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Skyrim stuttering 2014


Akreontage

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Grabbed your saves, and this is what i observed.....

 

This is Asset stutter. not the micro stutter. this is the game loading assets for your viewing pleasure. As no constant hitching is happening, only as you turn you suddenly load in all of Riverwood. For me it happened on both saves. I may be loading in more (graphics) on a slower HDD so got it on both saves.

 

The instant the save loads (screenshot) the VRAM is at 2075 (more then a 2 GB card has).

as i turned , the stutter happened as the game loaded another 251 MB of data in an instant , for a total of 2326 MB of VRAM...well over your 2048 (2GB) card. As your card is also only a 256 bit bus ...

 

Now this may not be what you have for totals when the game loads , as i do run 254 mods and a crap ton of texture mods including the HR-dlc's and HD 2K Lite.

 

Asset stutter = momentary stutter (on occasion ) goes away once all assets are loaded.

Micro Stutter = always present.

 

Thanks for explaining the difference! I didn't know the official name for that momentary stutters.

So that was an asset stutter, and you were right.

 

As I said in my previous post I tracked down the source of this problem and eliminated it.

But I still can't get rid of that headache. I mean I am very interested why did this happen at all.

 

Now when we know what was the problem for me, let's talk about it a little bit.

Let's say this asset stutter occurs when Skyrim loads trees (lets be more specific by now). When trees are loaded in range of 40000 units then everything is fine. Anything higher and I see stutters. But why does decreasing this single setting increases performance dramatically (to the point where performance is absolutely stable)? I mean there are plenty of things to load when using very high ugridstoload. But on practice this is just false.

It's hard to explain my thought right now, but I'll try.

uGridsToLoad=5

fTreeLoadDistance=75000

Stutters.

Closest value to get no stutters is 40000.

In combination with everything that is being loaded in those 5 ugrids...

So theoretically rising one of these settings now (when we know exactly stable values) should bring stutters back.

But as I said it doesn't happen. I raised uGridsToLoad to 15 (!) and there are no asset stutters.

Don't you think that is strange?

 

Also I know that vram is extremely fast (if trees are loaded to video memory) compared to other memory types. These loading problems usually appear when you cap vram and it then has to flush the memory and write everything again. That takes time and stutters appear.

But since I ran skyrim with monitoring software trying to solve my problem I can tell you that Vram was never capped even once. It didn't even use more than 1.2gb of my vram.

So where on hardware was this chocking happening?

 

Maybe that wasn't asset stutter after all?

 

P.S. Oops, I was talking about 11 ugrids. Never tried 15 actually. My mistake. Anyway that doesn't change anything.

Edited by Akreontage
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EDIT: Sorry, got sidetracked and was ninja'd

 

OP:

Changing ipresentinterval to 0 and 1 did not make any changes even when using default driver settings (vsync controlled by app). That was a strange discovery for me since I remember a few years ago when I had bad pc, turning it off definitely turned vsync off. I might be wrong.

 

Well, you need to get your ini settings worked out first. iPresentInterval certainly controls "VSYNC" in Skyrim. If its not working (Driver settings=App controlled), you have a basic problem.

 

Make sure you are setting iPresentInterval=1 under the [DISPLAY] heading in Skyrim.ini.

Make sure you don't have another iPresentInterval setting elsewhere in the file (some D/L ini sets have TWO entries). The lowest setting entry in an ini file wins (they're read top to bottom).

Make sure you are changing driver settings for any Skyrim (tesv.exe) profile if you have game presets in your driver.

 

Once you get ini VSYNC working correctly, test without an iFPSClamp entry (comment the line out ;iFPSClamp=xx ) and check for stutter.

 

uGrids to load simply increases the area to be drawn. Draw distances still determine LOD range and detail levels. A slight change in LOD distance can impact a large number of distant objects.

 

EDIT: Glad you found an issue affecting the stutter. Do you, perhaps, have a loose file LOD or Distant Detail mod installed (you can't "disable" those)? You might try a lower res version and play with increased LOD settings again. This guide may help.

Edited by Lord Garon
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As I thought it had nothing to do with textures.

Actually, what you described is a texture. Please allow me to explain.

