Performance Boosting for Modded Skyrim

[RedRicker]

I previously posted here, and comments b @Frankfranky , @donttouchmethere and @RW311  were very helpful. However, after making more improvements I was somehow getting more stutter than I was 3 days ago. So I've now reinstalled and will be building my way back up to a ~240 mod build. 4th time's the charm I guess.

 

I'm sticking to this guide for now. Did the Crash Fixes allocation. I set all skyrim settings to low on launcher, then combined this awesome video with the STEP guide. Loot and Bashed Patch applied, Merged Patch after I hit 150 mods I guess. ENB after 30-40 mods more.

 

I'm making this post because even now, at 44 mods and optmisations, there are small stutters (~18 fps few times a minute) during combat. It's mostly playable, but I fear what will happen after npc overhauls, npc AIs and UNP bodies. Optmizer Textures (Ordenador) also applied and resized to 1024. Whiterun market is mostly perfect, riften market stutters more than in the combat, somewhat manageable. Before this reinstall I think GPU was causing stutters, now it seems to be CPU (For now).

 

My PC specs:

 

i7 Processor 2.4 Ghz
64 bit, 8GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 820M 2GB

 

Modwatch (also incl skyrim and skyrimprefs.ini): https://modwat.ch/u/RedRicker/plugins

skse manually placed in skyrim folder, in data/skse/skse.ini: defaultHeapInitialAllocMB=512

 

Performance Monitor:

 

 

I'd appreciate pointers on what's wrong right now AND any advice for as I continue adding mods

[thek8ikat]

The Grass on Steroids could be a problem, especially if you're not using the ini tweak to make grass less dense. It's in Skyrim.ini, under grass iMinGrassSize=(something higher than 20 until satisfied). And maybe try putting XMPSE right above Alternate Start, as not having that skeleton overwriting everything can cause lag. Also, if you have that, please make sure you have HDT Physics Extensions. Realistic Rag Dolls needs to be above XMPSE, since XMPSE requires that. Are you using ENBoost? That can apparently cause stutters. Weird though, as I have a low-medium spec computer and the stutters are bearable. O.O Hmm.

[Pauduan]

I only had a brief look, but your GPU is terrible. I'm sorry there's no polite way to say it.

 

The 820M is about a quarter of (say) a Radeon 7750, which can get about 50fps on an ENB-enabled build if you keep the resolution at 1366x768 which I assume is your laptop resolution. I assume you can get half that but only if you optimise the build well.

 

Your CTDs etc. point towards the possibility of thermal issues as well, laptops get clogged up and need to be cleaned out after a few years. You have to think about dropping ENB in favour of something like Reshade or SweetFX (if at all). I would advise you to run some stress tests. I personally use the "power supply" test in OCCT which basically pushes everything to the max. Run it in increments of 5 minutes and see what kind of results you end up with.

 

Your laptop should be fine with the vanilla game and a few script-based mods. The i7 wouldn't be too bad at handling a bit more action. The GPU is what is killing your performance and I suspect it is overheating.

[Fifoo]

Do not blindly follow the recommendations of the guides because they are not necessarily adapted to your material. They can give you an idea of what can be done in terms of optimization, but after that it's up to you to experiment and to find the parameters that are suitable for you. Keep in mind that your setup will have a hard time running your Skyrim game properly if you activate textures beyond 1024 MB. Do not expect stunning benchmarks with your graphics card, its performance is slightly below an old GeForce GT 525M and the exaggerated size of the frame buffer does not benefit the GPU.

 

Nevertheless there are some tips that you can apply before pushing further, if not already done:

 

Spoiler

- The maximum recommended game resolution for this card is 1366x768. Try to move to a lower resolution for your gaming session and instead of Ultra go into High Settings in the game setup for example. Sometimes you have to sacrifice in rendering quality in order to get better comfort. With your equipment you have to go looking for the least gain in terms of Fps.
- Optimize your OS, eliminate unnecessary stress for your CPU, and free up your RAM.
- Disable the Windows Services you do not need (be careful there, extra caution is required, but google is your best friend) and eliminate all unnecessary tasks from the Task Scheduler of your OS, disable your antivirus during the game session, disable automatic updates of your third-party programs and pass them in manual search mode, NVidia experience is also resource-intensive, I never installed it.

- If you have updated your graphics drivers without taking some precautions beforehand, this may cause instability problems in your system.
- Enable the Default Offline Connection Mode in the Steam settings before playing - your laptop will surely love it.

- Remember to regularly clean up and defragment your HD.

 

After that, start a benchmark again and see the results.

 

[Frankfranky]

Mate ... um ...

 

the advice I gave you was my settings. I have an i75820 and a 1080. This isn't going to work for you. There was a thread here the other day. I forget the title. Yatol had a lot to say about optimisation, in particular optimisation for systems that don't have the kind of overkill resources I do. Search for his most recent posts.

[yatol]

so much for sticking to useless guides...

gpu go down when cpu go up

cpu have too much to do to give stuff to do the gpu

 

if you don't use mo, game over

if you use mo, vanilla profile, coc riverwood and screen performance monitor value during your sprint to whiterun

then you do the same, without mods, just the mods files

then with half the load order

to find whatever is the problem, to get rid of the mod (or fix it if you feel like trying your luck with the files or load order conflicts)

 

 

" Optmizer Textures (Ordenador) also applied and resized to 1024. "

what's the point to install 4k texture if that's to make them similar to what there is in textures.bsa?

