Sata Ssd and ram upgrade impact on certain mods

[bjornthebaker]

My Specs:

Intel I7 4710 MQ CPU @ 2.50 Ghz

Geforce Gtx 860M 2gb vram

8gb ddr3 1600 mhz ram

 

So I will add 8gb ddr3 1600 mhz ram and Samsung 870 Evo 500 Gb 560MB-530MB/s Sata SSD to the hardware. What I would like to ask is that how would these impact my Skyrim SE gaming performance with certain mods like city overhauls, texture mods or lighting mods. I know these are not magically changing my my graphic card or my cpu. Right now, with these mods I get too much stuttering in cities fps drops.

 

[wfandrews]

You should have 4gb vram at a minimum. With those specs you will probably not be able to run SSE smoothly.

 

Might try running at the lowest resolution you can get away with and no texture mods. I would advise taking a look at the system requirements for SSE.

[Deleted135840173User]

You exceed the Minimum Requirements but not the Recommended requirements.

Up to 1080p max you can run it fine and unlocked framerate with over 60fps and Default BethINI Medium Settings.

But you may have to go into your Drivers and select the Balanced Options and some Performance Options over quality.

Disable Ambient Occlusion from anywhere.

Disable Sceen Space Reflections this one is bad anyway.

Avoid ENBs.

Install a Good Weather Mod. Cathedral - Obsidian or Azurite or others that are made to function without ENBs.

Get xLODGen and DynDOLOD.

With xLODGen make sure to follow the recommended settings from its Page in the Stepforums. Stay within LOD Settings of 512-256 size.

With DynDOLOD 3 do not exceed 512 size of LODs and where it gives you diffuse texture settings or Billboard size do not use bigger size than that of your Vertical Screen Size. Select the one that corresponds to Vertical Screen Size.

Texture Mods. 2 Options: Tamrielic Textures - Cathedral Landscapes - Noble Skyrim. Select the best Performance Options. Better mountain textures you can get from Winedave's Majestic Mountains variants. I suppose with this GPU you wont have a Display bigger than 1080p so select the 2K Mountains.

Grasses you can try SFO Grasses.

Or Cathedral Grasses but you may have to do some tweaks and replace Reach and Marsh Grasses. Learn how to do it and how to use SSEedit.

Will take a while.

Trees check HQ Tree Bark and Assorted Mesh Fixes and Fixed Mesh Lighting as well as Aspens Ablaze, Realistic Aspen Trees 2K option, or alternatively Enhanced Vanilla Trees.

Architecture Mods with current DynDOLOD 3 you can generate for everything. Either fix Vanilla with Mesh Fixes or use CleverCharfs Retextures. Do not exceed 2K texture sizes.

Stay away from High Polygon modifications and HDT. Always choose the most performance friendly and best alternative to all mods especially Script wise.

Armor-Weapons you can go up to 2K Textures.

Use Relighting Skyrim and a Weather Mod. No performance impact.

In DynDOLOD 3 you can select Terrain Underside will prevent light to pass through objects. With that, Land Shadows, Tree Shadows and good Weather Mod it look great without Ambient Occlusion.

Have generally DynDOLOD control distant objects instead of base game sliders. Tweak imingrasssize. Make sure density is balanced. With SFO grasses 35, with Cathedral you can go 50-55 with Vanilla same.

Check out Mari's Flora as well for plants select performance options.

Snow Textures check out Better Dynamic Snow and Nordic Snow.

 

The information i gave you is a bit messy but may help when you try to mod the game. I guarantee 60-70 fps if you stay within these rules. I've played it like that with an I3 1st Gen and a Geforce 1030. You can make it look crazy good as long as you keep it balanced and a non heavy load order. Upgrade your GPU to a 4GB and you can get an ENB on top. Upgrade to 6GB and you can do this on a 2K or 4K Display. Downside the 4K Display will require bigger textures so you have to run it in 1080p anyways.

 

Alternatively if you upgrade play in 2k monitor resolution and keep texture sizes like this: Mountains 4K Architecture/ Large Objects 2K, Trees are somewhat mixed.

 

...and don't try to stream with all that not matter how high you''ll take the upgrade lol unless you upgrade to an 8GB GPU immediately. My advice stay with the 2GB and wait to find a good price for a 3000 series. I already regret not waiting for an 8 and bought a 6 with Covid Prices :tongue:

 

To give you an Idea. God of War 4 PC Version with an 1660 and Full Settings depletes around 6500MB of your GPU. Decrease it one step and you are at 5590MB out of 6GB VRAM. That with a 2K Display.

 

So my rule is, Skyrim's old, if you want 4K Graphics made for 4K Displays use Black Desert Online with its Remastered Graphics. If you want to play Skyrim play it in 1080p and 4K-2K-1K Texture Distribution with 4K Mountains and Tree Cones being the Highest Texture Sizes and simply don't overload the slow Papyrus Engine and no need to worry about anything anymore.

For that you need 6GB VRAM if using an ENB and if no ENB 4 is enough. For 2GB VRAM no ENB and don't exceed 2K Textures except of Trees were its Mixed like EVT does.

Works.

Edited January 17, 2022 by Guest

[bjornthebaker]

@extraterrestrialvoidghost

Thanks for advice, appreciate it. I actually own laptop so gpu upgrade is off limits for me. 7 years ago my gpu was great but now it is very low end and unfortunately, I cant buy another pc right now. About ENB, I can't just give up on it. Even bad textures looks good with it. I am okay with 20-30 fps as long as that fps smooth. City overhauls really puts stuttering to another level. Textures mods, I avoid as much as possible and when I install, I always choose the low texture. I was hoping ssd read time maybe help on that issue.

