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Need help to improve performance


Layia28

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Hi everyone,

 

I'm relatively new to playing Skyrim on PC and new to gaming on PC in general. I finally have figured out how to successfully use mods - which ones to pick, which ones are compatible and incompatible, the correct load order ect. At this point, I have all the mods I want correctly installed and aren't having any issues with crashes. However, I would really like to improve my FPS. It's around 20 FPS consistently which isn't bad, but isn't as smooth as I would like to be. If I could get it up to 30 FPS I would be very happy, but I'm not sure how to do that.

 

Like I said, I'm new so I don't know which .ini tweaks would make the most difference or if a new graphic card would help the most.

 

Here are my specs:

Windows 7

ASUS G75VW

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 2GB

8GB Installed Memory

Processor Intel® Core i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz, 2301 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601

 

I'm not sure if you need all that, but I thought better safe than sorry.

 

I've already done some ini tweaks like reducing the shadows. My video quality is set to High not Ultra. I only have a couple texture mods that I chose very carefully and the rest are all simple mods that shouldn't effect performance. I don't want to do too much ini tweaking until I know what would actually help me with my specific computer. So if anyone would be so kind as to give me some advice on how to increase my FPS and get the game running a little smoother even up to 30 FPS from the 20 FPS it's at now, I would really appreciate it.

 

Alright, thank you in advance.

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I feel your pain at 20 FPS bro. It's difficult to immerse yourself with an FPS like that. Several weeks back I got to a point where I was prepared to stay up all night and hunt down ways that I could improve my FPS. Unfortunately, your GTX 660 isn't on the list in the link below and neither was mine, but perhaps you can use GTX 680 as a guide?

 

My link

 

Give the next link a good read, and be sure to hit 'next' to continue the article before you reach the 'comments' section. The reason I say is because the button is really small and barely noticeable if you aren't paying attention. This link is good for comprehending terms that you see a lot, but have no idea what they stand for and don't appear to significantly impact your performance at first glance (i.e FXAA, view distance, etc.)

 

My link

 

As a side note, be sure to install FRAPS if you decide to record your FPS and conduct your own tests to decide what your system can and can't handle graphically. I made note of the drops and increases in FPS and I apologize if my results are inaccurate to others but this was what I recorded (I'm running with NVIDIA GeForce GT 230M) From what I take it's not the best graphics card, but here's what I found:

 

The Resolution (1280x720, 1366x768, 1920x1080)(~+/-20 FPS), Anisotropic filtering (~+/- 20 FPS), and finally Texture Quality (~+/- 20 FPS) were the three settings that impacted my FPS the most. I would like to add that Shadow Detail is also a big hit as well. Adjust one of these at a time, save the results, and then play the game with FRAPS active to pinpoint which settings your computer can play well at. This was a fairly long process, but by the time you're done, you'll know by heart which settings are the most detrimental to your computer and you can then optimize gameplay further by adjusting Anti-Aliasing, FXAA, Radial Blur Quality, View Distance, etc. For myself, I'd rather have better textures than shadows so I run texture quality on high and turn shadow detail down to low, but that's personal preference.

 

Anyways, that's the gist of my two cents. A final recommendation I'd like to give is downloading GeForce Experience.

 

My link

 

Cheers and happy gaming;)

 

Ethan

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First, I really want to thank you both for offering some great suggestions and taking the time to do so. I appreciate it a lot. I went over the guide Snakeking92 mentioned last night and made the necessary changes as well as killed the shadows on the grass like ilikecheese recommended and also found another tweak guide that has a high success rate of really improving FPS and implemented those changes.

 

I followed all the suggestions exactly with what suited my particular computer, didn't change anything I wasn't supposed to, and then went to play. But after the changes the game kept crashing on me. I would be able to get to the start menu, click on continue or load game, but when it reached the loading screen it would crash to desktop. So I went back and reversed one change I made in .ini at a time to see which was causing the crash, but nothing worked. Then, I reverted the entire skyrimpref.ini file back to the previous version and then my game finally loaded. But because I had to reverse the changes I didn't get the huge FPS improvement I was hoping for.