 

4k 11 mb 22mb (first is diffuse, second is _n, twice bigger with alpha transparency)

2k 2.8mb 5.5mb

1k 700 kb 1.4mb

 

unless you see purple in caves or mines, leave interior textures alone (dungeon folder, beds, walls, paints... there's the backup to put some back)

leave mountains 4k, you can waste 100 mb for that

if you are to resize down, start with the  _n

leave bodies 4k, you can waste 300 mb for that (4k head with 256*256 tintmask, of course npc suck, download npc overhaul for the 1k tintmasks)

 

 

 

 

 

[swmas]

If you can live with 30 fps limit the game to that.

[Lostdreamer]

Without knowing too much of the background, a couple of things jump out to me from the Performance Monitor testing.

 

The first is that the graphics card is pretty much flat out. Which, in itself isn't anything to worry about - it's not unusual to see the GPU load sitting at 100% with a few drops like that. Mine does. BUT this does mean you don't have much headroom left.

You have already run Ordinator to force all the textures etc down to 1k, so it may be worth rolling back further. You might find some stability/gameplay gains from things like Optimized Vanilla Textures, Performance X (several of these, doing things like limiting animations or removing underwater grass) & just removing mods that have huge file sizes or add a lot of extra textures like bonus armors or landscape overhauls.

 

The second thing is how much VRAM you are not using. I'd be expecting that to be sitting around the 4gb limit - modded games rapidly become BIG. Presumably the 250mb is the on board limit of your card. My guess is this is your bottleneck. If you explore options to mitigate this then it might help.

[thek8ikat]

9 hours ago, swmas said:

If you can live with 30 fps limit the game to that.

Yeah. 30 FPS is actually all you need for it to be smooth. 60 FPS is just EXTRA smooth.

[LazyBoot]

23 hours ago, RedRicker said:

i7 Processor 2.4 Ghz

Small nitpick... just saying i7 and a clockspeed really doesn't say much about the performance you can expect at all.

The core i-something cpus have been around for close to 10 years by now. So giving the actual model number at this point is kinda needed to know what kind of performance can be expected. ^{Not to mention that newer cpus have gotten better for the same clockspeeds (instructions per cycle has gone up)}

[Fifoo]

The CPU is an i7-5500U @ 2.40GHz as you can see in the hardware configuration features displayed by the image posted by RedRicker.

 

Spoiler

 

[swmas]

8 hours ago, ~Sugoirim~ said:

Yeah. 30 FPS is actually all you need for it to be smooth. 60 FPS is just EXTRA smooth.

Well said, I am completely fine with 30 FPS. I mostly play every game like that, if I know there is a chance a game can get even a few frames bellow 60 often enough, I'll just limit it to 30.

[yatol]

16 hours ago, Lostdreamer said:

 

The first is that the graphics card is pretty much flat out. Which, in itself isn't anything to worry about - it's not unusual to see the GPU load sitting at 100% with a few drops like that. Mine does. BUT this does mean you don't have much headroom left.

 

wonder why the ones that have no idea how to read performance monitor, post their useless opinions on it?

gpu at 100% it's normal, it's gpu under 100% you don't want

euh... don't have gpu stuff, didn't branch that on the good thing on the motherboard

doesn't matter, have no use for that

anyway

 

from 0 to 40 fps is 1, number of threads get up, cpu is more or less busy

that's coc qasmoke

gpu don't have much to do with the loading screen

some use loading screen fps limit to 30, some use no fog loading screen, that's to get the cpu to load stuff instead of wasting his time with the loading screen

have delete the loading screen, gpu render the main menu frame before coc qasmoke, or the frame opening the door, or... so i have 1 fps when loading stuff

 

then fps go to 60, it's running around in qasmoke

it go down when bat something

and back to 60 turning around (but cpu stay busy even if npc are no longer rendered, not because npc are no longer rendered their stuff is no longer done)

 

fps suffer much more with coc riverwood

performance get a little better running to whiterun

then it's as bad as riverwood

the finish off it's spawing dozens of npc, fps drop to 2, and those npc aren't even fighting (that's the slideshow mode)

 

bottleneck isn't ram or vram, i don't reach the max (it's 7 gb, have reserved 1gb for enbhost.exe swapping)

it's not the ssd either, 337 mb isn't its max, it's 500 or 600 i think

cpu don't reach 100% either, but it's the bottleneck

 

 

there's a lot of blabla about the papyrus settings, default is 1.2 and 1.2?

script a require 0.2 ms to be run, script b require 1.5 ms to be run

with 1.2 you waste 1+1.2 ms

with 2000 you waste 1999.8+1998.5 ms

with 0.1 you waste 0 (but reserving 0.1 ms 17 times take more time than reserving 1.2 ms 3 times, as for what is better... no idea)

 

that's what the bethesda guy said, have some doubts

didn't saw the very low fps because value too big when messing with that, either those settings do nothing, either game load default settings if you go beyond min/max values nobody know

 

cpu max 73%, for me, that mean 27% of cpu is wasted with the reserved cpu crap

cpu max is about 30-40% when i crush performance by spawning dozen of npcs, 60-70% of cpu wasted

problem isn't your cpu performance, it's skyrim.exe optimisation that is a joke

 

if you care about your performances, you have a lot of stuff to check

before giving hairs to npcs, you compare their performance impact, same with armors, enhanced blood, and everything

you do that in qasmoke, because it's always the same

and with more than one npc (0.2 fps, you can't see the difference, 0.2 * x, now you can see)