Almost finishing S.T.E.P. but...

[Jarda]

I started the game for the first time in order to check performance before continuing on Step 5. I was very happy because the fps at this point was 100~110, so I knew it was decent for the next steps. Only thing is the game looked like this:

Breezehome interior was perfect tho. Only thing I've made different was the weather part since it was optional. I got NAT and ELFX(interiors only + patches) instead of Cathedral + Luminosity. 

I'm on mobile right now and struggling to create a spoiler tag containing my load order, so here it is: https://pastebin.com/TtRAYMVv

Not expecting you guys to jump on something that deviates from the guide, but to put it short this issue is happening most likely because of the load order, correct?

Edit: Guess I should have posted on General Support subforum, I apologize for that.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Jarda
Potentially wrong forum section

[Greg]

I see you have ODIN and Vokrii installed. Did you by any chance follow the STEP SE 2.0 guide? The reason I'm asking is because this guide is still being developed and the 1.0.x Conflict Resolution Patch may not be compatible.

[TechAngel85]

 that is very odd. Not many first left for me with this game, but you managed one! How?...I've no clue. There are a lot of things wrong in those images.

Yeah, as Greg mentioned, the v2.0 Guide is still very much in development. No one should be using it.

[DoubleYou]

Perhaps you have depth of field turned up to like 100000? What are your INI files?

[Jarda]

You guys got me. I've followed 1.0 and then jumped on 2.0 comparing every difference and potential conflicts between the two guides. Except for Odin/Vokrii and maybe a few minor additions from 2.0 there are nothing drastically out of place, at least that's what I think. I know 2.0 is not supported, this is why I tried to come up with a more generic question without bothering you guys.

Anyways, regarding my issue I think I was too excited when I took a break from the PC and jumped here too soon. Looking at the load order I can see some discrepancies, but I think the biggest mistake is NAT ENB, I should have installed NAT Standalone instead and pay more attention on some details.

I will redo the weather part and come back here after that with feedback. Almost sure the issue was me rushing things in the last moments.

And yeah, I'm running SSE on a 5:4 monitor haha.

@DoubleYou I will check it out just in case, thank you.

Edited August 9, 2021 by Jarda

[Jarda]

Problem was the wrong NAT release and I had also forgotten to generate the grass. Now it's fine:

Since I'm about to start the LOD process I have a quick question. The guide tell us to merge Lod Pack for DynDoLod (all versions) with Majestic Mountains, is it correct? I thought I would have to create a new (TEMP) mod instead.

[Greg]

Yes, this is correct and I currently have three builds that do it this way. Cathedral Landscapes in 04-Foundation is a bit different in that this one is used only when generating LOD in Step 5.

[Jarda]

On 8/9/2021 at 5:54 PM, Greg said:

Yes, this is correct and I currently have three builds that do it this way. Cathedral Landscapes in 04-Foundation is a bit different in that this one is used only when generating LOD in Step 5.

Thank you, I think everything went fine. This is the result after generating LOD(no Grass LOD tho):

Both using NAT 2.0, first one is with Rudy ENB and the second is NAT-ENB.

I still need to turn on AF and a a couple more tweaks on NVinspector. I will also need to find some trade-offs because I can't keep 60fps with these ENB presets. Running around the area outside Whiterun it will go below 50fps sometimes and for me this is far from ideal.

Anyways I would like to thank you guys for the help. In regards the guide I have no words to express how thankful I am, that's an impressive job. Keep on the awesome work.

Edit: Almost forgot, do I need to repeat LOD generation if I decide to change the weather mod? Cuz I may want to go back to the old NAT Standalone in case I don't get good framerate results with NAT 2.0.

Edit 2: I suspected my settings on TexGen/DynDOLOD were a bit high, so I disabled the LOD related mods from Step 6 to see the exact performance hit. Indeed it was hitting harder then it should because of my mistake, but oddly enough the fps now is capped at 64.

