Stuttering with Skyrim 1.6

[greywater]

If you experience stutter its the vram in most cases as already written in some replies.

 

The best possibility to fix this problem is to deactivate AntiAliasing first (reduced vram usage by 300mb(4xMSAA) in my case) and all HD Textures (and the official HD Texture Pack)

 

If the stutter is removed afterwards, begin to install the HD textures. If not, its something else than vram

 

512-768mb vram-> 512*512 Textures (vanilla) , 4xMSAA possible

869-1024mb vram-> 512*512 Textures (vanilla) , 16xMSAA possible OR 1024*1024 Textures (Official HD Textures, some other Texture Packs), No AA

1512-2048mb vram->1024*1024 Textures (Official HD Textures, some other Texture Packs), 16xMSAA OR 2048*2048 Texture Packs, 4xMSAA

3072mb vram-> >2048*2048 texture packs

 

To check your vram usage, you can use Sysinternals ProcessExplorer, GPU-Z or AIDA64

Edited June 24, 2012 by greywater

[ZeroKing]

No anti-aliasing, I'm fully aware of VRAM usage. Thank you though for the statistical outline you put on here, @ greywater. However I fixed it with a fresh install of Skyrim, and updated all mods and the game itself, runs beautifully back at its optimal framerate with ~5% stutter, which is to be expected with my laptop. I have 1 GB of VRAM and it was running fine with earlier patches and Skyrim HD texture with my custom ENB, and I believe a fresh install was perhaps necessary (or not). Whichever, the situation is fixed and I can run ENB back at the expected rate without any major stutters. I think it was a broken mod or something else, but the install did the fix.

[elangford]

Here's my experience. I thought I was smart waiting 6 months so Bethesda could get the game half-way close to what should have been released. I began playing the weekend the 1.6 patch was pushed out, but I wasn't updated until Monday, so my character was created with 1.5. I've been playing on Ultra settings, with typical intermittent stuttering on 1.6 due to textures loading until yesterday evening, with about 104hrs play. I entered Dustman's Cairn and all of sudden I started getting up to a quarter second lag every couple of seconds. Of course, I have to wonder why only now has this issue surfaced.

 

I have the official HD textures and at least an additional gig of texture mods, running SKSE and Enhanced Shaders FX at full SSAO with 4MSAA. I'm on a Core i7 920 @ 3.5GHz, 6GB RAM, Asus GTX670 TOP and the game installed on a 10K WD Velociraptor, with an avg FPS of 50+ outside and 35-45 in dungeons with fog. Now, my FPS will dip anywhere from 5-15 frames without even moving my character. I've spent the evening trying to solve it, with the only real solution being to disable SSAO. With the exception of disabling VSync and getting screen tearing, nothing else short of this eliminates the obvious 1/10 to 1/4 second stuttering.

Edited June 26, 2012 by elangford

[tcbrianw]

Ive been following this post for a while hoping the fix would arrive. I too started getting the stuttering after the 1.6 update. The game would freeze for 3-4 seconds with the sound still working. It would occur about every 30 seconds making the game unplayable. Dropping back to the 1.5 TESV.exe fixed the stuttering but increased the CTD's. Disabling all mods and dialing down the video settings didn't help nor did reinstalling the game. I also tried other save game files with no luck. With 800 plus hours in the game I hated to give up my level 54 Imperial but started a new game character and have had no issues with the stuttering and the game is rock stable with about 70 mods installed. I didnt try deleting the ini files but may put my old save back on and try it. Edited June 27, 2012 by tcbrianw

[Silvist]

Heyo everyone,

 

Since I've been an avid fan of ENB, I've always fought for perfect performance. I even went to the effort of building a custom computer to handle Skyrim on ultra high, SMAA, full SSAO, SIL, BOK dof, and all the ini tweaks you can imagine (all at 1900x1200 resolution on a 36 inch sony bravia). Like everyone else here I randomly experienced a lag after a ninja update to 1.6 (I say ninja because I had my updates disabled on steam, because I tire of having to update SKSE and dragon script just to run the game ;p ).

