Skylight ENB: FPS Drop on Area Transition

[Kessno]

Hello,

 

I recently updated to STEP 2.2.9 and run Skyrim through Mod Organizer using SKSE. I noticed that after I installed Skylight ENB everything runs great until I either fast travel or load out to Skyrim from inside of an interior cell. My framerate outside, which typically stays high 30s to low 40s, drops down to mid to high teens.

 

I'm able to fix this by alt-tabbing out of the game and going back in. It almost seems like a memory issue of some sort.

Do you guys have any ideas?

 

System Specs:

Intel i5 3.4Ghz

Geforce 660TI 2GB

16GB DDR3 RAM

[Aiyen]

phazer : Only 1440p on my 660 GTX 2Gb... with 25-30 avg FPS in most locations. Some heavily forested ones go down to 20. On 1080p then it is 40-50 more or less consistently. 

 

The TI is a better card so it should be able to perform better. 

 

Transition issues are tricky, since it is most likely due to how stuff is loaded or how much is loaded. I would first try the disable/enable ENB to see if it is an ENB effect that cause the slowdown or if it is just generic skyrim. Depending on your shadow and grass ini settings then ENB shadows can cause these huge slow down during transitions. Also like root says.. do not accidentally press the limiter keys! :) 

 

Ofc. it is also a good idea to just check using only the default ENB files. 

[Nearox]

1) How are your enblocal.ini and enbseries.ini configured?

 

2) With that GPU, though it can run an ENB, you will likely have to reduce some settings in enbseries.ini to get a decent FPS. 

Edited July 14, 2014 by Nearox

[Shadriss]

Have the same issues, though not so often as Kessno... mine strikes about every hour or so, with a similar fix. Neither of us have touched the ENBseries portion, but out ENBlocals are alligned thus:

 

[MEMORY]ExpandSystemMemoryX64=trueReduceSystemMemoryUsage=trueDisableDriverMemoryManager=falseDisablePreloadToVRAM=falseEnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=falseReservedMemorySizeMb=512VideoMemorySizeMb=8192EnableCompression=trueAutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

 

This is based on Aiyen's suggestions over in the Skylight thread a few days ago.

 

My relevant data:

 

Intel i7 3.4GHz

GeForce 770 2GB

16GB DDR3 RAM

[phazer11]

Um... what resolutions and texture sizes are you using. AFAIK Aiyen is still trooping on @1600P on his GTX 660 2GB. (Correct me if I'm wrong mate). Also are you saying your framerate maxes out at 40FPS... indoors?

[Kessno]

No, I generally get high 40-50 with a cap of 60FPS indoors. I'm running at 1080p with 1K textures. Maybe a handful of 2K textures that weren't offered at a lower-res.

[rootsrat]

1) How are your enblocal.ini and enbseries.ini configured?

 

2) With that GPU, though it can run an ENB, you will likely have to reduce some settings in enbseries.ini to get a decent FPS. 

I have GTX660 2GB too and I didn't have to trim anything down in enbseries.ini file when using Skylight ENB, it runs perfectly fine. If the issue occurs only when using Skylight ENB then enblocal.ini won't matter, as it has nothing to do with processing.

 

@OP does your framerate goes back up when you disable ENB in game (default Shift+F12)? 

 

Also, check that you are not accidentally pressing FPS limiter hotkey (and that the limiter is not set to some ridiculous value). It happened to me before and I spend over a week trying to figure it out... I ditched my mod set up at the time and started everything from scratch. I lost 2 months worth of building my mod set up, making patches etc. I then lost another month trying to recreate everything from scratch. 

 

Finally I found out that all I was doing, was pressing the FPS limiter hotkey accidentally O_o

 

You can imagine how happy I was, NOT!  :angry:

[Kessno]

Thanks for the heads up about the FPS limiter key, I wasn't aware of that. I checked the default key bindings and I never use that combination.