 

I'm going to list the changes I made and if either of you or someone else can shed some insight into what caused the crashes I'd really appreciate it because then I could leave the particular .ini alone and change the rest to still get a FPS improvement.

 

I added this to skyrimpref.ini under General.

 

iPreloadSizeLimit=209715200

fMasterFilePreLoadMB=320.0000

iNumHWThreads=4

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1

 

I changed from their original higher numbers to the lower ones below.

 

fDecalLOD2=1000.0000

fDecalLOD1=500.0000

 

I changed these from the original numbers to the ones listed below.

fLeafAnimDampenDistEnd=1000.0000

fLeafAnimDampenDistStart=500.0000

 

I changed this the the lower number listed below as well.

 

[Particles]

iMaxDesired=250

 

I added this -

fGrassWindMagnitudeMin=5.0000

fGrassWindMagnitudeMax=125.0000

 

I tweaked the shadow quality to both low and medium.

I did turn Vsync off but once I realized that doing that actually causes more problems with graphic tearing I turned it back on so I know that wasn't causing the crash.

And I changed the anistropic filtering to 8X

 

I've also heard that threading is supposed to make a huge difference in performance and help a lot with FPS and I'm assuming the necessary threading files are like these:

iNumHWThreads=4

iHWThread8=3

iHWThread7=2

iHWThread6=1

iHWThread5=0

iHWThread4=3

iHWThread3=2

iHWThread2=1

iHWThread1=0

iAIThread2HWThread=3

iAIThread1HWThread=1

iRenderingThread2HWThread=2

iRenderingThread1HWThread=0

bMultiThreadMovement=1

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1

bUseThreadedBlood=1

bUseThreadedMorpher=1

bUseThreadedTempEffects=1

bUseThreadedTextures=1

bUseThreadedMeshes=1

bUseThreadedLOD=1

bUseThreadedAI=1

 

But I didn't add them to my Skyrim.ini because I don't know much about what they do if they drastically change the quality or if they are safe to just add to Skyrim.ini.

 

If anything above jumps out at you as possibly causing a crash please let me know. I thought that those changes I made were relatively simple and had no danger of causing crashes, but I guess I was wrong.

 

Anyway, and I'm not sure how this happened, but I started getting a solid 22-25 FPS when I was out in the world just walking around and exploring which is a tiny improvement but an improvement nonetheless. Also, I get around 28-32 FPS inside buildings. Then something interesting happened. I was fighting a dragon near the Dawnstar area and noticed that my FPS was at 50 or 60 which seemed crazy because it was so much lower when I was doing simple stuff. So I have another question. Does Skyrim have some kind of a smart system where it only gives you the FPS you need for whatever you're doing at the moment? For example, you don't need as much just standing or walking around but you need a lot more when engaged in a massive fight so it adjusts the FPS you get accordingly?

 

Alright, thanks again and I'm looking forward to hearing any suggestions.

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Hmmm...I've had the game crash on me as well as I would attempt to load a saved game. Your problem is about to delve further than I can understand, but my intuition tells me that one of those weird entries you typed into your skyrimprefs.ini file may be the culprit, but I would encourage someone more experienced than me would jump in before I wage on that.

 

Once you do figure out how to get your game working, make a habit of saving a backup of your skyrimprefs.ini before you add and delete from it. That way if things go south with new entries, you can go back to the original. Here are some issues that I've dealt with that may help:

 

1) Sometimes in the plugins.txt file there may be more than one skyrim.esm or update.esm. Some say to delete all of the 'update.esm' entries and have only one 'skyrim.esm'. If there are multiples of either of those two entries, that can cause the game to crash when trying to load a saved game, but usually the game will alert you with an error message before the crash, so I'm unsure.

 

2) If you play with mods then its possible that one mod may conflict with another mod which can cause a crash. Access your data files folder in the SkyrimLauncher.exe and turn off about four mods at a time, save the changes, and then play the game. If the crashing continues then you know the mods you unchecked aren't the problem, so uncheck another four or so and repeat the process until the game starts successfully. Once you reach that point, you can narrow down and find which mod is causing you problems.

 

3) Try loading an earlier save; the saved game you may be trying to load may be corrupted for a reason you may never know.

