Fps, delay, lag..?

[Krazaf]

Hello everyone!

To begin with, I'm sorry in advance for the big post that will follow, but I would really appreciate if anyone have advices and/or solutions for me. And secondly, I'll try my best, but English is my second language.

 

So, here I go; I've been playing Skyrim since it's release, but on Xbox, until the Elder Scrolls Anthology came out on Pc, which is, for me, a gift from the divines. So yeah, I've been playing with all those games, already familiar with Morrowind and Oblivion, I'm an old fan as like a lot of you. Though I've never been into modding. I was afraid of it unstability and of virus and bla bla bla.

Until recently.... I've been watching modding stuff on Youtube and I fell in love with mods like Frostfall, Needs and Diseaces, Immersion stuff, and couldn't resist. I discovered this wonderful world of modding and gone through a rampage. In less than a month, I played 160 hours while in university and working, +time for understanding the whole concept, how it work, etc, all by myself. From time to time, I had to ask some questions here, but I think I wasn't too much of a pain for anyone, finding stuff through olds posts and faqs, etc. Now, I have tested nearly 150 mods, restarted my characters 4 times, following advices and all. So yeah, you could expect that my game got a little bit unstable by times.

 

It was my third time I played the character I wanted, but now I was experiencing more lag than before, more CTD, and, I'm not sure how to explain, but some kind of delay. I mean by that, that when I open certain specific menus or making some actions, the game took too many time to load the event. For example, opening the survival menu from frostfall was taking almost 30 second, after that, it took another 1 minute to make appear the firecamp, and then it took almost 2 minutes to actually place it. Other time, it took almost 1 minute when I asked a merchant to trade with him. So yeah, for going into immersiveness, it was kind of a let down.

 

But now I use Boss, and even gone through TES5Edit and clean dirty edits. Removed some undesirables mods, patching others, etc.

So, I was done this morning at 5 am, and I restarted my character, again. The whole was feeling way more stable, more enjoyable, and I can already tell I fix a loooot of stuff there.

 

However, for an early game, there is still a bit of lag, and the delay thing was still there but it's better.

SO, my questions would regard my options now.

 

I'm not really familiar with specs, computer, fps and things. I know the general things but I couldn't say what is good and what isn't. Let's say that I have almost 140 mods installed now.

 

The options I envisaged kind of afraid me, so that's where I'd like some advices:

 

-Should I try mods that help Fps.

-Should I try to learn and merges some mods and hope that it will help. (Yikes!)

-Should I play with my graphics and put them even lower than they are.

-Should I simply remove some mods. =(

-Or, can I uncheck the mods that I won't use with a specific character, but check them for others, or will it cause conflict, and needs to be uninstall, reinstall for each characters.

 

That's pretty much what I think of right now, but if I come to think of something else I'll ask.

 

If anyone could help me, it would be VERY appreciated!

Thanks a lot for reading, and it's a veryyy nice community we have here, thank you all modders!

[Valkyrie]

Hmmmm where to start... Ok what are your system specs? CPU, videocard and memory at least. Do you have any video card monitoring software installed like Afterburner etc?

[Krazaf]

Alright, so I have this:

 

Windows 7

AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core processor 4400+ 2.30 ghz

6 gb of RAM

64 bit

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT

 

That's pretty much what I can find.

 

But, this computer has been given to me by a very good friend. The only problem is, I don't know if it's fully protected, if he have already worn it out, if there is junk on it, etc. I know he's a gamer, so he should have run this computer already a lot.

[Valkyrie]

Pretty sure that videocard only has half a gig of memory on it, maybe a gig max. If you use any texture mods they will use that right up. If you have a choice between like 1k or 2k textures always use the smaller ones. Other than knocking down your settings or resolution that may be the most ya can do. Their are plenty of video tutorials on how to optomize windows by shutting down background programs etc but thats only gonna do so much.

[Krazaf]

So it's not about the amount of mod I use?

 

For the textures stuff, I use Climate of tamriel, Realistic lighting and blood texture. I think it's pretty much it. I knew to not use HD texture and stuff.

[Georgiegril]

Your hardware is just barely meeting the minimum specs for the vanilla game.

 

If you want to add mods, you are going to need to learn about your computer and how to maximize what you have. Do not bother with ENBs, or other lighting/effects mods. Or mods that spawn a bunch of new creature or encounters. USe the lowest-res option of any mod that adds textures. You might try a texture optimizer like SMCO.

Make sure to disable all unnecessary background programs/apps/services.

And *definitely* get a good security program. Run basic computer utilities (clean up old files, defrag, etc.) Depending on what your friend did before giving you the computer, it may be worth the time and effort to wipe and reinstall your operating system, then do new installs of Steam, Skyrim, etc.

Get the latest drivers for your GPU-- do not use windows driver update or steam driver update. Do a complete clean install, following this guide.

 

A nice website for low-end computer tweaks for Skyrim is RookieNoob's guide.

 

Make every change one at a time, and test thoroughly before adding anything else, so if a problem occurs, you will know the cause.

 

I don't think you will be able to run COT or Realistic Lighting successfully.

[Krazaf]

Well, thanks to both of you. Really helpful.

I'll try to follow your advices and fix my games and PC.

 

Though I'm wondering if the other problem is related to that aspect.

You know, the part where I spoke about delay.

I'm not sure this kind of delay is related to FPS, it's not actually like the game is lagging in those instances.

 

But really like, if feel as if the computer search the file and it take sometime. Meanwhile I'm looking around in the game, but it's not laggy, just long. I'm not sure if I'm clear?

 

In any case, if it's related, I'll see it pretty fast.

Edited December 10, 2013 by Krazaf

[bben46]

How much free space do you have on your hard drive? - a basic rule of thumb is you should leave about one third of it open. If you are using more than three quarters of the drive, either do a major cleaning to get rid of unused stuff - or get a bigger hard drive. The built in windows maintenance will do a fair job of cleaning.

Make sure you are not running some background program that is causing the slowdown

Next run an antivirus - The MS Security Essentials Antivirus is FREE and does a pretty good job. It is also easy to manage and doesn't take up a lot of space like some other well known Antivirus programs. You should only be running ONE antivirus as more can slow things down. A full antivirus scan can take several hours so be prepared to be doing something else while it runs.

Next run the disk cleanup.

Start>All programs>Accessories>System Tools> disk cleanup

Then reboot the computer

Then the defrag

Start>All programs>Accessories>System Tools>Defragment

The defrag may take quite a while

 

If you want to do a more thorough cleaning, I use ccleaner free version. But be aware if you have stored passwords it may clean them off too. Read the documentation if you don't want that to happen.

 

The worst thing you can do is download some computer cleaning program that 'guarantees' to speed up your computer . Most of those do nothing more than the same thing the built in Windows disk cleaning does, while at the same time installing a malware that can actually slow you down while redirecting all of your internet searches through their site where they sell your information to scammers.

[Georgiegril]

The biggest problem is your GPU-- it is very old and barely meets basic requirements--assuming you have the 512 MB one, and not the 256-- if that were the case you would be below minimum specs.

Your low-level GPU is going to mean that your VRAM is constantly having to try to clear out memory in order to render everything. That causes the performance issues you describe.

 

However, your processor speed is pretty low as well, and that can also cause slow performance.

 

The more memory requirements you make of your RAM and VRAM, the more performance issues you will have--fps being just one measure of that, as you point out.

[Krazaf]

Excellent!

Thanks to you all for your help and for teachings me theses stuffs.

 

I'll have everything fixed soon enough, well at least with what I have.