saves after initial computer and game load?

If yes, then faster memory would be a big help, from what one very advanced user wrote about RAM and Gamebryo files.

Have HDD, plus higher-end i5 and 3000mhz DDR4 ram, and I'm adding ENB, and SMP to the load, plus big load order and inital load is longer to load everything in.

After that seems like 15-20 seconds or so on reload of a save.

No real tricks other than keeping other program files (like all the update utilities) not needed shut down.

[Nazzzgul666]

Don't hit me please, but... i run Skyrim on a HDD, added loading times in my papyrus settings and have loading times between 1 and maybe 20 seconds. To me it seems quite random when it takes how long, but never minutes. Honestly i'd rather assume something crashed before i wait minutes, it happened once or twice this week... but that was the first time in a long time and i actually messed something up.

One note about "window mode because of freezes", though. I have an unfinished download in MO, that causes windows to pause the shutdown when i hit the reset button because MO wants to asks me if i really want to quit. Hit cancel for windows shutdown aaand continue playing.  Dirty workaround, but it does the trick.

Just to be sure since you didn't mention it: you do have crash fixes? This thing improved both my performance and stability at once, really nice.

I've turned on some of the experimental settings, at least one, been a while... the one i remember for sure is the setting to split memory blocks. Reduced my crashes from 7-20 times a week with lots of playing to 1-2 per week and so far now downsides, but that might be a very individual experience that works only on my system.

*edit: i can't really remember, the last time without crash fixes was months or maybe even a year ago, but i think it actually might have improved loading times too.

[guk]

Hmm well after playing only Fallout 4 for two years (where loading screens are usually 20+ secs with ENB), Skyrim seems to load almost instant. Especially when entering/leaving houses.

I also run a very heavy landscape and texture setup with maxed out DynDoLOD, with uGrids 5 of course.

 

Well i am relatively sure that the ENB settings are important:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[GLOBAL]
UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false
UseDefferedRendering=true
IgnoreCreationKit=true

 

[PERFORMANCE]
SpeedHack=true
EnableOcclusionCulling=false

 

[MEMORY]
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true
DisableDriverMemoryManager=false
DisablePreloadToVRAM=false
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false
ReservedMemorySizeMb=512
VideoMemorySizeMb=16384
EnableCompression=false
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

 

[THREADS]
DataSyncMode=0
PriorityMode=0
EnableUnsafeFixes=false

 

[WINDOW]
ForceBorderless=true
ForceBorderlessFullscreen=true

 

[ENGINE]
ForceAnisotropicFiltering=true
MaxAnisotropy=16
ForceLodBias=true
LodBias=-0.5
AddDisplaySuperSamplingResolutions=false
EnableVSync=true
VSyncSkipNumFrames=0

 

[LIMITER]
WaitBusyRenderer=false
EnableFPSLimit=true
FPSLimit=60.0

 

[ADAPTIVEQUALITY]
Enable=false
Quality=1
DesiredFPS=20.0

 

[ANTIALIASING]
EnableEdgeAA=true
EnableTemporalAA=false
EnableSubPixelAA=true

 

[FIX]
FixGameBugs=true
FixParallaxBugs=true
FixParallaxTerrain=false
FixAliasedTextures=true
FixSsaoWaterTransparency=true
FixSsaoHairTransparency=true
IgnoreInventory=true
IgnoreLoadingScreen=true
FixTintGamma=false
RemoveBlur=false
FixSubSurfaceScattering=true
FixSkyReflection=true
FixCursorVisibility=true
FixLag=false

 

[LONGEXPOSURE]
EnableLongExposureMode=false
Time=1.0
BlendMax=0.0

 

 

Some settings are specific to the ENB preset and/or your PC, however you could compare some of the settings with your own and test if any of these improve your problem.

The Expandmemorysystem64=false setting assumes you run SKSE with the memory hack as well.

[Darkpig]

I heard this helps

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/7901/?

 

1. Blank Meshes=less work

2. ?

3. ?

4. profit?

[LazyBoot]

Just tested loading my current save^* and it took just under 20 seconds from hitting "yes" until I could see my character.

Relevant HW specs:

32GB DDR4-2132 (4x8GB in dual channel)

2x480GB SSDs (560MB/s read each^**) in RAID 0

Intel i7 6700k

And a 1080 with 8GB of vRAM (though I'm not sure if gpu really matters for this)

 

This is with Load Game CTD Fix, which may slow loading a little bit.