All I did was to disable these three mods on MO2. Even tho I knew no changes were made by myself I went trough BethINI, NvInspector and SSE Display Tweaks just to make sure there was no vsync or fps limiters enabled. Everything was in place.

Now this was unexpected.

Edited August 11, 2021 by Jarda

[TechAngel85]

On 8/10/2021 at 3:35 PM, Jarda said:

 I will also need to find some trade-offs because I can't keep 60fps with these ENB presets. Running around the area outside Whiterun it will go below 50fps sometimes and for me this is far from ideal.

You can gain some performance back simple by turning down the quality settings in the enbseries.ini. You can just do a search on the file for "quality". 0 being High and 2 being Low.

On 8/10/2021 at 3:35 PM, Jarda said:

Edit: Almost forgot, do I need to repeat LOD generation if I decide to change the weather mod? Cuz I may want to go back to the old NAT Standalone in case I don't get good framerate results with NAT 2.0.

Only if the weather mod is a master of DynDOLOD, then you'll need to redo that. 

On 8/10/2021 at 3:35 PM, Jarda said:

Edit 2: I suspected my settings on TexGen/DynDOLOD were a bit high, so I disabled the LOD related mods from Step 6 to see the exact performance hit. Indeed it was hitting harder then it should because of my mistake, but oddly enough the fps now is capped at 64.

All I did was to disable these three mods on MO2. Even tho I knew no changes were made by myself I went trough BethINI, NvInspector and SSE Display Tweaks just to make sure there was no vsync or fps limiters enabled. Everything was in place.

Now this was unexpected.

Yes, DynDOLOD will have a performance hit of around 10FPS for most users.

As for the cap, enblocal.ini also has that stuff so check there too.

[Jarda]

@TechAngel85 Again I want to express my satisfaction and gratitude for the feedback provided and for the work put on developing the S.T.E.P. guide. I can say the final result was a complete success.

4 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

You can gain some performance back simple by turning down the quality settings in the enbseries.ini. You can just do a search on the file for "quality". 0 being High and 2 being Low.

I disabled DoF and lowered ResolutionScale and SourceTexturesScale values under [SSAO_SSIL], that was enough.

4 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

Yes, DynDOLOD will have a performance hit of around 10FPS for most users.

For me the impact was way up to 20+ fps, but that's because I mistakenly abused too much on settings. After redoing Step 6 with correct settings I was surprised to see how much I gained on both performance and visual quality compared to vanilla, I just can't believe.

4 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

As for the cap, enblocal.ini also has that stuff so check there too.

Now this one was interesting:

Spoiler

 

I had already checked all possible places including enblocal.ini. I went trough every possible ini or configuration file over the load order and searched all over Windows registry... nothing.

Procmon was my last resort when nothing else made sense . In a couple seconds I've noticed many NOT FOUND errors coming from SkyrimSE pointing to the audio device. I apologize if the following happen to be old news for you guys, but speaking for myself I've never experienced something like this before.

It turns out that moments before disabling mods from Step 6 I've disconnected the headphones. I don't want to hear a single SFX from the game before starting my playthrough, and it isn't unusual for me to use this PC without audio output.

 

Long story short, as soon as the headphone was plugged, I launched the game and the framerate has been restored. Not sure if it was related to something else on my end or it is SSE expected behavior when no available audio devices are found on the system, but anyways I think it would be important to report it here for further reference.

This image is the result of S.T.E.P. + NAT 2.0 + Rudy ENB. 16x AF + VSync from the gpu driver and SMAA from ENB. Game running smoothly at 1280x1024. Running around this area used for initial performance testing the fps will barely drop below 60 if ever on rainy weather, but most of the time it will incredibly stay at constant 60.  PC specs on the signature, it is close enough to the recommended by the guide.

10/10, would follow the guide again.

Thank you so much.

Edited August 12, 2021 by Jarda