Massive performance drop at certain outside areas and time of the day

[rootsrat]

Hi guys. I am getting massive performance drops at certain outside areas in the day time. So far I've noticed at Whiterun Stables, Valtheim Towers and a bit after Valtheim Towers, where the road turns around towards Ivarstead. But for example Riverwood is perfectly fine.

 

Facts:

 - it happens mainly in broad daylight, it's ok during the night

 - it's worse with many NPC's around

 - no performance drop inside locations (caverns, buildings etx.)

 - happens MAINLY when turning around or running - when standing still or making really slow turns it seems to be ok

 

The drop is MASSIVE, I mean to the point where the whole game freezes for good few seconds, the moves just a single frame maybe and then freezes again.

 

Any advice? I was thinking of reducing shadows to Medium or using ENB without SSAO - woud this help you think?

 

If you need any more info please let me know.

 

Thanks!

[JudgmentJay]

Sounds like you're running out of VRAM. Try lower resolution textures.

 

What video card do you have?

[rootsrat]

That was my suspicion... I run clocked Gigabyte nVidia GTX 570 SOC edition.

 

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

[JudgmentJay]

So yeah, 1280mb VRAM on that card... you definitely want the "light" version of any texture pack that offers one. You can also try reducing AA/AF 1 notch, but I'm not sure that would make a difference. Maybe try backing up and deleting your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini files so that the game can re-create the vanilla ones... just in case you had a tweak in there that was especially performance-heavy.

 

What resolution are you running Skyrim at?

[rootsrat]

Yeah, forgot to post the most important feature of my card in this case. 1280 MB of VRAM, confirmed. I have it clocked to 1000 MHz on memory, cannot squeeze any more :)

 

Guess I'll have to reinstall TPC and go for lower res texutres... I don't want to though! I want my Skyrim to be beautiful! :(

 

I did not tweak ini file much, just followed STEP instructions really.

 

Hm, or can I smell new graphics card for xmas? :D (if you read this, my wife, please cover your eyes...)

 

::EDIT:: Running at 1920 x 1080. Most of the TPC mods are medium quality (whenever there was a choice, otherwise as per the installation guide).

[mothergoose729]

I suggest using texture optimizer from the nexus. Run it on maximum settings, and dont' forget to select your BSAs. With 1280mb of VRAM on your card you should have no problem running a large quantity of high resolution textures so long as you make sure to run them through an optimzer after you install them. You will actually often get better visual quality with a texture optimizer like optimizer textures or DDSopt because most custom textures on skyrim.nexus have not properly created mipmaps.

[rootsrat]

Ah, I've seen this mentioned here and there, but never actually looked into it. Could you be so kind and link it for me please? Searching Nexus for various terms did not bring any results... Most grateful!

[JudgmentJay]

Judging from his heavy performance loss I doubt running the textures through an optimizer will be enough.

 

Honestly the difference between low resolution and high resolution textures is not huge (with a few exceptions). Also, depending on how much effort you want to put forth you can mix and match high and low resolution textures based on what appears in interiors vs exteriors. For example you should have no problems keeping all your dungeon textures as high resolution.

 

EDIT: Here's the link to Optimizer Textures: https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801

[rootsrat]

Hm, I may just try Texture optimiser and see what it does. If this won't work then I will switch to lower res textures. Hand picking textures isn't something I would like to be doing to be honest, I haven't got enough time as it is already :)

 

Say, if I lower the texture quality in Launcher and also reduce resolution to 1600 x 900 - will this make much difference in performance do you think?

[mothergoose729]

Yes but I don't recommend it. You don't have to. The GTX 570 should max out skyrim on ultra with mods installed. I recommend before changing your setting running the optimizer, and then I would download GPU-Z and use it to monitor your VRAM usage in game, and FRAPS to monitore your FPS.

 

If you have your ugrid cells set to 7 as STEP recommend, and/or you have your shadow resolution set to 4096, I would recommend changing those to 5 and 2048 respectively if you are having performance issues after optimizing and checking VRAM usage and FPS. Also, lowering your AA to 4 and your AF to 8 would help a lot to. I would recommend disabling FXAA all together, because it looks like crap and it has a small performance it in conjunction with AA. If you have an ENB, consider uninstalling it or fiddleing with your ENB setttings. There isn't any good reason your system couldn't run skyrim on ultra with good fps.

