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Scratch all the reporting I wrote below. I think I've found the issue. My VRAM is probably throttling. Despite my GPU is only at 77C maximum, when I am trying to record a video to show the problem I found even when the performance issue "fixed itself" after waiting for a while, if I keep waiting there longer the performance could drop agian. Then I have HWiNFO opened for monitoring all the temperature sensors and it turns out whenever I have mountains/rocks in sight the GPU memory junction temperature will break 100C(HWiNFO says 110C is the limit), and if I stop turning the camera, after a several minutes it drops to 90C, in sync with the framerate drops. Probably because some rock textures are 4k and 8k so only these objects will push the temperature to over 100C, and this happened to just the same time I changed my landscape mods. The GPU is kind of old so I'll order some thermal pads to see if this finally fixes it. Thank you so much for reading my lengthy posts these days.

I generated LOD dozens of times in the past week. Now I fixed the mod list, I think I have found some more patterns: First, I think it is related to the DynDOLOD output. It only happens often with the High DynDOLOD settings. I haven't met any performance issue without DynDOLOD or with low settings, and with medium settings there would be some rather short time after fast travel when frame rate drops, and I cannot tell if it is the same issue. I also tested trees and grass. Disabling ultra tree and grass LOD for the generation doesn't seem to affect the issue at all. When using the high settings, the frame rate drop only happens when I have some rocks/mountains in my view, and if I open console and wait there for 5-10 min (10-20 min with ENB on) doing nothing, the frame rate/GPU power consumption will turn completely back to normal. Like the screen shots in the previous post, disabling some small rocks will usually result in some performance boost. I tried to wait and see if I wait long enough every time the performance issue could be solved, it turns out that only 5~6 locations would return to normal performance, and if I travel to some other slow locations, some of the previously slow locations will slow down again. I was suspecting the new mods I used for landscape (Majestic Mountains Complex Material + Majestic Landscapes + BDS3) since I was using the non-complex material version + Simplicity of Snow before with 0 performance issue. Removing Majestic Mountains Complex Material from the mod list does mostly eliminate the frame rate drops but having a mod list with only Majestic Mountains Complex Material + Majestic Landscapes doesn't have any problem (this time I didn't generate terrain LOD though). I also tried to find if there is any hardware issue. Removing shader cache, reinstalling GPU driver with DDU, and setting GPU power to max performance all does nothing. When the performance drops, the VRAM usually sits at around 9-9.5/10GB of usage on the OSD. Although in task manager sometimes it shows over 11GB of combined GPU memory usage, but the issue still happens even when the GPU memory usage shows only 9/33.9GB. I compared the new textures to the old ones and they are the same resolution, so I guess the VRAM isn't the issue. I also tried the Intel monitor tool PresentMon which shows an interesting graph of CPU/GPU busy time: When the performance drops, the GPU busy time stays the same as the frame time (usually 100+ms/frame with ENB), while the CPU busy time would drop to less than 5ms. Another finding is when I was waiting for the performance to turning normal, the GPU power usually has a 2 step raise: if the issue was causing the GPU to consume only ~200W without ENB, sometimes after a while it will rise to ~270W, and if I turn on ENB right now it will immediately drop to a bit higher than 200W, and after some extra time it will rise to 300+W and the performance is normal again. Maybe there's something going on with the complex material textures? I couldn't see any SSD usage spikes in task manager though. Sorry my test took a while and thanks for reading such a long result. If there's no fix for it, I guess I'll just turn down some settings or bear with the current performance.

Thanks for the reply. Sorry I forgot to check the DynDOLOD version and my DynDOLOD version was still v167. I am using v169 now and there's no range check error. Following the Rudimentary Troubleshooting page, using tll will only delay the performance issue from ~5 to ~15 fast travels. I also tried generating a DynDOLOD without having the terrain LOD in the mod list and it also only delay the issue to ~15 fast travels. And If I load the save without anything in the DynDOLOD output folder game will CTD after ~15 fast travels. The good news is I finally find something that is more closely related to the frame drops. In one testing run, I found some rocks from Majestic Mountains Complex Material not loading properly. Here are some screenshots. Sorry for using phone cameras for the screenshots. During the testing, whenever I have this rock(rockpilel01.nif, BaseID 000226BA, RefID 000A523C) in sight, the GPU would stop working at full power(screenshot1), and after I disabled it, I gained some FPS back(screenshot2). However, I am not able to replicate this scene. After some minutes disabling and enabling it back and forth, I switched to the MO2 window to check which mod the mesh is from and then alt-tab-ed back, everything then seemed to be loading properly and GPU drew over 300W(screenshot3). One notable thing about the rock(rockpilel01.nif) is that it also has a lot of warnings of textures not matching in the DynDOLOD summary although I checked all the textures are from either Majestic Mountains Complex Material or Majestic Landscapes. DynDOLOD Summary.zip

