njkilleen

I am fully aware of the 970's memory shenanigans. Back in January, when I read articles about the issue, I immediately ran Skyrim Performance Monitor to see if that was the culprit. Both it and GPU-Z show that the 970, whilst running modded Skyrim on my system, never crosses above 2gb... if even close to that. (I'm not very heavy on the performance mods, nor am I using an ENB). Everything I've read about the 970's memory limitations make it very clear that it will only become an issue if crossing above 3.5gb of VRAM usage, and, even then, you might not notice it (varies from game to game). After coming to the conclusion that, since I have a 1080p monitor and have no immediate intention of going 4K or anything crazy like that, future games demanding more than 3.5gb of vram at max settings would be pushing my card to the limit anyways. In other words, if it had been advertised as a 3.5gb card I would have bought it anyways. What seems to be the case with Skyrim, more often than not, is a persistent macrostutter caused by the game loading new assets into the game world. This happens most commonly when the player crosses into a new uGrid, but it also happens intermittently when objects, items, npcs, textures and other such things are loaded into the RAM and VRAM. It's consistent and repeatable, generally happening in close to the same locations over and over again. I know it is asset loading stutter, as the stutters happen at exactly the same time as moments of increased disk I/O activity. I've yet to find a solution that completely solves the stutter, and I'm not entirely sure I ever will. Some people have different amounts of success with different solutions: Dropping distant object detail to High, Lowering shadow distance, overclocking, ENB tweaking, and whatnot. I haven't been playing Skyrim terribly much lately, so I haven't put much time into finding the exact right combination of settings for my system, but distant object detail seems to have the strongest effect for most people. The fact that so many people share this similar situation shows that this macro-stutter is mostly the fault of the engine.

"Macrostutter" definitely seems like a much better way to describe what going on. Thanks. It's definitely comforting to know that, at least, it isn't just my computer doing something wonky. I kind of already knew that Skyrim's engine wasn't particularly designed for 2014-level graphics, but still... ya' know... I want it to be. (Yeah... first world problems. Whatever.) I would be prepared to just dial everything back to vanilla... but it seems that even when I have just the "official" high-res dlc installed (and no other mods whatsoever)... the game likes to macrostutter. Most of the time it seems as if it's actually stuttering more than it would be if I just had a modded high-res texture pack on. My guess is that the official dlc replaces a lot more textures than a modded texture pack does. (quantity over quality... i guess) It seems odd to me that the "official" dlc would cause macro stutter on a powerful GPU. I don't believe this is a problem with VRAM. I have 4GB of it (okay, 3.5gb + 0.5gb if you follow the news for the gtx 970... but that's irrelevant since I haven't even crossed 2gb with the setup I currently have). My screen resolution is 1920x1080, and i'm not running DSR or anything like that. For me, changing shadow resolution didn't seem to have much of an affect... the results would be different on different runs / tests. I've got to agree with you about the tweaking philosophy. The less, the better. However, one tweak that did seem to decrease macrostutter in certain areas was raising the ugrids to 7. Weird. I guess the game is just forced to load in more stuff so there is a longer delay between moments when it has to pull stuff from the drive. It isn't gone, however, and I switched back. This game is so much more trouble than its worth :)

Thanks for all the suggestions. It would appear that changing Texture Filtering to "High Quality" doesn't effect the performance / stuttering in any noticeable positive or negative way (neither does individually messing with Trilinear Optimization). Seeing as this problem exists pretty exclusively when I have more quality-enhancing mods activated, I've been trying to nail down a potential one or two mods that might be causing it. It seems to be tied pretty exclusively to any texture-related enhancements. Skyrim HD, Amidionborn armors, HD DLC (that's pretty much it). I tried some of the various texture-optimizing programs. Didn't seem to make a difference. Any other ideas?

Glad I could help :) A little update: It looks like, when I thought I was playing on "Vanilla" skyrim, I was actually playing on Vanilla Skyrim + Bethesda HD Texture Pack. (I'm assuming when I put the Texture setting on "LOW" it just disabled that addon.) I went back and played truly Vanilla Ultra Skyrim and the stutter is toned down quite a lot (to the point where I'm pretty sure the stuff I'm noticing is just placebo). Introducing the Bethesda HD Texture pack exasperates the stutters. Putting in the Skyrim HD Texture really spices things up. Adding more visual mods like Skyrim Flora Overhaul, SIMM, and Pure Waters or W.A.T.E.R... and then the stutter is definitely rearing its ugly head again. It looks like the stutter is just hardcore asset load stutter (though being on an SSD you'd think that wouldn't be as bad). My question now is... is this normal? Is it common to encounter little bouts of hitching while traveling (especially with higher texture stuffs installed)? I've seen videos with people with much more demanding mods installed and older cards that don't have any noticeable hitching / stutter. I've updated to the newest Nvidia Drivers too. Either way, if anyone knows a way to tone it down, that'd be great.

Disabling Hyper threading didn't seem to change anything. It would seem that the lower the Texture Quality setting the less pronounced (and common) the stutters are. This includes the enabling / disabling of Texture mods. That makes sense, the higher the resolution the texture the more data that needs to be loaded from the drive as the game loads new stuff. At least, that's what I think is going on. Still, the only setting that completely eliminates it is 'Object Fade.' At minimum, its gone - regardless of anything else. I feel like I might just be going crazy at this point.

