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uGridsToLoad Talk and Testing


hanslanda007

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Hi

 

3440 X 1440 is really stressful with a reshade & lots of mods even with a single 980 ti. On the old Skyrim(350+ mods, ENB) I had to replace my GTX 980 ti with a GTX 1080 to maintain 60fps when I went form 2560 X 1440 to 3440 X 1440. It is just a lot more pixels.

 

With the old Skyrim I used uGridsToLoad 7 for about a year. It is not a good idea to use it if you plan on doing the main quests. There is no going back to 5 with any save you make at 7. You may get away with a few load/save cycles but they will corrupt & the results can scare you.

 

Uping the ugrid is a CPU/ram hit. On the old game I added too many NPCs & was running out of ram. I went back to 5 to stop the out of ram CTDs. To maintain frame rate I also keeped terrain meshes vanilla. I like to keep my i7s at about 18 to 23% usage to maintain high frame rate.

 

Later

 

 

Yes I agree that 3440x1440 is stressful on a 980ti with reshade and lots of mods BUT I must admit that performance is a heck of a lot better on this Special Edition, I'm not sure i'd even use ENB again as visually i'm pleased with my mods and a reshade.

 

I was using uGrids 7 on Old Skyrim for some time without issue when I finally got my head around how to actually implement the change correctly.

 

All the purpose of this thread was for was to share knowledge as SE is a very different beast, I'm not serious about a play through yet as i await other mods that I need for a fresh start so I'm using this time to test. Changing the detailed LOD to 21 has proven to be stable and with out a issue although I still can't get my head around the tree pop in as even with the uGridsToLoad upped (I been as far as 11) it does not fix tree pop in.

 

Oh and one last thing that is puzzling me, I perfectly understand that upping uGrids hit's the FPS BUT whether it's 7, 9 or 11 my FPS stays the same. So for example with uGrids at default I'm at a solid (CAPPED) 60 FPS when running through the settlements outside Whiterun but when set to 7,9 or 11 it's 45 FPS, I moved to higher ground and the increased grids was obviously working but performance impact no different.

 

Any way back to it.

Edited by hanslanda007
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NPCs were the killer for me. The more that become aware of me the bigger the hit. I had lots in my game. I could free the camera & sometimes count up to 300. My game was about large battles with up to 15 high end followers & 50 or more enemies. Higher level saves would have up to 60 followers on the roads using MHIYH. It was lots of fun but had to be monitored & adjusted all the time.

 

I use 2 GTX 980 ti in my 4k rig. I have only tested Skryim SE with 1 card & it runs flawlessly at 60fps at 4k. The down side is that the popping in is more apparent at that resolution. The only time it is livable is when there is lots of distant ground fog. Vivid Weathers helps with that.

Fortunately I prefer Skyrim at 21:9 & I am hoping that I will find the right combination of tweaks and mods to make distant terrain a none issue.

 

Like you I am mainly testing. What is troubling so far is that I am averaging 4.3gb vram usage without a single terrain texture added. It is troubling to me because I more than doubled the vram usage on the old Skyrim. That & the popping in of trees & grass will be a big challenge.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Later

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  • 5 weeks later...

Hello,

 

I will bring my testimony.

 

On my Oldrim game, heavily modded and tweaked, I held 200 hours of play with uGridsToLoad=9 before my save becomes corrupted. Of course, I had a CTD once an hour of playing on average, but this was due to the limit of 2.8-3.3 GB of RAM.

By cons, to 200-250 hours of play, freezes and infinite loading screens appeared. I had to give up my game. (Bug every 5 minutes, unplayable!)

 

I thought that with Skyrim Special Edition, I could push the limits further. 78 mods are installed. I started my game directly with an uGridsToLoad=11 and uLargeRefLODGridSize=31. No problem with my test character during 10 hours of play. Except a Mammoth or 2-3 NPCs of Whiterun which sometimes levitated in the air, at 100 meters of altitude. I said to myself: bug of the Havok but without incidence ... No crash, no problem loading ... if only that, it will pass.

I start my real play of Skyrim. No problem on the first 10 hours of play, apart from there also 2-3 cases of NPCs that floated in the air in Riverwood.
Go to Whiterun. 5 days in game passed and 10 hours in real life...
I go to a dungeon. At the exit, 3 skeevers levitate with their AI disabled ... I sell my loot and go to Arcadia to make a potion ... CTD when leaving the alchemy menu! The first in 11 hours of play.

I reload and kill the smugglers who are hidden west of the ramparts of Whiterun... One of the three enemies levitate with no IA... CTD after 5 minutes of batteling. (I've play on Legendary difficulty, so the combats are long.)
I reload and slept 24 hours at the Bannered Mane. I decrease the uGrids to 9 by doing the necessary manipulation on the console (refreshini code).

No more NPC floating in the air. I can play an hour more without CTD or hover bug.

I return in south of Riverwood... I have to reload a save there ... and there, infinite loading screen.

I realize that my save is corrupt.
I disable all my mods. I go down the uGrids to 5 (refreshini ok), cleaning the save with SkyrimTools (maximum power: all cleaning option). Same problem south of Riverwood. If I reload a save here.

