Mini-freezes on exterior cell boundaries

[TomForStep]

I get mini-freezes when crossing exterior cell boundaries. At least I think it's on cell boundaries. Here's a video showing four occurences of mini-freezes north of Helgen. The freezes always happen at exactly the same spots, can be replicated and most likely all exteriors are affected. They occur when walking, running or on horse-back.

Game is on a SSD. 32 GB RAM. RTX 3080 with 10 GB VRAM. Game version 1.5.97. I haven't always had these freezes. They started at some point in time, but I cannot pin it down when exactly. I have added a lot of mods over the course of my 900+ hours save game.

What I have tried so far, but nothing helped:

- Installed latest Nvidia driver

- Disabled texture mods (for terrain, trees etc.)

- Disabled ENB and Reshade

- Disabled DynDOLOD

- Tested with BethINI Low settings

- Removed almost all mods I added in the last three months (a couple had to stay as the game would crash otherwise)

- Ran Papyrus Profiler and removed the mod/scripts which seemed to cause excessive script lag

Is there anything else I can try or test?

 

[z929669]

2 hours ago, TomForStep said:

I get mini-freezes when crossing exterior cell boundaries. At least I think it's on cell boundaries. Here's a video showing four occurences of mini-freezes north of Helgen. The freezes always happen at exactly the same spots, can be replicated and most likely all exteriors are affected. They occur when walking, running or on horse-back.

Game is on a SSD. 32 GB RAM. RTX 3080 with 10 GB VRAM. Game version 1.5.97. I haven't always had these freezes. They started at some point in time, but I cannot pin it down when exactly. I have added a lot of mods over the course of my 900+ hours save game.

What I have tried so far, but nothing helped:

- Installed latest Nvidia driver

- Disabled texture mods (for terrain, trees etc.)

- Disabled ENB and Reshade

- Disabled DynDOLOD

- Tested with BethINI Low settings

- Removed almost all mods I added in the last three months (a couple had to stay as the game would crash otherwise)

- Ran Papyrus Profiler and removed the mod/scripts which seemed to cause excessive script lag

Is there anything else I can try or test?

 

Try switching to DynDOLOD DLL NG with the large ref workarounds if you are not already using it. All plugins that have them will need to be cleaned of UDRs for NG to function though. (About 40 vanilla plugins)

[Mousetick]

If you already disabled DynDOLOD and that didn't make a difference, switching to DynDOLOD DLL NG wouldn't help.

What about your grass: grass mods, grass cache (or lack thereof), grass settings?

Also: memory (OS or GPU) usage?

[TomForStep]

Thank you for all your input!

- OS RAM is at about 20 GB out of 32 GB so I think that's fine

- VRAM usage is at 9.5 GB with Pfuscher's AIO 4k and at 8.5 GB with 2k -> rather high I guess, but maybe also not the issue

- The mini-freezes don't seem to occur on the paths from Riften to Fort Dawnguard (at least I didn't notice any there)

- I get the mini-freezes at exactly the same spots around Helgen even with grass disabled (via BethINI setting)

- I have begun disabling mods like all the grass and nature/tree mods -> still get the mini-freezes

[ButchDiavolo]

On 2/7/2024 at 11:20 AM, TomForStep said:

 I have added a lot of mods over the course of my 900+ hours save game.

Perhaps a silly question, but have you tried cleaning your save with Fallrim Tools/ Resaver? It could be that the mini-freezes are caused by residual data that the game doesn't know what to do with. Just an idea though. If/ When you are going to try Resaver, make sure to NOT overwrite the dirty save with the cleaned one. Call the cleaned one something like "Cleaned". That way if cleaning corrupts the save file, you can always go back. But if the cleaning corrupts the save it is probably an indication there are problems with the save file.

[TomForStep]

2 hours ago, ButchDiavolo said:

Perhaps a silly question, but have you tried cleaning your save with Fallrim Tools/ Resaver? It could be that the mini-freezes are caused by residual data that the game doesn't know what to do with. Just an idea though. If/ When you are going to try Resaver, make sure to NOT overwrite the dirty save with the cleaned one. Call the cleaned one something like "Cleaned". That way if cleaning corrupts the save file, you can always go back. But if the cleaning corrupts the save it is probably an indication there are problems with the save file.

Yes, I had a look at it. Resaver doesn't show any unattached instances/scripts. And it usually shows only three or so active scripts.