Stutter

[idwilson]

I've tried the search tool without luck but this may already have been addressed.

The consensus, I think, on stutter appears to be NPC spawns and particularly those that have been changed by a mod (no matter how small). Given the number of mods that improve the game immensely that involve changing NPCs, can anyone confirm that they use mods like better settlers, unique settlers, better locational damage, weaponsmith, super mutants redux and so on without getting stutter?

[DjinnKiller]

That is a tall order to answer, and the answer would probably not help you much.

It is the combination of mods + your hardware (and resolution) + that "blessing" that is the game engine that gives you headaches...or not.
.
An example:
I have a 4090, 300+ mods, every 4k texture mod I can lay my hands on, and I run the game at 4k (not the same as the texture resolution).
Butter smooth, no problem anywhere. Then I added a couple of mods, and suddenly I get drops down to like 10 fps for 2-3 seconds in certain situations.
Now, there was nothing wrong with those mods, they work fine. But the sum total of my load order made the engine go "Nope, I don't wanna play".

To get a large load order to work, do it the hard way. Add one or a couple of mods at the time, test it, adjust load order, get it to work, than add the next one. There is no quick fix here......sorry!

Edit: And enable the console and use the "savegame" command to give you complete snapshots of the state of the game when you play around with mods. This has saved my bacon countless times.
Edit2: Btw, your graphics card VRAM memory (how "many" texture mods can be kept in VRAM before the game have to flush them), and your disks (the speed the game can load textures in to the game), will have a signifcant impact on stuttering if you are using highres texture mods.

Edited Monday at 04:59 PM by DjinnKiller

[mkh97]

9 hours ago, idwilson said:

The consensus, I think, on stutter appears to be NPC spawns and particularly those that have been changed by a mod (no matter how small).

If you are on the Next-Gen update, this is a known issue:

  https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/4598?tab=posts

Quote

A verifiable test case for the stuttering issue has been created by Glitchfinder. As predicted, it wasn't due to anything WE did, but rather something Bethesda themselves needs to fix.

ANY mod which makes an edit of ANY kind to an NPC WILL contribute to the issue. It makes absolutely no difference what kind of edit it is, but the issue was introduced with the NG Update.

Or it could also be because you have a lot of textures that have not been packed into a BA2 archive. 2 and 4k face textures, especially, will cause stutters if they are loose files.

[TurntLogic]

The current understanding is any mod that edits NPC records can cause the stuttering. There's more information on the subject here, and a video by Juicehead covering it here. But as for solutions, you can either avoid mods that edit NPC records until a possible patch or, sidestep the issue by downgrading your game.

[idwilson]

Thanks for the replies. It isn't a gfx issue.

Although it doesn't directly address the question, I think I can infer that the only way to play with a lot of mods that alter NPCs is to do it with the old version.

I've been the downgrade route but couldn't find the pre-update versions of mods that I use.

I was hoping that someone would have a different answer and be able to point to the successful use of at least some mods that impact NPC spawns without stutter on NG.

[DiodeLadder]

 

Does this happen using mods with NPCs with baked meshes and textures?  If your mod doesn't have the baked face assets, what'll happen is that the engine will run the face gen at run time when those NPCs get loaded (in exterior, when crossing relevant cell borders), and this always was an issue even in the older versions if you had a lot of NPCs like this.  I suppose the problem is made worse with the latest update?

If your mod has an issue, try this (see Workaround section) :

https://falloutck.uesp.net/wiki/Actor/Dark_Face_Bug

It says it's a workaround for Dark Face bug, but you are just pre-baking face gen data for these NPCs (just like how vanilla NPCs are treated), which should help in this case. 

If some older mods packed these baked face assets in the old .ba2 format, those files won't be loaded in the new version of Fallout 4 (face gen will happen at run time), and this maybe the reason why some people experienced the issue? 

Or - is the new version of Fallout 4 simply not loading the baked face assets in mods?

Edited Tuesday at 07:47 AM by DiodeLadder