Sudden Game Stutter

[Katarsi]

Guys, help. I have no idea what is going on with my game, it was working fine just a few days ago, and now it's stuttering like crazy. I didn't make a change to my mods in the meantime.

Just to be clear, I've tried everything I could think of. I turned off ENB, disabled ALL mods - still stuttering.

When the stutter happens, the frames plummet for around 20-30 FPS for the duration of stutter. The stutter is completely independent of what I'm doing in the game, I could be just standing still and it's happening.

I've recently installed updates for both Windows (10) and graphic card (GeForce). I'm suspecting one of those is creating problems, though I don't know which one... Btw I'm on a laptop. It's a pretty good gaming laptop.

Is anyone else experiencing these issues?

 

[7531Leonidas]

Did you start the game from Steam one time after the GeForce driver update, to make sure that the game is using the proper video card driver? Alternately, the driver installation might have gone poorly, or the driver installation might have changed some settings. Double check, then try d/l and reinstalling the driver.

[Katarsi]

Did you start the game from Steam one time after the GeForce driver update, to make sure that the game is using the proper video card driver? Alternately, the driver installation might have gone poorly, or the driver installation might have changed some settings. Double check, then try d/l and reinstalling the driver.

 

The installation didn't change settings, I checked.

So I should start the game directly from Steam? Not from SKSE?

[7531Leonidas]

Yes, the most common way is to launch the game from Steam, but ONLY if you use the latest version 1.6.6xx, or have set the appmanifest file to 'read-only' to protect against auto update upon launch. I think that you could also check the SkyrimPrefs.ini in your Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition folder. Scan down the document until you see the [Launcher] section, check that sD3DDevice matches your video card model. I 'think' that is where the change is. It's only been several years since I have had to do this... I hope that someone else comes along and confirms this, or gives you something more worthwhile.

 

BTW, there are a couple of Skyrim 'fixes' and/or 'tweaks' mods that might also help with stutter.

[Katarsi]

Thank you for your help Leonidas :)

 

I managed to solve the problem by reinstalling the latest update for NVIDIA. I've been messing with all kinds of settings in the meantime, so I had to fix them later... Namely Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini.

 

I have all the bells & whistles for improving game performance, SSE Display Tweaks and so on. I consider them a necessity for a game this old.

 

Yeah, I'm adamantly settled on standard Skyrim SE (1.5.97), so loading the game from Steam was out of the question. Funny thing happened though... When AE first came out, I've used a hack to make the update file Read-only so it prevents any updating from Steam, and it's also set to not update the game unless I launch it. And just in case, Steam is always in offline mode.

While I was troubleshooting my recent problem, at one point I switched Steam back online - and it immediately started downloading the update! I paused it as fast as I could, then made sure all the settings are adjusted to prevent updating - and they were, so I have no idea how TF this happened. Goddamn Steam overriding my own computer! Fortunately, I managed to preserve my game, and Steam is back to offline, no thanks. But still, it was a really weird occurrence.

[7531Leonidas]

Glad you got it all sorted, I know it drives me crazy when something doesn't work like it should. I just got a new card, and will have to wipe the NVIDIA drivers and install the AMD stuff, so I expect something will break, but I hope not.