I have done some testing in the past days. First the problem doesn't seem to happen without DynDOLOD's output. Without the DynDOLOD output the GPU power draw is constantly at over 300W but when the frame drop happens it only draws less than 180W. Also, the frame drop only happens after I fast travel for like 5-6 times consecutively, and only when I am looking at the mountains/trees(even when there is a tiny part of mountain/tree on screen), frame rate drops to around 10 fps. If it is caused by loading full models/textures, then I think it is most likely caused by Nature of The Wild Lands - 3D LODs. There was a weird warning I ignored last time I generated LOD: a small tree was so small that got ignored by TexGen but then DynDOLOD was reporting not finding its textures. I decided to regenerate LODs to get some newer logs, but this time I had a range check error when DynDOLOD is calculating occlusion for DLC2SolstheimWorld. Here are the logs: https://ufile.io/dqefrg5r . Some of the logs are from my last generation(March 7th), and in between I only downloaded/updated some dialogue mods and animation mods.

I recently redone my landscapes(changed some textures, switched from Majestic Mountains to Majestic Mountains Complex Material, and created my own grass patch), and after generating all the lods(grass cache, then xlodgen, then texture gen, and finally dyndolod), and I occasionally will have huge framerate drops(50+ to 10+) when looking at the mountains. This frame drop only happens when switching cells, but I cannot find out how to reproduce it. When the frame rate drops, the GPU usage will hit 100% with only about half of its power draw(RivaTuner's monitoring), in both RivaTuner and Task Manager the VRAM is not full, everything is on an NVME SSD and the drawcall isn't particularly high. And if I made a save immidiately and reboot the game, the framerate will be normal. The reason I think this could be related to the LOD is that I found I could reduce the frequency of this kind of frame drop by lowering the LOD settings in BethINI. I need some help about what I should check to find out what is causing this performance issue. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the replies. Sorry I didn't specify the guide I was following. It was the Step Guide SkyrimSE v2.2.0 here. I can't remember but I think I changed the gamma values to be exact same as listed in the guide. Maybe I shouldn't do this? I uploaded some more screenshots. It seems that the snow shader from Simplicity of Snow is also a little bit off (the tree LOD snow is much darker, and maybe the snow pile is too bright). I am changing the landscape mods, so I'll also try to see if BDS is better for my list too.

screenshot (the distant snow on the ground is darker than the snowy roads and snow piles) screenshot of map view (on the map the snow is still slightly darker than the rocks, but this is acceptable for me) I generated all the LODs (xLODGen, TexGen, DynDOLODGen) following the guide. I also tried adjusting noise texture which will cause other terrains being too bright. Also I am using Simplicity of Snow, and the projecteddiffuse texture is already patched with the snow texture from the landscape textures mod (Also I just find the screenshot of ProjectedDiffuse Patch Hub mod on nexus shows the same problem). How can I fix this? Thanks!

Thank you! Unfortunately, after whitelisted all these folders and file extensions, windows defender still takes almost 20% of my CPU usage during generation. I guess that's something with Windows Defender and I'll just keep it off while generating LOD.

Hello, I am wondering what files/folders I should add to the exclusions of Windows Defender, so that it won't keep scanning while generating LOD? I have already excluded the DynDOLOD folder and the output folder, but in task manager I can still see windows defender actively scanning when generating LOD, which causes my system to run out of memory (16GB) and freeze. Turning off the real-time protection solved this problem, but I'd like to set up the exclusion list so that I can forget about the extra steps of turning off and on the real-time protection.