I resume my Helgen save with the uGrids at 11 with all mods, then and speed run to make a quicksave at the same place with my level 1 hero. No infinite loading screen.

So my save is really corrupt. No more doubt. Probably because of the Havok. (Mods were found innocent.)

The physical engine is not designed to handle a large uGrids. It completely disrupts it. If you see NPCs levitating while being frozen, this is a warning sign to take very seriously.

In the short term, the uGrids cause no problem (ideal for the most beautiful screenshots). Over the long term, it's suicidal. It destroys the save slowly.

Revert uGridsToLoad doesn't clean the save. The antidote would be a reset of the Havok, but SkyrimTools Special Edition does not manage it yet.

uGridsToLoad=11 => Corruption after 15 hours of play.
uGridsToLoad=9 => Corruption after 200 hours of play. (And I think I was lucky.)

uGridsToLoad=7 => I think it should stand for several hundred hours of play. Best compromise.
uGridsToLoad=5 => No problem: it's the vanilla value. But the display distance is small.

FPS is not a problem. With a GTX980M 8 GB, I was at an average of 40, with 30 FPS recorded to the minimum. And strangely, Skyrim SE never exceeded 3 GB of RAM (with Data folder of 21 GB, 78 Mods + heavy ini tweaks.)

It seems that now it is wiser to modify uLargeRefLODGridSize=11 to 21 or 31. More safe.


I'm good to resume my game from scratch.

Edited by amrasanarion
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I'm going to throw this out there because everyone keeps talking about performance but keep ignoring the real reason why increasing ugrids is not a wise idea.

 

1) uGrids effect not just distance visibility but also event triggering

2) The game is designed around having a uGrid of 5, nothing greater

3) When you increase uGrids, events are triggered before they logically should be.

4) When events are triggered improperly, they cause runaway scripts, broken quests, and numerous other issues.

 

Conclusion:

uGrid increases are only a good idea if you don't give a rats arse about actually playing the game, but rather are just looking for screenshots, videos, mod testing, etc. Absolutely at no point is it ever a good idea to falsify event/script triggering by increasing uGrids, despite the trendy opinion that it will increase your gameplay visual quality. It will 100% of the time eventually break your game/saves, this is not even close to being up for debate. Period.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I have played classic Skyrim on ugrid 7, with 100+ mods, for some 150 hours of actual gameplay with a Radeon 5850 and an i7 730. Not even a single corrupt save game. The occasional CTD and that was all (RAM, I assume). No broken quests either.

 

I also have 180 hours on Fallout 4, also on ugrid 7 since minute 1, some 35 mods, GTX 1070 and i7 6700k. Again, no corrupt save so far and if I had a single CTD, I don't remember. No broken quests either.

 

Now I'm starting Skyrim SE, same rig as in FO4, same grid, some 50 mods. Just went from Riverwood to Whiterun, all ok. Curiously, the giant that the wolf guys kill when you first met them "poped" on the screen at the same distance it poped when I was using ugrid 5 some ten minutes earlier.

 

That said, it's safe to assume that Skyrim SE should be ok at ugrid 7 if you have the rig to back it up. People who treat ugrid higher than 5 as a taboo haven't played with it and are biased, or didn't have the hardware needed to play safely. At least at level 7, quests are fine and save games are fine. The only downside is, of course, the FPS loss, but so far Skyrim SE on my rig is, near Whiterun, at 59-61 FPS, with dozens of mods at 2560x1080.


ALSO: haven't tried with Skyrim SE, but on classic Skyrim you could revert ugrids to a lower level without hassle. You just had to load your game, alt+tab to Windows, open the .ini file, revert ugrids to 5, save the .ini file, go back to your game and save it. Done.


Don't be mean to ugrids, they are our friends!

Edited by Ariranha
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  • 1 year later...
old thread but i read things i can not confirm. but i can confirm what ariranha wrote. i'm playin skyrim le with ugridstoload=7 since 2015 heavily modded without any serious glich. it is correct that there is a performance impact and i would not recommend to increase it above 7 but i would also never go back to 5. the loss of detail and immersion from 7 to 5 is immense. running enb memory hack prevents any memory related ctd running with 7 and while 4GB awareness for tesv.exe is activated. all ctd i discovered were mod or mod order related. hardware should be at least a graphics card with at least 4GB, 980 GTX class or better and a fast quad core cpu combined with 16GB ram, depending on the desired resolution. i could not exclude script related problems but i've never encountered a related problem so far. Edited by xrayy
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I suspect that getting to grips with LODGEN and DynDOLOD is harder than simply increasing ugrids in the ini file and therefore the tweak has remained popular.

I did some very brief testing the other night and increasing ugrids did help a bit with Lods. However I found shesons uLargeRefLODGridSize tweak to be more effective and more performance friendly

Also worth noting that the performance impact of increasing ugrids was roughly equivalent for me as DynDOLOD in high with ultra trees. Obviously the latter gives me a much better result

Edited by QuagaarWarrior
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