Most of my FPS drops occur when loading new areas

[Shotokanguy]

Is there anything that can ease the transition into an unloaded area? I can get 60 FPS almost constantly until I move away from the general area I'm in, and it's really disappointing to be traversing Skyrim so fluidly and then run into a few moments of big stuttering before it maybe smooths out again.

 

But I wouldn't even know what I can do to get around this. Loading is kind of unavoidable. The game has to load.

[Georgiegril]

Have you increased your ugrids? If you have, the lag is because the game is being asked to load at least twice as many cells--not just the tectures but the critters ad NPC, run their AI, etc.

If you did not properly set your Cell Buffer along with your ugrids, that would also cause problems.

 

If you did not change your ugrids, then you might consider looking at your graphics driver game profile. In Nvidia Inspector (for geforce cards) you can find a value "maximum prerendered frames" You might try raising this value, and that may smooth out your loads a bit and generally increase performance. I use 7, but you might try to play around with that, anywhere from 5-9.

 

Limiting your fps might also help some.

 

The problem may simply be that you are using a great many mods that increase textures, spawns, and tweaks like extended LOD etc. The game was built to handle only the vanilla--when we add a bunch of mods and tweaks it can strain the game engine. So it may be one of those things--you may have to choose between fewer mods/tweaks (or less resource-intensive options) and occasional lags.

[Shotokanguy]

Yeah, I set uGrids to 7. Thing is, I felt like I was still getting that same "pause" as the next grids loaded, even at 5. So I went, what the hell, 7 looks so much better, I'll just find some other way to make it load easier.

 

So I just looked at max pre-rendered frames with the Nvidia Inspector, and the option is greyed out. It says "PRERENDERLIMIT_APP_CONTROLLED".

[Georgiegril]

Did you go to the specific Elder Scrolls Skyrim game profile?

(there's a pull-down menu on the top toolbar)

[Shotokanguy]

I did.

[Shotokanguy]

Oh, I shouldn't have looked at the Inspector first. I opened up the Nvidia control panel and it gave me the option to set it to 4.

 

If you recommend 5 or higher...I dunno, I can only go to 4, so can I get some more info on what exactly this will do?

Edited May 27, 2013 by Shotokanguy

[Georgiegril]

Sure.

Pre-rendered frames info, from the STEP guide.

 

 

Maximum pre-rendered frames Maximum pre-rendered frames sets the number of frame that the CPU can pre-render before the GPU takes over. Some claim this causes an input delay (in milliseconds) from the mouse and keyboard when set to higher values; however, this will be different for different users. In fact, raising this value can actually improve performance. The recommended setting is "8"; however, if you experience mouse or keyboard lag, use the highest setting possible where no lag is experienced.

 

Actually you may find that part of the STEP Guide very useful. I don't follow STEP but they have a lot of helpful information, even if you don't use the whole thing.

 

I use 5 for that setting.

It perplexes me that you are unable to adjust this setting in the inspector.

What version of the Inspector are you using?

Also, could you list your GPU information--type, VRAM, Driver version