Need People Smarter Than Me to Answer These Questions

[ERASERhead1]

Buckle up!

 

I overdone-did it. Maybe you guys get to that point. Got there with OG Skyrim. One too many mods and the FPS gets assassinated. Familiar territory again with SE. Listen, if you're still reading, I'm not looking for a miracle lol, just your thoughts on some things. I'm gonna share some of mine. Don't beat me up too bad.

 

- I use Vortex

- I'm at 1017 installed mods. 241 active and 131 light

- I've never used XEdit and don't know how

- I've never made a merged/bashed patch, although I know how and have w/ Fallout

- I've always installed mods (never uninstall unless textures) mid playthrough and have had little perceived issues or broken saves

- I've ran into save game CTD and fixed it with load order. Surprisingly, because this isn't me trying to toot my own horn here, this has really been my only snafu that was game breaking for a minute

- I'm not a complete dummy I guess. Know my way around ENBs, inis, DynDoLod, Nemesis, Fores, DAR, etc.

 

Right now my world space Skyrim is a slideshow. Too much to bear. And when this happened with original Skyrim I pretty much just quit, which I don't want to do right now. I guess what I'd like to know is:

 

- When FPS gets too LOW does it break physics? I want to know if what I am experiencing is engine related or mod conflict related. Things get especially borked around water as well.

- I'll just get a new graphics card like last time right? Availability aside, I have a 2080 oc 8 gb VRAM right now. I don't want to upgrade my card for just one game, but how much from an engine limitation/mod overload standpoint do you think this would help make it playable again? And this kind of goes into my first question, because if my issues are mod related than I know I'm on my own lol.

- Merged/bashed patches...I guess my question is how would this change my Skyrim experience and do these help with performance at all (I would think not)

- XEdit... I'm willing to learn if I understand better what the gains are. I guess I'd rather hear from the community or layman how difficult using XEdit is and what the reward in doing so is as well.

 

Thanks.

[IsharaMeradin]

If FPS has tanked, I would drop ENB from the equation. In my experience, it has always cut the FPS by about half.

 

That said, there will always be a FPS dip when crossing cell boundaries. The game has to load in the newly attached cells and unload the recently unattached cells. Depending upon what is in those cells, the dip can be noticeable enough to cause a stutter.

 

One thing that can help with performance to a small extent is walking instead of running. By walking the cells are not loaded and unloaded as quickly, this gives a little extra room to process the variety of scripts that may be on objects inside these cells. Lower end systems would benefit more. This is merely a perception fix, it does not change what the game needs to do in the long run.

 

xEdit won't necessarily help with overall performance. It is a powerful tool that can be used to track down plugin record conflicts within a load order, manually create patches as needed and other things. The best way to learn xEdit: create a mod in the Creation Kit, then load it in xEdit. You'll know what changes you made and thus be able to better understand what you are seeing in xEdit.