 

When you change the loading distance of anything in the game, Skyrim has multiple texture files on hand for each of the objects; low, medium and high. When you change the loading distance, skyrim adjusts what is see at multiple distances, etc. Each of these distances has a relationship to a texture that it loads; in your instance, trees.

 

For the trees, at an extreme distance, it will simply load a block of sorts with a shade of green. As you get closer, more and more detail is added until you're right next to it. These are textures or "assets" that have to be loaded. So basically when you changed it from 75000 to 40000, you told skyrim NOT to load the trees at extreme distance, which was causing the micro stutters.

 

There was a mod on skyrim which had a thread that explained loading distances and how everything was affected. I tried it and it killed my game. too much at too great of a distance.

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As I thought it had nothing to do with textures.

Actually, what you described is a texture. Please allow me to explain.

 

When you change the loading distance of anything in the game, Skyrim has multiple texture files on hand for each of the objects; low, medium and high. When you change the loading distance, skyrim adjusts what is see at multiple distances, etc. Each of these distances has a relationship to a texture that it loads; in your instance, trees.

 

For the trees, at an extreme distance, it will simply load a block of sorts with a shade of green. As you get closer, more and more detail is added until you're right next to it. These are textures or "assets" that have to be loaded. So basically when you changed it from 75000 to 40000, you told skyrim NOT to load the trees at extreme distance, which was causing the micro stutters.

 

There was a mod on skyrim which had a thread that explained loading distances and how everything was affected. I tried it and it killed my game. too much at too great of a distance.

 

 

Not necessarily you can disable that. My PC has it disabled by default.

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Chevyowner,

 

Could you please explain? I'm having issues where my game is CTDing and lagging heavily because of the textures and draw distance (i'm slowing figuring out what it can and can't take...the Highresolution packs are killing me...I may disable them).

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Chevyowner,

 

Could you please explain? I'm having issues where my game is CTDing and lagging heavily because of the textures and draw distance (i'm slowing figuring out what it can and can't take...the Highresolution packs are killing me...I may disable them).

 

I am referring to the setting in the Skyrim launcher under Settings > Advanced > View Distance > Object Detail Fade.

On my PC that defaults to unchecked. When I check the box distant objects look worse, but with it unchecked they look the same

Distant object detail also defaults to ultra for me.

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I was writing long detailed post, but accidently reloaded the page. : /

Don't feel like writing it again.

But this is extremely critical and I will tell you briefly what I found out.

 

So, basically... This game has this infamous "64hz bug", There actually is no single solution which works. Tried them all.

I can confirm that I've been running game smoothly with iFPSClamp set to 60, BUT!

It is incorrect to do so since iFPSClamp set to 60 breaks some parts of this game. For example animation. Set iFPSClamp to 60, summon flame atronach and you will notice that fire trails it lefts on the ground are static. Yet there are other problems which will persist when you apply this setting. It has something to do with game cycle update time and animations/physics/maybe some other parts of this game rely on this game cycle setting.

I won't tell you what 64hz bug exactly is but here is the thing... To be able to play Skyrim properly with fps higher than 30 you need 64hz monitor. No other solution will work.

As I said I accidently lost my post when refreshed the page. I wrote how to overclock your display to 64 hz (most displays can do this easily) but won't write those instructions again.

 

I'll tell you this. Skyrim can only work well at 30fps and 30 iFPSClamp/64fps and 64 iFPSClamp. Also use driver vsync and keep fTreeLoadDistance at 40000 value or lower (tested it on different hardware configs and the results are identical. That tells us that there is some kind of bug with loading tree lods, since you don't cap video memory/ram/etc but still stutter exist)

 

So this is basically it...

If you have good hardware and can maintain minimum 64fps all the time then overclock your monitor to 64hz, add iFPSClamp=64 to your Skyrim.ini, add fTreeLoadDistance=40000 to your Skyrimprefs.ini, force on vsync through nvidia control panel, enjoy NOT-BROKEN, BUTTER-SMOOTH, STABLE Skyrim.

Good luck! Going to play Skyrim at last without thinking about stutters/engine problems/etc etc etc.

 

P.S. Some say display overclocking may be dangerous! Try this at your own risk!

Yet I didn't find any single evidence about broken hardware while oc'ing monitor.

 

P.P.S. Can you stick this thread or this post? I think this is extremely useful information and if somebody told me that earlier it could save me from so much headaches....

Edited by Akreontage
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