Best Way to Improve FPS with a long load list

[tregolani]

Hey all,

 

So, after about a good 2-3 weeks of research, DDSopting, and meticulous instruction following, I've finally finished my loadout:

 

Baseline STEP Extended

+

VEGA

+

Extra mods for armor/weapon additions and city/road population.

 

I also DDsopt'd my vanilla BSAs according to the guide.

 

MO shows ~290 mods installed, with the plugin list ~215 (I'll be able to give specifics once I get home from work).  It's a hefty load, but aside from one epic-superflip bugged-out ride to Helgen where Lokir got stuck behind the cart and couldn't get shot in the back (restarted the game after, worked fine 2nd time), it's been working great.  

 

I am, however, experiencing quite a bit lower FPS than before playing with the setup, but that's not super surprising, seeing as I have, well, a LOT of mods.  Outdoors (especially after coming out of the cave with Hadvar) it dips to about 20-25 (17-19 when looking into the distance), whereas inside Alvor's house, I had a pretty stable 50ish (which I am quite happy with).  

 

My question is:  what is the best way to recover some FPS, especially outdoors?  My machine defaults to Ultra settings, and always got a steady 50-60 FPS with Vanilla (specs listed at the end of the post).  I'm not looking for super epic levels of FPS, but rather just a steady 30+ everywhere.  What would be the best way to go about helping my frame rate? Should I attack my graphics settings (AA=4x, VSync=default, Anisotropy, etc) or my textures first to gain back performance? I don't really want to uninstall SFO or SRO, but if it comes down to that, I will. 

 

I've been looking into HialgoBoost, and might give that a try, as well as SPP (since I didn't install it originally), but am not sure whether or not those will help me get back some of that lost FPS.  I've also been investigating using Texture Optimizer since I have so many mods, but again, am not sure whether this will give me a noticeably FPS boost. I have followed the INI tweaks to the letter in the 2.2.8 guide, so I did activate the shadows on trees and land, as well as setting the grass variation to 7 per SFO's recommendation.

 

The only thing I did not do was use TES5Edit to clean my modlist after the original ESPs/ESMs (I did clean those).  However, I doubt that will help with any FPS issues.

 

Specs (for reference):

ASUS G75VW-RS72

Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor, 2.3 GHz (Max Turbo Frequency 3.3GHz), 6MB Smart Cache

12GB, PC3-12800/1600Mhz DDR3

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670M w/3GB GDDR5

 

Any advice you guys can give would be amazing.  Thanks so much for STEP!

[tregolani]

You could also try grass on steroids SFO compatible version. I need to add it to my list again as well.

This solved my problems. Thank you!

 

I noticed I had originally installed SFO with iMinGrassSize=15 (thinking my machine could handle it as default was 20), so the density of the grass was a lot higher than usual on top of the HD textures from SFO, but then had completely forgot about that tidbit.

 

However, after installing GoS, my framerate outside is about 30-50, depending on the area.  So thanks for all the help, everyone!

[EssArrBee]

You could turn shadows to high and drop the view distance sliders down a little.

[phazer11]

You have a machine very close to my own laptop (which is slightly better on the video card side) I have an ASUS G75VX with a GTX 670MX Graphics card, turn your shaodws down to 2048 with the secondary to 1024. If that doesn't help much I'll have to look more closely at the differences between our cards (I'm also using a SSD).

[tregolani]

I have a sneaking suspicion that the culprit is SFO - my FPS tanks down to 10-15 in some of the very intensively flowery fields around Whiterun, but everywhere else it's a nice 30-40, which is definitely playable and enjoyable.

 

Regardless, it's only outdoors that my FPS suffers. The worst part about it is the occasional bit of lag (giants suddenly sprinting across a field faster than I can draw a bow), which to me suggests that it is CPU/RAM-related as opposed to VRAM-related.  Engine and AI scripts would not be lagged by VRAM issues.

 

I'll have to uninstall it to test my theory this evening.

[DoubleYou]

Easy way to test that would be to type tg in the console to toggle the grass on and off.

[phazer11]

You could also try grass on steroids SFO compatible version. I need to add it to my list again as well.