20-30 fps after STEP Guide (Macro stutters)

[Beamer]

Hello everyone, first I want to say I recently started playing Skyrim and love it. Then I found modding... At first I started with CoT, Immersive weapons and armors, Skyrim Unleashed and a few others and skyrim played fine with the occasional freeze when in a "inside" area (caves, houses etc). Besides that the game ran smoothly. I wanted to make skyrim look better so I followed the STEP guide then added CoT and a few others (alternate start and the sort). Sadly before even adding these other ones my fps seems stuck between 20-30 with hard drops to 5 randomly. I tried following the tips on the guide but to no avail. Also another weird thing that happens is when walking into a town or area with houses/walls details will start loading right in front of me which I don't recall happening before. I will take any help I can get as there are a few more item mods I want to install and to finally start another play through.

[CovertSlinky]

Are you using an enb graphic preset, or just enboost? Also what are your specs? Have you tried lowering graphics quality, most particularly would be the distant detail setting in the launcher, I run mine at medium if I am trying to run at 1920x1080, but I have come to find I run modded skyrim like a champ with ultra graphics settings at 1680x1050.

 

EDIT: sorry I mean the distant object detail under the view distance tab in the skyrim launcher.

Edited August 18, 2014 by CovertSlinky

[Beamer]

Here are my specs:

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (3.1 GHz) [ 2 Cores, 2 Threads ] 1MBMotherboard: nVidia nForce 590 SLIMemory: 4GB DDR2 -- can be upgraded to 8GBVideo/Graphics: Dual SLI Cards -- ATI Radeon HD 4870 (From Alienware) each 512MB DDR5Storage: 250GB SATA HDD 16MB CachePower Supply: 880W SLI Certified with Blue LED fan

 

I tried lowering the resolution by one step but no change.

I will try setting the distant detail to medium.

I believe just ENboost if I did it correctly.

[CovertSlinky]

Wow, yeah those are some pretty low specs, the Crossfire (not SLI, that is nVidia) config is helpful, but those cards are relatively weak in todays standards. But, remember, because you have two cards with 512mb of vram, you still only get 512mb of vram, they do not stack on each other to give you 1024. That 512mb of vram hurts your possibilities of modding skyrim. You will need to ditch the HiRes DLC for starters, if you haven't already. You need to pick low quality textures for mods were you can, and I HIGHLY recommend DDSopt your vanilla content AND the mods in your line up that can benefit from it, which there is alot of information on the STEP guide for it

https://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:DDSopt#tab=QUICK-START_GUIDE that will get you started.

You really need to pay attention to your vram use, best way is to use the Skyrim Performance Monitor that STEP recommended in the beginning of the guide. And you will need to find good settings for your enblocal.ini to help prevent CTD's from running out of vram.

[Beamer]

Yeah I know it's not top of the line. Darn I thought when I checked how much Vram I had it said just about 2gb worth. Alright I'll take out the Dlc textures and check out that link thanks.

[CovertSlinky]

Let me guess, you used dxdiag to tell you? If so, first off, dxdiag doesn't show vram only, it shows shared video memory, which includes the use of RAM. Second, dxdiag has been known for sometime now to report inaccurate values for shared memory on 64bit windows 7.

 

And, your cards can perform, but, because of your vram limit, your performance is capped lower than what it might be able to achieve if it had 1gb or 2gb, etc. Point is, you are going to cap vram before you cap graphics computing. 

 

Also, I might of mis-spoke a bit, you might be able to use the Bethesda Hi-Res DLC Optimized

as an alternative to the hires dlc.

Edited August 18, 2014 by CovertSlinky

[Beamer]

Ok thanks for the help. Looks like another number of hours before being able to play again =P

[Aiyen]

4Gb of RAM and only 512Mb of VRAM.. yeah you do not want to touch ENB at all.. it is not going to grant you any sort of benefits, since you do not have enough memory for it to even matter I would think. You are most likely going to be restricted to only using the vanilla textures. You might be able to get a few higher quality ones in there.. but they would stand out rather badly. 

[GunerX]

But, remember, because you have two cards with 512mb of vram, you still only get 512mb of vram, they do not stack on each other to give you 1024.

I also run SLI 3x GTX 480's. Is there Any Possible method of making it use all vram from all the cards? Aka 4.5 GB VRAM instead of just 1.5 GB VRAM?

[CovertSlinky]

I also run SLI 3x GTX 480's. Is there Any Possible method of making it use all vram from all the cards? Aka 4.5 GB VRAM instead of just 1.5 GB VRAM?

Oh man, don't any of us who run Crossfire or SLI, wish. Afraid not, tis wishful thinking.

[Halde]

You might want to not only optmize your textures, but also reduce them using DDSopt.

[CovertSlinky]

That's a good point, that Halde makes. I am no expert on the subject, but would he run 512 across the board, or go even lower?

[Aiyen]

1k dxt5 should be fine. I remember running that without any issues on a 768Mb card...

[Halde]

I don't think you would want to go lower than 512, but it depends on the resolution.

[CovertSlinky]

Oh, shoot, I was way off. Dxt is which one, the lossy right? and 5, do you mean under the compression tab, setting it to 5 as opposed to any other number?

[Halde]

I am likewise no expert, but I wouldn't even try getting big texture mods. Perhaps modding some misc. items, but going for mods like amidiaborn or Skyrim HD/Serious HD etc. isn't adviceable.