 

4) Try installing BOSS (if you haven't already). This program will help you with your mod load order (if you use mods). Don't get me started on trying to explain it, but this tutorial is very helpful if you decide to do this.

 

 

Anybody else have ideas??

 

Ethan

Edited by Snakeking92
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Personally when I was playing on my recently deceased crappy laptop I tried everything to get a better fps, I found that disabling all shadows to 0 helped a lot and even specular, one thing that really helped me was finding a mod to lower the quality of the distant mountains.

 

This is my own opinion and don't hate me for it because I've been there but I can't understand trying to beef up your skyrim with mods if your computer can't handle it, I've always been that taker that prefers smooth game play to amazing graphics (with in reason) so this is my advice.

 

I'd ditch the mods in all honestly, I know a lot of people want to get the most out of their game but why not play through vanilla first get a feel for the game and eventually upgrade your rig to handle these mods, you'll know what you want after playing it standard plus it becomes a whole new game after that :)

 

I've seen so many people not enjoying the actual game due to constantly restarting or wasting a few months at a time searching for preferred mods. Play it through vanilla and take note of what you want to change and search accordingly.

 

I recently built a new machine under 300 pounds and played through vanilla once and my god it was worth the wait, hate me if you want but I think it'd make more sense to enjoy the game first, then upgrade and then blow it open with mods

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I took the advice from Snakekin92 and Xaikarik, which I really appreciate, and implemented them, tweaking and changing various things last night and then played Skyrim for a while so I could let you guys know what worked and what didn't.

 

Snakeking92: I was able to revert SkyrimPrefs.ini back to it's previous version and I was able to load my saved game without a problem. I saved/backed up that version of SkyrimPref.ini and then tweaked one .ini at a time, opened Skyrim, and loaded a save to see what caused the crash. I figured out what the problem was, reverted that particular .ini line back to it's original setting, and kept the other changes. I didn't find any multiple update.esm or skyrim.esm, but I will keep that in mind in case it crashes again in the future. I do have BOSS installed and that really helps with the load order, but there are still some mods that I have to manually move to the correct spot. As far as the mods conflicting, I'm still working on seeing if that is causing the problem. I didn't have the time to go through that process last night. However, with the tweaks that I made to SkyrimPrefs.ini I now have my Skyrim game steadily running at 30FPS which, for me at least, is very smooth. I also capped the FPS in NVIDIA inspector so it won't fluctuate too much and become unstable.

 

Actually, I have 30FPS 90% of the time, but it drops in Riverwood and stutters a little and it also drops when I'm on a horse. Not sure why.

 

Xaikarik: I'm asking for people's opinions and suggestions, so I'm not going to hate you for giving yours. Whether I agree with it or not or whether it makes a difference or not I still greatly appreciate you taking the time to offer your advice. With that said, I do agree with you about playing through in vanilla first and seeing what you want to change, what areas you'd like to improve, and then really enjoying a modified version after. However, I've already put in 200+ hours playing Skyrim vanilla on console. I know, I know, that's a bad word here, I'm sorry, but that's the only option that I had until I bought my first gaming computer last year. And I brought Skyrim for the PC so I could have a different experience than the one I had on console, but if I hadn't played vanilla Skyrim first, I would honestly take your advice, and play through vanilla first.

 

I will admit that the first time I played Skyrim on PC, I was so excited that I didn't really pay attention to the mods that I was downloading, I just picked what I want and went for it. The game wasn't the smoothest because of that, and my life got crazy busy so I didn't have the time to really do it right and put in the necessary research involved. I just recently came back to Skyrim a couple weeks ago and decided to do it right, so I uninstalled all previous mods and saves, and started fresh. This time around, I really picked my mods carefully. I picked only what I absolutely wanted and read the entire mod description, compatibility, troubling shooting, comments, ect. before even installing.

 

With all my mods activated and installed and with the recent changes I've made to SkyrimPref.ini I have 30FPS 90% of the time which is as smooth as silk for me. I'd just like it to be at 30FPS all the time.

