Good Performance Hunting

[skwareballz]

The thread that Martigen started about this over at the Beth forums was pretty interesting. He listed quite a few STEP mods that could optimized for a few MB here or there, but wouldn't it be up to each individual to do this on their own to get the best performance from the mods? It seems like we might need to ask the modders to optimize their mods and then reupload them, or try to make a large package with everything available to everyone.

 

I wonder if there are any texture mods from STEP that you guys leave out? like Chris2012s Whiterun which Martigen metioned could be reduced by over 100MB.

[frihyland]

Check out my new DLC section over in Skyrim Installation

 

Edit: not sure why i posted this here, must have had multiple tabs open and posted to wrong one, but yeah while you are here might as well check it out :P

[SmegmusMagnus]

@z & stopping by

 

I will get back to you concerning greater specifics on my rig.

 

Also; do I read you correctly that having my pagination allocated the way that I do likely creates performance problems?

 

Thanks

 

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk 2

[z929669]

As s4n states, you want your page file to be about 1 to 1.5 times the size of your available system RAM, no more. You should also set min and max size to be the same to avoid resizing on the fly. Another good recommendation is to place the page file on another drive than your OS (NOT another partition of same HDD as OS!), preferably at the beginning of the drive. I actually created two 6.5 Gb partitions at the beginning of two of my HDDs (not the HDD with my OS). I use about 6 GB of each for swap space.

 

This is great for performance of non gaming programs for graphical and video editing, but the page file will be of little use for gaming, as it is way too slow for real time needs.

 

Your video card is good enough to handle most/all of your graphic memory needs in-game I suspect.

[stoppingby4now]

+1 to zMan's comments. Having your page file that big won't cause performance problems, it's just unnecessary and a waste of disk space. But I'll also add that while putting your page file(s) on other disks is good for performance, it's still recommended to put a small amount on the C drive. Otherwise, Windows won't be able to write out debug information should you blue screen.

[z929669]

Good point on the BSOD, s4n.... I never worry about that though, since I pretty much always know the cause of a BSOD, and if I did not, then that log would be a PITA for me to interpret :P

[frihyland]

You'll get much more performance gain by moving the swap off of the system drive (windows) than you will by increasing its size past 100% of your memory and anything over 150% is a complete waste. The swap file is actually a leftover from twenty years ago before RAM was cheap and plentiful and if your on a machine with 16GB RAM or more you're better off getting rid of it completely for great performance gains, note that in rare cases this will cause a bsod (you never get something for nothing).

The optimal setup for performance and stability would be 3 ssd's one for the system files (windows), one for boot files,the swap file and system temp files, and one for your games. At $70 bucks each for 64gb ssd's its pretty doable for the first time ever.

Personally I live fast and cheap so I'm going with 2 ssd's and no swap file on my new build.

[stoppingby4now]

Completely disabling the pagefile when using HDD's can still be detrimental to performance. Some Windows components force information out to the page file, and if one doesn't exist that information gets created as temp files, which further adds to the fragmentation problem.

[frihyland]

  Quote

Completely disabling the pagefile when using HDD's can still be detrimental to performance. Some Windows components force information out to the page file, and if one doesn't exist that information gets created as temp files, which further adds to the fragmentation problem.

 

 

Not if you turn off those components :D Most of them are silly safety and compatibility stuff, who needs that. But yeah this is not a path for the feint of heart, bsods will occur, its just how often. And you can create a RAMdisk for the swapfile if you have 32GB of memory which is my plan, all to fool the silly operating system that can't use it all but thinks it needs more and more in order to function.

 

Good catch stopping I was thinking aloud about my own build while giving tuning advice, not a good combo, wouldn't want to be responsible for that mess.

[stoppingby4now]

Sure, but you can't turn off everything, and it's still going to occur. Bottom line, safest recommendation for those with HDD's is to use one. SSD's are the way to go for maximum speed and to avoid the fragmentation problem.

[stoppingby4now]

DDSopt finished. When you said 1.5 - 4 hours, figured It'd be there for awhile, but took just over an hour. But I could not get the 64bit version of The Compressonator installed, so having to use the 32bit version. Also NOT a fan of it's windowing. I double clicked a file to check it out, then closed it thinking it was a new window...nope, had to re-compare all over again. And yes, I missed the note, but it should probably have the button name in there.

 

EDIT: In step 6.4 the formula has extra information that creates an invalid path.

 

="del ""\textures"&A7&""""

 

should be

 

="del """&A7&""""

[stoppingby4now]

Completed the guide and just copied everything into the Data directory rather than packing it all. No other mods installed, and I have some different visual results.

 

This first image is in a similar location in Windhelm from zMan's images. I'm still getting a lot of smudging.

 

 

The second image is of the snow. It's exceptionally bright, and has extreme blue/purple tints to it.

 

[frihyland]

Yeah windhelm is notorious for bad meshes, SMIM will clean that all up given time.

[z929669]

  Quote

Completed the guide and just copied everything into the Data directory rather than packing it all. No other mods installed, and I have some different visual results.

 

This first image is in a similar location in Windhelm from zMan's images. I'm still getting a lot of smudging.

 

 

The second image is of the snow. It's exceptionally bright, and has extreme blue/purple tints to it.

 

 

 

Hmmm,

 

 

 

Looks like missing textures in both (or the snow is just the normal map), and the smudging tells me that you may not have the proper settings on the constraints tab (or elsewhere) ... or more likely, the DDSopt'ed texture(s) is not getting used.

 

I'd say that your "del" edit in Excel is the problem.

 

Also, you should not perform that step anyway, as I have already vetted the settings for DDSopt with Ethatron, and none of the textures is really messed up at all by DDSopt, save only one forge texture that is well known. Again, the guide is out of date :D

 

Sorry, I thought you knew about the MSE being a false negative in the Compressonator (posts around here somewhere, first of which are in the previous site archives). This is largely due to edited normal maps not being renormalized or other perceived problems that are not really problems at all; however, the game shader engine does that automatically, so even though they appear messed up in Windows, they render nicely in game. (you can see the diff using the Photoshop DDS plugin or in Gimp with the same).

 

Compressonator is buggy, but it is still pretty useful in many ways.

 

 

Just go to my earlier post on this thread with all of the benchmarks and use the DDSopt settings at the end of that. Otherwise, use the defaults. Run this on all of the vanilla textures and use that product(s). I have 7z archives of vanilla standard textures, vanilla DDSopt'ed textures, combined vanilla HR standard textures and combined vanilla HR DDSopt'ed textures. That is what I tested in that post, and the DDSopt'ed versions of both will be best for your rig (no Vano optimized DLC necessary unless you find yourself low on VRAM later in STEP)

[stoppingby4now]

@zManI did use your settings from this post rather than the ones in the guide for the constraints tab. So essentially, I don't need to do the steps using Compressonator at all, right? I must have missed, or it didn't sink in, about the MSE being a false negative.

To recap what I did:

• Extracted textures and dcl01 & 02.
• Fixed paths/filename.
• Combined the dlc and the vanilla textures.
• Applied Vano's 00 Core files from his archive.
• Ran DDSopt with constraint settings that you provided in this thread.
• Ran compressonator to get the report.
• Used Excel to generate commands.

Gathering from your post, I can drop 4, 6, and 7?

 

EDIT: I wanted to run through this to see what the results were on my system. I have 3GB of VRAM, so I'm not worried about running out.