b3ast1e

I've been coming here for a while now but never registered, just lurked and soaked up all the great stuff here to make my game better. But this patch was enough to draw me out of the shadows just to shout from the rooftops how chuffed I am. I've not been using it enough to give any real contribution to feedback other than anecdotal, no numbers or anything useful to back myself up. And I've been using Safety Load for a while now so ILS has been much less of an issue for me than it once was. What I wasn't expecting was for this patch to give me a big general boost in performance.My game has gone from okay but a little stodgy because of all the stuff I throw at it (thanks to STEP lol), to significantly smoother and more stable than I think it's ever been, by some margin too. I've even been brave enough to up my u-grids to 7, and my creaky old rig didn't even seem to notice! Sheson is a master of the dark arts, this has to be black magic - he's fixed Skyrim. And thanks to Neovalen for going to the trouble of making it much easier for us folk who don't much like computers to get up and running without chasing our tails. My hobo setup: AMD Bulldozer 6100 (don't hate me) slightly clocked / 2x 2GB 1.3ghz DDR3 /GTX 650ti 2gb. I'm running the general core STEP guide with a bunch of other stuff I've added, about 190 plugins, all dirty edits cleaned and textures optimized at 1024 or lower. I'm using a performance ENB (Saraan Suum) but with deferred rendering enabled so I can turn on stuff like reflections. I play at 1920x1080 and generally get avg 30fps exteriors, 40-45 interiors. As I say, no problems with loads, no freezing, no stuttering, load times were often longish (25 - 30 secs max) for big transitions, but most interior to exterior loads within cities seem much faster now (this ENB has always been slower than others I've used). As a quick test I did the North Tower dragon, always been a lag spot for me. Throughout that fight I was getting 35fps - normally it can plummet to 24fps there. In wooded areas around Falkreath I normally get as low as 22 or 24 fps, with the patch it's 28 or 30 - but the significant difference is that I'm not getting any little freezes, no pauses while cells load - unheard of for me in that area. I've not thrown anything like Immersive Patrols at it yet, but that's going to be a significant test as I've never been able to run it well with this setup. I'll update with how it went if that's useful.