[Deleted135840173User]

I don't think you'll drop that much. Back when i had a 2GB GPU i was using the above recommendations, xLODGen-DynDOLOD, SSEDisplayTweaks, Realistic Water Two, Enhanced Vanilla Trees, Better Dynamic Snow, SFO Grasses and Plants, Tamrielic Textures, Enhanced Lights and FX plus Intrigued ENB and Obsidian Weather and 44 was my lowest around Whiterun.

I was also running Cobb encumbrance and Sunhelm and they weren't causing any lag.

 

You just have to use the Performance or Quality version and go to your ENB InI. Where Quality is 1 or 0 change it to 2 and under SSAO disable self intersecting and Tesselation under Water.

Another Tweak is to active UseOriginalObjectProcessing so Objects don't look washed out with the Performance version.

 

So if you use some Vanilla fixes for meshes such as Fixed Mesh Lighting or Assorted mesh fixes and some flora fixes everything will look consistent enough and still benefit from the ENB while keeping FPS above 40 (around whiterun) expect overall 50-55 range. So you could still benefit from colorgrading and shaders.

 

Everything also depends on Load Order weight and how fast it can load. SSDs help alot as does CPU because ENB isn't a normal Post Processing Tool it burdens the Engine alot and the more work the Engine has to do the bigger the impact will be.

 

Cities and NPCs will be a Heavy Hit indeed. I would say this is also more Engine level related compared to VRAM.

CPU and SSD can help with that Optimized Scripts and Patcher or Spell Perk Item Distributor distribution of effects or abilities or items.

 

In short Vanilla Skyrim already has Textures that are 4K and 2K so using Texture Mods is simply replacing them with the same size or lower but better quality. As long as they load fast enough no problem. Thats why an SSD plus not overburden the Engine helps.

Its like running a better Vanilla Skyrim.

 

Just keep in mind once you start adding more mods, no matter what they are the Engine will have more things to load so it will affect the ENB binaries a bit and you may reach a point it will be problematic. My personal opinion is its not worth it in the long run if you build Ultimate Playthrough Mod Lists but certainly worth trying it out. (But that's just me wanting to play with Crazy framerates and Combat Mods)

 

Your CPU isn't bad for Skyrim (A 10 Year old game) its only issue is the Processing speed of its Cores. Skyrim needs good Single Core speed. Can't benefit from Multicore. So the question that remains is ''How much you can mod it''

Edited January 18, 2022 by Guest

[bjornthebaker]

Really thank you for the advice. Unfornutely, Skyrim without combat mod is really dull, I have to use it. When those use scripts, I felt it in combat, sometimes fps drops or stuttering. Well, we will see when I install the Sata Ssd. After I install my must mods, with respect to how the game runs, I will start to put on top of it slowly to see the results.

[Deleted135840173User]

Check Blade and Blunt. Very lightweight and working.

Works even with CGO if you use it, Nemesis will provide you with Retimed Hit Frame to fix NPCs hit before their attack lands. I use TK Dodge as well Skyrim Revamped and then Synthesis Patchers for Mortal Enemies, KYE etc.

I stopped using CGO but when i did i did run it with these mods.

I was running that stuff even on the old pc and the aforementioned load order in my first 2 posts and couldn't notice any fps hit with all these neither with SkySA setup.

 

I would say that some older Combat mods do have some slow script behavior compared to the more recent ones. Its simply Scripts not being as optimized or using cloak effects to apply stuff on NPCs.

 

Generally Scripts themselves are not performance intensive. It all depends how much calculation is done in the background while playing. This is more a matter of how Scripts are build and how many will stack with each other running constantly.

Some mods also use SKSE directly to implement features or rely on Behavior Engines such as Nemesis or on Dynamic Animation Replacer thus they have 0 performance issues.

 

An example:

Cobb Encumbrance vs SunHelm Carry Weight Feature:

Cobb constantly checks your inventory. SunHelm just puts an instant 150 Carry Penalty. = Low-Medium Script Load vs 0 Impact.

Or another one:

Wintersun vs Pilgrim:

Wintersun tracks actions to increase or decrease favour with a diety. Pilgrim works differently. (Though Wintersun doesn't have a real impact at all its actually very light)

 

Try to always look for the fastest and most modern alternatives and you'll do fine.

Quest Mods themselves can get heavy if they rely on constantly running Quests in the background = Papyrus Engine Slowdown compared to Quests that fire when they should or a bunch of NPCs doing any action within a Cell which hasn't loaded (You haven't entered) are also not properly optimized. Many examples.

 

Oh and Leveled List Distribution of stuff can stack with Engine Load as well. Its best if Leveled Lists are Patched once and load once during startup.

Anyway what's most important is to remember always to leave some spare room wether its GPU Memory or Papyrus Engine Load or space for more Plugins and you should be fine.

Edited January 18, 2022 by Guest

[bjornthebaker]

*Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch.esp

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Sata ssd came. Here is my load order. My fps did not improve from earlier gameplaythroughs. In city 30-40 fps, outside 20-35 fps, interiors 40-60 fps but one significant bonus bonus is that all of the stuttering is gone. No fps drops and small freezes as I play the game. I was expecting a little bit fps boost but this one I can be content with as well.