Tree LOD 'popping' in?

[gwoody79]

It's kinda hard to explain (I think) and searched all over (with no success) for how to make the tree's from 'popping'...Sprinting across Skyrim, the tree detail (meshes/textures/LOD - not really sure what to call it) suddendly 'pop's and changes detail and causes brief lag/stutter..

If anyone knows a fix (I belive it would be INI) please share. I followed STEP, searched for fix but this lil bug is a big problem for me.

Thanks in advance for anyone who can offer some advice.

 

QuickEdit- more specifically, what I am having problems with is I can see the trees when sprinting across the land, but all of a sudden the detail/texture 'pops' and changes causing lag/stuttering. Is there a fix or unavoidable Skyrim problem?

[Nachtfrost]

I think that's normal for most open world games. However, you can change the uGrids value in your ini but this is very demanding up to total instability of the game. I wouldn't do that unless you have a very powerful rig and know what you're doing. In regard of the fact that you already get stutters on the default uGrids, I believe you have to live with that. More information about your rig would also be helpfull. 

[torminater]

Well, it might be possible to give trees a full-LOD-status, so they're shown regardless how far away they are. I am not quite sure how demanding this will be for your rig since you already seem to have performance problems. If you're running through skyrim and enter a new "area" like 30-60 "meters" away from your current position the new "area" will get fully rendered and the old area gets deleted, so that you have full texture quality for some distance in the way you look in and your computer doesn't have to handle all of the old textures anymore. If you see trees popping in and then changing their textures this is exactly this phenomenon. However, if this causes lags/stuttering for you and you have a decent rig, I'm pretty sure, that your VRAM is overflowing. This causes textures which need to be processed by your cpu and gpu get put on your RAM which is incredibly slower than the vram of your graphics card. To fix this, you have 3 possibilities:

- overhaul your rig to most modern high-tech-standards (windows 7 64 bit, SSD for windows, SSD for games, 16 GB RAM, some high-end-cpu overclockable, high-end-gpu with as much vram as possible, separate sound card and mb, power supply and whatever else you might think of)

- optimize skyrim for your rig (performance over quality everywhere possible!)

1. start off from a clean vanilla install and install whatever scripting tools your currently using.

2. keep adding more and more of your favorite texture mods and test them thouroughly before adding the next one. Try to stick to med res or low res versions and use "Texture Optimizer" or DDSopt on them

3. tweak view distances and everything for your best skyrim experience

[gwoody79]

Thanks for the replies.

I think you helped me figure out my problem, and that is my rig needs an upgrade.

Current specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 945 Processor 3.0GHz 

ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossfireX 4.00 GB RAM

 

overall, game runs really good & smooth using STEP just that darn tree 'popping' bothers me.

Sounds like SSD & RAM upgrade

 

 

you mentioned "give trees full-LOD-status", to make sure did it correct is that changing the 'fTreesMidLODSwitchDist' in SkyrimPrefsINI?

I already upped it to 25000.00 - should I up it more or is it a different setting to 'give trees full LOD status'?

 

 

THanks again for replying, you already pointed me in right direction in what i need to do to improve my Skyrim - SSD!

[torminater]

You would need to edit the records for all of the trees with the creation kit as far as I know. I'm no expert though on that matter, sry.

The ini-settings usually don't effect the game as much as they promise, since they get capped by other ini-settings which really kill your performance.

For example: To reduce textures popping in or too be more precise, to increase the distance at which textures are popping in you can increase your ugrids with instant effect. The higher the ugrids-value the more cells are getting fully loaded ergo the more trees you see on your screen in further distance in higher detail. you could try ugrids 7 with reduced textures etc. might be worth trying before spending money.

However, SSD and RAM is not too expensive atm, so you might as well upgrade to them.

[stoppingby4now]

To be clear, simply upgrading to an SSD and more RAM will not elliminate the 'popin'. It doesn't matter how fast the underlying parts are, you are still going to notice the change due to the significant difference in what is represented before and after. Running DDSOPT on textures has shown to help this a lot, so that is something to consider (you can check out the DDSOPT thread starting around this post).

 

As torminater stated, increasing ugrids to 7 will cause the more immediate surroundings to not exhibit this behavior, but at the added cost of needing to keep more high detailed objects in your view. Increasing ugirds higher will significantly reduce the 'popin' that you are seeing, but you also run the risk of instability the higher you go.

[frihyland]

There are a couple of mods on the nexus that simulate the results of ugrids 9 without the instability by making certain features always visible, I haven't tested them yet myself.

 

Ddsopt creates all of the proper mipmaps so that they don't have to be created on the fly so it would definitely help for any graphics that are not properly mipmapped.

 

Setting your ugrids to 7 (or at most 9) will cause a significant strain on your system that the extra ram and an ssd might help to relieve somewhat. You can be the guinea pig :D

[gwoody79]

DDSopt it is, think this might be the solution I was looking for.

Tried just about every INI tweak I could find out there with no fix.

 

Thanks again - didn't think I needed to DDSopt cuz game is running stable and smooth, just trying to get rid of that tree detail 'popping'

and bonus, it looks like it tidies everything up for efficiancy.

[MadWizard25]

Let me know how DDSopt works with tree popping. I DDSopted several tree mods, and it resulted in less LOD popping, but more tree shadow popping, oddly enough. To clarify, i use the STEP recommended tree textures with a few extra tree mods.