Some experimenting with Skyrim Performance Monitor has shown that the 'stutters' undeniably coincide with moments of increased Disk I/O activity. It doesn't happen on all cell borders, nor does it always happen on cell borders, but when it does happen it is clearly the game loading 'something.' It would seem that this stuttering is less an issue with my hardware, and more a fundamental part of the game engine that was harder to notice with the lower frame rates I was getting before. Now, when the frame rate is consistently at a monitor's refresh rate, it would seem that tiny perturbations like load stutter are significantly more noticeable. It's like being able to easily spot a ripple in a still pond versus a ripple in a flowing river. Still, I'm genuinely curious if there is a way to lessen the stuttering. I'm not the kinda person to just give up on something like this. I keep seeing solutions with people who say they have a 'butter smooth' skyrim... and its got me wondering if its actually possible. Turning off Hyperthreading is an interesting idea. I'm not entirely sure how it would help, but I'll give it a shot.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to have made much of a difference either. Any other ideas?

Thanks for the response. Changing both of those settings in the NV Control Panel doesn't seem to have had an effect. I have not changed any settings involving the page file since installing Windows on this computer. According the stuff in System Properties --> Performance Options --> Virtual Memory it is located on my C Drive (SSD) and is 'System Managed.' The 'automatically manage paging file size' check box is ticked, and most of the settings are grayed out. Is there something I could change?

A little update: It looks like the another thing that does make a difference is adding "iFPSClamp=60" under the [General] section in the Skyrim.ini. This seems to virtually eliminate stutter entirely. The pretty significant downside to this approach is that if the FPS ever drops below 60 the game engine "slows down" making everything seem to go into slow motion. From what I've read, it seems that this setting 'locks' the game engine to the number you place after it. Go below it and you go into slow motion, go above (which isn't possible with Vsync and a 60hz monitor) and you go into fast motion. Because this setting had such a strong impact, it seems likely Skyrim's stuttering is a problem inherent to the engine. Still, if there is anyone else out there with fixes that I could apply, I'd be grateful.

Here we go, the forty bagillionath stutter-related thread. I recently rebuilt my gaming PC. After getting everything in place and booting up the game, I found that it has a rather strange intermittent stutter. I hesitate to call it micro-stutter as I know that exact terminology is a little fuzzy, but instances of it are definitely not longer than a quarter of a second... if even that long at all. Most consistently it seems to occur when (I would assume) the game is loading a new cell or pulling textures and various objects from the hard drive. If I were to walk down the road from Helgen to Riverwood multiple times, it would occur in almost exactly the same places each time. Keep in mind, this is not a game-breaking issue by any means, its just a little bit of an annoyance given the time and money I put into my new computer. The funny thing is, I had a similar issue with my last computer. The stutter was much more pronounced, however, and I fixed it completely by reformatting the computer and doing a clean installation of my graphics drivers. But this time I've tried... pretty much every stutter-related solution so far. Vsync on/off. Forcing Vsync with external applications. Limiting the frame rate to 60/59/58. Enboost (with various settings). Skyrim Memory Patch. Reverting to completely vanilla Skyrim with absolutely no mods installed. Reformatting my computer again and making sure all of my driver's were good to go. You name it, I've probably done it. The issue does get more noticeable the more texture mods I pile into the game, but it most certainly is present in Vanilla as well. My GPU has 4GB of VRAM, so I don't think that is the problem. After all this, I was resolved to simply call it a fundamental issue with Skyrim's rather... quirky engine. None of my other games were doing this. About to give up, I reverted everything to Vanilla and set all of the game settings to 'Low.' Boom, stutter gone. Curious, I began raising individual settings back to Ultra and found - after some trial and error - that the settings causing stutter were, without a doubt, "Object Fade" and "Distant Object Detail." Pulling those to Low eliminates the issue. All of this is to say: I'm am fully aware that Skyrim's engine has its optimization and memory issues. I must ask, however, are there any INI tweaks (or any other solutions) that would allow me to retain Ultra (or at least decently high) settings for Object Fade / Distant Object Detail without re-introducing stutter? I've seen many forums with people describing things like iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes and iPreloadSizeLimit along with other things. I've also seen conflicting posts saying its a bad idea to mess with those settings. I have not changed the uGrids value, not have I done any major INI shenanigans on my own. Like I said, the stuttering happens in Vanilla. My specs: Intel i7 - 4790K Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI Mobo Asus Strix GTX 970 4GB OCZ Agility 240GB SSD (that Skyrim is installed on) 16GB G.Skill DDR3 Ram (Nothing is overclocked)

Regardless of all of all the issues with shadows present in Skyrim, there is only one that particularly bothers me. It's a weird shadow "line" that is always traveling a fixed distance away from the player. As it passes over the shadows, they suddenly become crisper/more detailed. If I had to take a guess as to what's happening, I would say that the game was, at that line, switching from the blurry and lower quality secondary shadows to the higher quality primary shadows (evident in SkyrimPrefs.ini as iShadowMapResolutionPrimary and iShadowMapResolutionSecondary). However, after some lengthy experimentation, the only setting in the SkyrimPrefs.ini that has any impact on the moving line is fShadowDistance. It seems as though the line is completely proportional to the total distance that shadows are rendered (probably about halfway between the player and the edge of fShadowDistance). At ultra settings, with fshadowdistance=8000, I can ignore it (as its relatively far away), but anything setting lower than that... and its just kills immersion. fShadowLODStartfade and fShadowLODMaxStartFade also seem to do nothing. If it is truly switching between secondary and primary shadows, then I would imagine that the game engine would blur the line in some way... instead of making it an instantaneous transition. I have a video demonstration this weird... phenomenon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvKd7xH8L7U&context=C4dbd9a0ADvjVQa1PpcFNJlkxLmKmI9qLxPhog5pO6Jk9_1zMZkq0= Make sure to put the video on 1080p, or youtube will stretch the pixels and it will be difficult to see the line. Focus mostly on the tree's shadow at the center of the video. This is running at fshadowdistance=8000. If anyone has any knowledge about this weird shadowy detail line, please let me know! Thanks in advance.