 

Most of the mods I have are very simple, like fixing a bug the vanilla game has, a mod that improves FPS by reducing the falling leaves, pines, and rain, a couple simple armor or weapon mods. There are only a couple mods I have that I can see negatively effecting performance unless there is a conflict somewhere. But you bringing up mods did make me think of an idea to safely uninstall all the mods, start new game to test, see what my FPS is without any mods, and then, re-install/activate one mod at a time to see if any of them reduce my FPS -it won't take long since I don't have that many mods-.

 

I started to do that this morning and then I discovered something, and I'm not sure if I'm going to explain this right, so if it doesn't make sense I apologize. I uninstalled all the mods via Nexus Manager since I had downloaded them all via NMM, but when I started a new game the texture mod (Skyrim HD) I have was still in effect. I went to re-install it so I could uninstall it again in case that would fix the issue, but it kept asking me to overwrite the files of a mod I had deleted last year which was Realistic Overhaul. I'm not sure if this if anything, but my game still has the textures implemented of mods that I deleted a year ago, could that be effecting my FPS? If so, how do I completely uninstall a texture mod since doing it just by clicking uninstall on NMM doesn't seem to work. I like Skyrim HD and my computer can handle that by itself easily, but if there are other texture mods that I thought I uninstalled then it might be a different story.

 

Also, I heard that disabling all shadows negatively effects the lightening somehow, like you can't see at all in certain areas. Is that true or there a way to disable the shadows without effecting the lightening. Do you happen to have a link to that mod because I searched yesterday, but I couldn't find a mod that just reduces that quality of distant mountains without effecting the ones close up too.

 

Winterlicht:

GeForce GTX 660M

8GB, 2GB dedicated.
60HZ
Driver Version-GeForce 296.44 WHQL
I haven't played a game unmodded with the original inis in a long time and I didn't know about FPS counters at the time anyway. I don't remember what the FPS was, I'm sorry. Since it's 30FPS steadily with mods and it even jumps up to 45-60FPS during fights, I'm assuming that it was fairly high originally.
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That's great news, Layia. I'm glad you were able to make progress in fixing your problem.

I do have a couple more suggestions if you so decide to bump your FPS further. I recall that your anisotropic setting was at like 8 samples if my memory serves me correctly. If you're running at that setting, try playing at 4 samples as a test to see if you can aesthetically handle the difference (adjust other anisotropic values respectively). You will lose quality but you will gain several frames; my guess is 10-15 FPS increase.

 

There is also another mod on Nexus called HiAlgo Boost. Basically, what it does is pretty harshly reduce the resolution whenever the in-game camera is moving. This setting I found out is highly unappealing (especailly during afternoon when everything is visible). Optimal playing is during dusk and in caves when that pixelation isn't noticable. I would highly recommend not using it, because it simply tarnishes the gaming experience, not to mention that your in-game camera is moving around most of the time.

 

Keep us posted if something comes up,

 

call me Ethan:)

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Alright, Ethan, I'll remember that :)

 

Thank you for the other suggestions. I did switch those settings to 4 and I'm going to test it out tonight. I also enabled threading specifically for the Skyrim game on my computer which is supposed to make a huge difference. I'm going to start a test game tonight and see what difference those two changes made. I also completely got rid of shadows, but that actually made my FPS drop about 15 frames so enabled them again.

 

There is one other thing you could help me with. I did deactivate all my mods via Nexus Mod Manager and was planning on enabling them one by one to see which cause an FPS drop, if any. Since I don't have that many it wouldn't take long. Then I started a new test game for that so it wouldn't damage my save games. I do have one texture mod that's rather large and a couple smaller ones that just improve the baskets or improve the potions, small stuff which didn't seem to cause an FPS drop at all. However, when I started the test game, with every single mod deactivated, I noticed that all the textures from the large texture mod (Skyrim HD) were still there. Even though I uninstalled it on Nexus and it didn't show up on the launcher or on Wyre Bash as being activated, it was still active. So my FPS was still at 30. The good thing is that I, without having to go through the process of reactivating every mod, figured out that none of the other mods are causing an FPS drop. If anything is it's the texture mod. The bad thing is that, apparently, deactivating/uninstalling it on Nexus Mod Manager doesn't actually uninstall it.

 

So my question is do you have to manually uninstall texture mods, even if you downloaded and activated them through NMM? If so, how do I uninstall them manually so I can see what difference it would make it my FPS?

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