 

_{* Just inside the door to understone keep}

^{** That's what the box claims anyway...}

[spoonsinger]

Under clocked, (yes), AMD 8120 with 12gb memory on a dedicated five year old 256gb, (with 1gb free), SSD and a Nvidia 970 = 1 minute 47.9 seconds from hitting 'yes' (It's why god invented kettles).

 

ps

 

Mind that is with 'Load Game CTD Fix' which basically loads the game on one thread and 'Continue game no crash' which basically automates doing the old 'load start' trick for when you have a ton of animations. Also I found you needed both of those for continued lack of loading CTD happiness. (Even though the author of the former said you didn't need the latter - and even though it was the same author).

[yatol]

4 hours ago, skyrimll said:

 

Did anyone come across additional tips to reduce loading times?

download skyrim performance monitor

coc markarthexterior to check whatever is your bottleneck when the npc get attacked, run around in town, enter and leave a few buildings

 

you barely use 3 gb and you have 16 gb?

you use enb?

it's not configured right

 

the ram usage can be reduced by copy pasting from mo last folder to skyrim bsa, run smco and texture optimiser on the result, and repack, compressed bsa (to see the difference, load the game with your grass mod as loose file, then as compressed bsa, instead of relying on some random blabla)

game no longer load c:\...\data\textures\character\femalebody.dds, to replace with c:\...\mo\mods\x\...., then with c:\...\mo\mods\y\y.bsa, with c:\... \mo\mods\y\... when you launch the game (if you have 20 000 conflicts, you load 20 000 files for nothing)

 

compare coc qasmoke with your load order, and with just skyrim.esm

that way you may see a mod like summerset that make loading time 30 sec longer

 

load your save in savegamecleaner, and check whatever you have in activescript or update offset

broken scripts? waste of cpu to load stuff that don't work

if there's enought for a stack dump, loading stuff to get it dump, to reload it for another dump... useless waste of performance

 

 

etc etc, the more mods, the more chance to have stuff that waste performance

[pinky6225]

Guk has a good point, go play fallout 4 a bit and skyrim will seem very quick

 

Have you amended in skyrim.ini fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=2000.0 up to a higher value as thats the only one i know of that would increase load times that much although i seem to recall when i was playing with enblocal.ini that if you tick on fixes for issues you dont have this does affect performance quite a lot so might be worth checking in there as well

[guk]

9 hours ago, yatol said:

you barely use 3 gb and you have 16 gb?

you use enb?

it's not configured right

Not sure which mod the OP means with "memory patcher for 64bit", but either this could be the old "4GB Patch" which is not even needed with 100% unmodded Skyrim, or with SKSE and ENBoost there also are 2 conflicting memory enhancements.

 

[Memory]
DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB=768
ScrapHeapSizeMB=256
[General]
ClearInvalidRegistrations=1

 

 

You should only have one of these active, like if you use the SKSE.ini patch posted above, then don't enable ExpandMemoryx64 in enblocal.ini.

 

9 hours ago, yatol said:

etc etc, the more mods, the more chance to have stuff that waste performance

Well yes i also removed all the mods for screenarchery and porn stuff, so the gameplay / combat mods get all the CPU and RAM power to do their job.

[DeepBlueFrog]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I am happy to report my game is now running a lot more smoothly.

 

I don't know if one of these things was the determining factor in the solution. It feels more like it was a combination in the end.

 

Here are some of the things I did:

- Replaced windowed mode by borderless full screen mode (I tried disabling the FPS limiter but that screwed up the physics engine and sent objects flying all over the place)
- Created a TESMerged plugin in addition to a bashed patch
- Installed mod to remove smoke effects on loading screen (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/7901/? )
- Enabled pre-loading of SKSE plugins (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/75795/? ) and the CrashFix plugin (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/72725/? )
- Disabled Rigmor of Bruma (I love that mod but the toll on my game was just tooo much)

 

In addition, reducing the quality of Ambient Occlusion effects in ENB and lowering the distance of level of details improved smoothness of the game in general but did not have an impact on loading time. 

 

Running the skyrim performance monitor (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/6491) showed I am running well below the limits of my RAM and VRAM, so that wasn't the issue.

 

I also tried to run the SKSE launcher and skyrim executables in administrator mode, but that had no effect on load times.

 

Edit:
Two more things I did today to make my game even smoother.

- Optimized my textures using Optimizer Textures (Ordenador) (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801/)
- Generated LOD objects for all my mods with spectacular effect and very little performance impact using Dynamic Distant Objects LOD - DynDOLOD (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/59721/)