 

Though I can tell ya, that I watch my task manager processes like a hawk, and a couple days ago I noticed something. The reason for my fps drop was due to a process called "audiodg". I was never even aware of this windows process until a couple days ago, and since then I've fought with it. Today I think I finally resolved the issue, but time will tell.

 

I had to disable all my audio enhancements, and actually go into services and disable all the creative labs processes. Thing is I use optical out into my surround sound receiver, and prior to this update, I never had any issues. What worries me is after "briefly" reading about audiodg, it has something to do with DRM protected crap. I don't blame bethesda for utilizing it, but I think there is definitely something wrong with the process that causes some kind of random memory leak.

 

I tested this all at first by simply disabling my sound card completely, and running skyrim. Without sound enabled, game ran flawlessly. Then I did it with sound, and after about 10 minutes of playing, random shuddering occurred. I obviously in game made sure to disable enb, and enable enb to make sure it wasn't an enb config causing this issue. So then while running skyrim, I went into task manager and killed the audiodg.exe process. This killed my entire system sound, though the lag/stutter evaporated.

 

So to anyone else who is having issues, I would suggest you watch your pcs performance carefully. Took me quite a while to realize, and narrow down the exact process causing me issues. If anyone else notices they are having a similar issue as I was, and needs a better explanation on how I fixed it pm me.

Edited June 27, 2012 by Silvist

[IsolatedPurity]

Removed Super Sampling, did the texture optimizer. Set fps limit. Still terrible stuttering.

 

Took off all of the 2k texture packs

 

Still stuttering.

 

 

I then punched a baby in the face out of anger.

[prsmcarty]

I was also having a stuttering issue making the game really unenjoyable. I tried a number of things, my card is an ati 5990

1. Bought a SSD, loaded quicker but still stuttering.

2. Reinstalled with no mods except Beth hires textures. Still stuttering

3. Reinstalled "factory default" no hires textures, smoother but still stutter

4. Updated drivers, rolled back drivers no change. Banged head on wall In frustration

5. locked refresh / fps at 59, 60 etc. Nada

6. Installed radeon pro, turned off in game aliasing and anst filter used aliasing and ans filter on radeonpro set everything to max now smooth as butter and no stutter with heapps of mods, skse, and Beth hires textures

[CHB000]

Have NO idea if this is what causing it but usually it's a lack of vram right? I have 1.5gb on my 580 and I was watching my resource monitor and its at 100% usage for memory!! Wow! So did this patch add some 4096 textures or something? Because I never had it this bad and I haven't installed any new high res mods.

 

I am currently using the skyrim optimizer tool for textures (after backing everything up too) so I'll see if reducing the texture sizes helps the stuttering.

 

I realize this Thread is somewhat "stale" but I too have had this issue on a uber-system ( 580GTX-SLI, [email protected], 12Gb 8-8-8 RAM). I found a simple mod that nearly cures the stuttering issue. "Skyrim_Stutter_Fix-2581-0-1" It's a FPS / DLL fix and I have near perfect results at 50 FPS limit with no tearing. I found the texture optimizer not so good on my system. I had have some CTDs at that point which I traced to a combination of mods that modified the world space. All of these issue appeared after the 1.6 update with no new mods installed.

 

Hope this helps somewhat

 

chb000

[Galacticat42]

@CHB000

Could you give a link to that mod?

 

@prsmcarty

Oh wow, thanks for that tip with Radeon Pro. Been having stuttering and that program reduced the full stuttering freeze into miniature stuttering lurches... MUCH more enjoyable! (I have a Radeon HD 6530D 2.4Ghz quad core with 1gb dedicated vram and 1gb shared auxiliary vram).

Edited July 7, 2012 by Budz42

[washerw2]

Try to Disable Steam In-game, this causes some issues with the new Patch 1.6 maybe this is another one, who knows.

 

Also make sure you have Page File enabled to the Drive the game is installed, and let the system manage the page file or use the recommended value.

 

 

Tried these and they really helped, I also get the added bonus of 'Steam' friends not bugging me every few minutes asking 'silly questions'