 

I can confirm that it is indeed the ENB causing the slowdown and not Skyrim itself, as once I disable the ENB with Shift+F12 the FPS immediately shoot up into the high 40s. Unfortunately, a few seconds after that I get a driver crash that brings down my entire system and forces me to restart. I guess it doesn't like me disabling the ENB during the choppy framerate. Works fine if I disable the ENB when the framerate is higher.

 

On a side note: I was receiving a driver crash like that about every 30 minutes because I forgot to install SSME. Which makes me think this is another memory related issue of some sort?

Edited July 15, 2014 by Kessno

[Nozzer66]

I have to ask, are you running the latest drivers?

[Aiyen]

Ah the "the nvdagdagadsafagfa has stopped responding" or whatever its name is. Had that for ages way back when. Most of it got solved via driver updates as time progressed, but ultimately it was due to some bad VRAM. 

 

It is not always due to bad VRAM however and sometimes it is just weird. For example I could run the most graphics intensive game back then for hours with no issues, but running wow for 20 mins could produce it. 

 

You can find oh so many posts and blogs and what have ya about the topic, but the bottom line is that it is best to first try to different drivers, and if they all fail entirely then RMA the card just to be sure. 

[Kessno]

I have to ask, are you running the latest drivers?

I'm running the latest WHQL GeForce build 337.88. I was running the beta driver, but I reverted back to WHQL when I was experiencing the crashes. Although, I believe that was related to SSME not the graphics driver, as that problem went away. I might jump back to it and see if there's an improvement.

 

Ah the "the nvdagdagadsafagfa has stopped responding" or whatever its name is. Had that for ages way back when. Most of it got solved via driver updates as time progressed, but ultimately it was due to some bad VRAM. 

Actually, I'm not getting a "Not Responding" dialogue box. The sound suddenly freezes in the middle of playing and then I get either a black, dark grey, or dark blue screen. Sometimes the sound will try to recover then freezes again. It never recovers though, I don't even have access to the keyboard to bring up the Task Manager. I end up forcing the computer to power off by holding the power button. (probably not good for my hard disks)

Edited July 16, 2014 by Kessno

[Nozzer66]

I had that similar issue happen with a 7870. Ended up having to hard reset the machine every time. I was getting full black screens with a sound loop. 

 

Tried a full clean install of the drivers, card reseating, running with the side case open and a fan pointed at the card, the whole 9 yards. Ended up grabbing a friend's 670, tossed it in and never had the problem despite torture testing the machine. Bought a new 670 FTW, tossed it in and never had an issue hence...

[phazer11]

How recent is your OS install (and since your last clean driver install)?

[Kessno]

How recent is your OS install (and since your last clean driver install)?

Roughly eight months to a year since I installed Windows 8 onto my SSD. I did update from Windows 8 to 8.1 a few months ago. Skyrim is running on a separate data drive.

 

I've never performed a clean driver install on this system.

[Kessno]

Bumping this thread to let all of you know that I believe I've fixed the problem for good.

 

I went back to the GeForce 340.43 beta driver and still had the FPS drop on area transitions. Then I decided to install the Vividian - Weather & Lighting ENB and got slightly better performance but it still had a very noticeable drop in FPS after loading into several different locations. Apparently, as Aiyen stated, I lowered my grass density in the skyrim INI but forgot to test lowering the shadow settings.

 

Original Setting:

iShadowMapResolution=4096

fShadowBiasScale-0.1500

iShadowMaskQuarter=4

 

Changed to:

iShadowMapResolution=2048

fShadowBiasScale=0.2540

iShadowMaskQuarter=4

 

I immediately noticed a difference after just a few minutes of testing in-game. I played for roughly three hours yesterday with no crashes or FPS slowdowns after transitioning with high 30-40fps.  I guess I could drop this value down even further to 1024 for the iShadowMapResolution without noticing much of a difference since I'm using an ENB?

[Aiyen]

Yeah 4k for shadow is just a bad idea... 

 

However the quality of the shadows still make the shadows nicer even with ENB on. I play with 1024 since well... I think the shadows look good enough for playing the game and I would rather want the extra performance. 

 

But glad to hear that you have a good playing experience now!