Terrible Lag After Loading New Areas

[Aarut]

Hey all, just wanted to know if anyone has gotten anywhere with this. I'm having this problem just about every 3 loading screens when transitioning between indoor/outdoor areas. Only alt-tabbing fixes it.

 

One thing that I would like to add is that this has nothing to do with savegames, so let's get that theory out of this thread. Save games don't work like that in Skyrim.

 

What could it be? Most threads in other places say VRAM is full, but that's simply not the case. I'v monitored it and it's nowhere near full. Any other ideas? It's absolutely driving me mad!

[Lord Garon]

One thing that I would like to add is that this has nothing to do with savegames, so let's get that theory out of this thread. Save games don't work like that in Skyrim.

 

 

Really? Perhaps you could tell us all how savegames do work.

 

Bethesda Forum on bloat

 

A Nexus thread

 

If your savegame might be bloated (running orphaned scripts from mod uninstalls), you could try the SKSE install directions here. The ClearInvalidRegistrations setting will slowly prevent unused scripts from executing. May, or may not, help, depending on the cause of your game lag.

 

EDIT: If you have an AMD FX cpu and have tried everything else, take a look at this thread.

Edited January 23, 2014 by Lord Garon

[Skateboards]

Type pcb into the console whenever you start getting lag.
PCB (purge cell buffers) should hopefully fix your problems up. :)

[Aarut]

PCB and hitting F4 with ENB do nothing for this issue. Saves are not the cause because this happens right from the get go. I don't need have a high level character with bloated saves to see these frame rate plunges.

[Lord Garon]

I traced some lag and stutter on my old machine to:

 

1. Too many resources loading/rendering. Usually, this goes hand-in-hand with larger uGridsToLoad settings or very large draw distances with dense grass, flora overhauls, etc. If you have a large uGridsToLoad setting, follow a good process to lower it back to default (5) and just see if it helps. Try cranking back extreme render distances just to see if it helps. Shadows are a big CPU load.

 

2. Too many scripts firing up on On Load events. Papyrus is only allocated a certain amount of time to get things working on new cell loads, like occur on entering/exiting and fast travel. Giving Papyrus some extra time on loads reduced in-game lag on my machine. In Skyrim.ini:

[Papyrus]fUpdateBudgetMS=1.2               <-- Changed mine to 1.6fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=1.2         <-- Changed mine to 1.6fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=500.0       <-- 1000.0 helped, 2000.0 was best ON MY SETUP                                  * Last setting causes a slight stutter on my machine                                  * when crossing cell boundaries, but Lag is gone

This link talks about Papyrus ini settings.

 

3. Hardware. It didn't cause Lag, but some disk error affecting a bsa file caused a lot of stutter on my old computer. Chkdsk fixed it. Constant re-reads, maybe even pagefile thrashing, can cause the symptom of lag or stutter. Look for system errors in the Event Viewer or huge numbers (large numbers are okay, :blush: this is a hard one to pin down) of hard page faults while playing in Resource Monitor and you might find a clue.

 

EDIT: BTW, if you have an AMD CPU, don't forget to check the link I posted above. Microsoft has a CPU core scheduling hotfix for Win 7. I'm not sure how to tell when it applies to a particular system.

Edited January 26, 2014 by Lord Garon

[Aarut]

Thank you for that post. Lot's of good info. I'll give them a try and get back to you.

[Aarut]

Welp. I'm at a loss. Tried everything you posted above to no avail. Performance monitor shows absolutely nothing wrong. Everything appears consistent and peachy overall: steady GPU/CPU usage - no drops. Steady temperature - no overheating. Steady VRAM and RAM usage - not maxed out. But, FPS?... BLAM! Straight to the floor after a few indoor/outdoor loads. Makes absolutely no sense to me. Tried this with mods, without mods, new save, old save... makes no difference.

 

Thanks for the help though. Guess I'll just have to resign to my fate on this one and stick to the Alt/tab fix. My only hope is that Bethesda completely rewrote a brand spanking new engine for Fallout 4 and future TES games instead of modifying and re-labeling an ancient one like they did with Creation Engine.

[thefatalyst]

My save files are less than 14 MB each. Collectively, they are around 330 MB. I agree with Aarut that save files are unlikely to be the issue, though, since disabling saving altogether doesn't seem to make a difference. And starting a new game altogether seems to have the same issue, as well.

 

I also haven't been able to pinpoint any issues with the performance monitor. When the game starts to lag, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable changes in the graphs, etc.

 

Lord Garon and Lukezkee, thanks for the useful info. Will try those fixes out and see if they work. :)

Edited January 29, 2014 by thefatalyst

[Lord Garon]

Normally, I won't provide "ideas" unless they've worked for me, or there is a good technical reason for them. Since you guys seemed to have tried most everything, here's a couple off-the-wall things that other people said worked for them:

 

Nvidia graphics cards - SOME people have trouble with Nvidia Control Panel power settings. Change the power setting from Adaptive to Performance.

 

Windows 7 - Go to Control Panel-->Appearance and Personalization-->Personalization. Select a Non-AERO Desktop Theme. While you're in Control Panel, verify your Power settings are on Performance as well.

 

When you ALT-TAB out, one thing that happens is that the game loses focus and the graphics pipeline is flushed/reset for the new window. You could try running Dxdiag (Start button, type dxdiag in the search box, run it from the list) to verify the DirectX setup on your machine.

 

Leave Resource Monitor up on the CPU screen and ALT-TAB to it next time you have a lag problem. See if any CPU cores are Parked when the lag happens. There are some Unparking utilities and Microsoft fixes out for core parking issues.

Edited January 30, 2014 by Lord Garon

[Arbitez]

It may be because your temperature is rising too much because graphics cards activate self protection mode which means they will lower down their clock speed to prevent overheating, and whilst clock speed is down it means lag so it maybe that your airflow isn't that good or you may be stressing out your system.