Performance help, please; what do I tweak first?

[madegeeky]

I just did my first benchmark for Step (after section 2.D, as suggested) and, as I knew would happen, my game is laggy af. I let Skyrim launcher choose my presets (high) and then did as Step recommended. However, I knew from experience that I'd have to turn things down so was prepared for it. (I've done this whole shebang before with Skryim but then my hard drive crashed and burned.) In the past I've just kind of done things using my rather rudimentary knowledge of this sort of thing to decide what to tweak. However, this time, I thought I'd ask for opinions of people that are more knowledgeable so I can get the best bang for my buck.

 

Basically, when you start having to turn settings down to help with performance, what should get turned down first? I know from my own experiments with other games that good textures can make a world of difference but other than that I'm at a loss.

 

One specific thing that I've been wondering has to do with the high-res texture packs. Is it better to have texture quality turned to high with low-res textures or is it better to have texture quality turned to medium with high-res textures? (Better meaning in regards to getting the best quality for the least performance cost.) Even if this ends up being irrelevant for me, I'm still just honestly curious and figure it can't hurt to know for future reference, so an answer would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you for your time and any help that you can give me.

 

My specs for my laptop, should they be needed:

 

CPU: Intel Core i7-3610QM @ 2.30GHz

Integrated GPU: Intel Graphics 4000

Dedicated GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M (which is what Skyrim uses)

RAM: 8GB

Storage Type: SSD

 

Please let me know if any other information is needed. And, again, thank you.

Edited August 31, 2016 by madegeeky

[DoubleYou]

Try using BethINI medium preset.

[madegeeky]

Try using BethINI medium preset.

That worked perfect!

 

Actually, I had just found out about BethINI before posting this (from looking through the forums) and so I had only just installed it. So, I decided to test and see what would happen if I did BethINI on high and it also runs way better than it did before (on medium I'm getting 40-60 fps, with high 25-45; before I installed BethINI I was getting 15-35). I had no idea what I had tweaked in one of the .ini files that was causing the lag but BethINI fixed it. I'm probably going to end up on medium once I finished with all the Step mods and then the extras I want to install, but the fact that it now works on high is amazing. 

 

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer what is, probably to most people, a very obvious answer to my question. Like I said, I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something obvious to more knowledgeable people that I should start with. (And, see, there totally is, because I would have been messing around with the Launcher settings and this is so much easier.)

 

Thank you for making the program; it's amazing and is already making a world of difference for me. Just thank you so much. 

[Shinobus]

 I have started a new game, same ini's and mods, just a fresh game and re-install of mods. I started to get stutter,(you can see in FP mode with weapon drawn "phasing" when looking up and down) not affecting my FPS either, most noticeable when looking around or with weapon drawn, and in certain areas interior, but not as prolific outdoors. So I re-installed Skyrim, still had the problem. So got enb Boost, got the crashFix's, and this fix also. My AMD is set for app, only vsync is enabled outside. I'm very stuck with this, and depressed lol I had a stable game before re-start, I re-started because there were mods I no longer wanted, and didn't want to use a save tool to remove them. Any help would be awesome, I'm not a smart egg (too many bumps to the head lol) So I really appreciate any help.