[rootsrat]

Yeah, I do use those two tools. I have just downloaded the optimizer and I'm going to use it now. Quick question, I want to change the back up directory - I'm presuming that this line in INI is responsible for this:

 

Backup = RAR = C:\Textures Backup

 

Is this correct and do you know if I can safely amend it to something else? I haven't got much space on my C drive, it's only used for OS.

[JudgmentJay]

I honestly have no idea how the texture quality setting in the launcher affects modded textures.

 

Lowering resolution would help, but I don't really think you'd want to do that. That typically makes games look like crap. If Texture Optimizer doesn't work you should really try lower resolution textures. You might be able to tell the difference in texture quality by comparing screenshots, but I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't notice when playing the game, especially at 1080p.

[JudgmentJay]

Yes but I don't recommend it. You don't have to. The GTX 570 should max out skyrim on ultra with mods installed. I recommend before changing your setting running the optimizer, and then I would download GPU-Z and use it to monitor your VRAM usage in game, and FRAPS to monitore your FPS.

 

If you have your ugrid cells set to 7 as STEP recommend, and/or you have your shadow resolution set to 4096, I would recommend changing those to 5 and 2048 respectively if you are having performance issues after optimizing and checking VRAM usage and FPS. Also, lowering your AA to 4 and your AF to 8 would help a lot to. If you have an ENB, consider uninstalling it or fiddleing with your ENB setttings. There isn't any good reason your system couldn't run skyrim on ultra with good fps.

STEP recommends uGrids=7? If you do have that set to 7, reverting it to 5 would be the first thing I tried. I would also leave shadow resolutions at their default ultra settings. Also, set water reflection resolution to its default 512. 1024 can cause huge performance hits in certain areas, even on a vanilla install.

 

EDIT: Just looked at the STEP .pdf. The only time it mentions uGrids is to say that messing with it is not recommended.

[mothergoose729]

Your texture back up folder should be somewhere around 4gb with BSAs backed up there as well. Run the tool and then offload them on to a flash drive or external drive if you need the space. I personally have never had a reason to use my texture back up folder, and while I don't recommend it you can disable the texture back up all together in the settings. Keep in mind that texture optimizer will reduce the size of your data folder by a lot as well, so you will likely save space when everything is said and done, even after the back up.

 

Also, I edited my last post with more information that you might find helpful.

[rootsrat]

If you have your ugrid cells set to 7 as STEP recommend, and/or you have your shadow resolution set to 4096, I would recommend changing those to 5 and 2048 respectively if you are having performance issues after optimizing and checking VRAM usage and FPS. Also, lowering your AA to 4 and your AF to 8 would help a lot to. I would recommend disabling FXAA all together, because it looks like crap and it has a small performance it in conjunction with AA. If you have an ENB, consider uninstalling it or fiddleing with your ENB setttings. There isn't any good reason your system couldn't run skyrim on ultra with good fps.

STEP recommends uGrids=7? If you do have that set to 7, reverting it to 5 would be the first thing I tried. I would also leave shadow resolutions at their default ultra settings. Also, set water reflection resolution to its default 512. 1024 can cause huge performance hits in certain areas, even on a vanilla install.

I did not change uGrids - I knew this would be too much for my system. My shadow res is 2048 and Water reflection is at 512... I have couple more questions re the Optimizer though, as I am bit confused with the instructions on the mod page.

 

1. Do I select ..\Skyrim\Data folder, then tick Textures and tick BSA and just run it (on Maximum preset)

or

2. Do I select ..\Skyrim\Data\Textures folder, then tick Textures and tick BSA and just run it (on Maximum preset)

 

Do I select Compress BSA in the BSA tab?

 

Do I run it twice (1. Skyrim\Data and run for BSA and then Skyrim\Data\Textures and run it again for textures)?

 

Sorry, but the instructions on the mod page are not the clearest...

[mothergoose729]

Just select your data folder. Select BSAs, then in the BSAs tab select all. I use BSA compression and all the other options. Make sure each check box is checked. I haven't been able hurt a BSA with it yet. Then just run it. That simple really.

 

More simply, select every box except 'remove invisible mask...'.