Help with cuts to improve FPS performance

[thunderclam]

My Skyrim is mostly stable and certainly playable right now. I do get some odd CTDs, particularly when trying to hard save the game... but I don't believe that's a hardware/memory problem. What I am hoping to resolve is a minor but nagging issue with FPS drops. With stability pretty much settled, I may as well focus some attention on smoothness. The stuttering seem to occur most often in problematic areas to begin with (Windhelm docks, Riften, outskirts of Whiterun, etc). Sometimes when turning the first-person camera and looking around an area, I'll swing down from a solid 57-60 FPS to anywhere from 29-40 which causes "macro-stutter". Very temporary stutter, but it occurs semi-frequently. Never in indoor cells. Worst place may be Dawnstar but I've experimented with Footprints and noticed dramatic improvement when limiting that mod in Dawnstar and I imagine I'll get similar results in other snowy towns like Winterhold.

 

Given the advice on STEP 2.2.9, I have tried running without SRO and it makes no difference. I have not tried without SFO yet, but I feel like I have experienced the stutter in areas that should be unaffected by SFO which makes me think it's not that mod. However, I do get a weird stutter when sliding the camera over trees. Perhaps there are more performance friendly settings for SFO than I am currently using. Textures are 7 and GrassSize is set to 50 in my .ini.

 

I am using a Radeon 6950 2GB so I have a card that supposedly passes muster on most of the medium or high-res versions in STEP 2.29. That said, I installed low-res versions of anything that was a pure texture replacer to cut the stutter down with subtle or mixed results. I do use extra mods, beyond STEP, but only one texture replacer (Improved NPC Clothing, 1k version) and only the mod Inconsequential NPCs that really makes any dent in extra spawns of high-texture-clothing-wearing NPCs and only then in cities.

 

What I'm hoping to accomplish here is to figure out some cuts I should make of textures in the various replacer packs STEP recommends (SRO, Tobes, etc) in order to keep the best or least performance intensive parts of those mods while dropping anything that is nice, but may prove to have too high a performance impact for me to continue using.

 

Sorry if this is too sprawling or subjective a question set. I was intending to get a bit deeper into this than the information I've found on the STEP guide and in more specific-to-x-mod threads on the forums.

 

EDIT:

 

Played around with Skyrim Performance Monitor after a huge minute-long bout of crippling lag during a vampire attack in Ivarsted. After this attack, Ivarsted became very stuttery once the stop-motion level lag ended. SPM tells me I'm hitting 2017/2048MB on VRAM and 1500/8000mb RAM. I am not sure what this means. I am going to try an enboost setting that supposedly cuts down on stutter (DisablePreloadToVRAM=true)

 

These are my current enblocal.ini settings:

 

[GLOBAL]

UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=true

UseDefferedRendering=false

IgnoreCreationKit=true

[PERFORMANCE]

SpeedHack=true

EnableOcclusionCulling=true

EnableZPrepass=false

[MULTIHEAD]

ForceVideoAdapterIndex=false

VideoAdapterIndex=0

[MEMORY]

ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true

ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true

DisableDriverMemoryManager=false

DisablePreloadToVRAM=true

EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false

ReservedMemorySizeMb=512

VideoMemorySizeMb=1598

EnableCompression=true

AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

[WINDOW]

ForceBorderless=false

ForceBorderlessFullscreen=true

[ENGINE]

ForceAnisotropicFiltering=true

MaxAnisotropy=16

ForceLodBias=true

LodBias=-0.38

EnableVSync=true

AddDisplaySuperSamplingResolutions=false

VSyncSkipNumFrames=0

 

 

 

EDIT 3:

 

Ah, my memory block log looks weird this time too.

 

 

logging of blocks enabled
logging max values only
Timer disabled
Block1 Block2
512MB 256MB
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Edited April 25, 2015 by thunderclam