[Help] Dying inside: Extreme FPS Drops with or without mods

[AquilaTheStone]

9 hours ago, radiusrsatti said:

perhaps a bit presumptuous, but you mentioned it occurring in exteriors... IF you mean places such as outside whiterun, and say the lag spikes when rotating camera to look around, you could be suffering from... grass

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42161

generate prebuilt grass cache, so the engine isn't stressed to build it in-game every time you look around... may still be some spike, but back when I discovered it, it turned my fps canyons into post-holes

 

I do mean places like outside Whiterun. That was my first guess as well friend. But that isn't it. I already have the mod you recommended and also Grass FPS. Prebuilding it sounds like a good idea nonetheless, I'll do that...uh however that works. But this issue persists regardless of grass mod (And I've tried some of the recommended lightest ones out there) and had the issue with no grass or trees.  Also, I did eventually have massive drops in interiors, it's just my interior FPS is much better, and I've mostly been testing exteriors. It was getting wild at points in the Bannered Mare but late in testing. Also, the issue of getting a drop 'looking' somewhere seems to be fixed by EFPS I think now for me. The issue is more like a random hiccup, which sometimes becomes a coughing fit. (Spiking up and down repeatedly, evening out for a while, then doing it again) 

I've tried it with a wide range of grass types, as well as nothing but vanilla. Turning down the grass density might have done something, but the issue persisted with or without that.

I just tried another test. According to Skyrim Performance Monitor, the GPU is still randomly dropping in performance quite a lot and my temperatures still seem hot. However, my FPS was more stable for longer after cleaning my fans, I think mayhaps they're keeping it from getting too hot too fast because it took a while to see drops. Not sure it's 'fixed' but I played around for a bit to see if anything happened, didn't notice anything. I feel like this issue is thermals related. Anecdotally, the drops I had in my latest test (Which went well) seem to be when it's 'loading' lod or something because it seems to happen in transition areas then it evens out right after. 

I am lucky to have a popular laptop model (The Zephyrus) with a large community around it. Supposedly this thing has a 'boost' setting that is terrible for heating and not that good for performance. I am going to research, and see if I should disable it then perform a test. I want to see if I can lower the temperatures a bit and see how it goes. See, the performance at first is 60+ (I'd like to lock it but I seemed to have more issues when it was locked) and then gradually it gets worse. I also could try applying a custom fan curve or something, not sure. I think I'm going to try optimizing the laptop settings first, since that seems like the least painful solution. 

Out of curiosity, how does one prebuild Grass? Is that a DynDoLOD thing?

[AquilaTheStone]

12 hours ago, 7531Leonidas said:

Glad its an SSD, but I think that the size of your swapfile may still be problematic, given the amount of memory as indicated by SPM.  My system, running at 3840x2160, routinely goes over 24 GB of total memory use, so your data transfers, even at your lower resolution, could still be slowing you down.  Search out the recommended swapfile size for 24 G of system memory, and set the min and max to that value.  I don't think that dynamic sizing is your friend.  A link, but a bit dated ( https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/5117-windows-page-file-and-skyrim-load-times/ ).

 

 

 

I'll consider this but I don't know (However this works, I've never heard of this LOL) and update if anything changes. Last test I just did seemed to go better than prior ones...but I'll keep trying.

 

Like I said, this issue is happening vanilla and modded. Additionally, I have played on this computer before, ultra modded (A year ago) and while I do recall needing to configure things to get FPS stable, I remember it eventually getting stable. I never messed with paging files then so, I don't know how that could be it. I guess it's possible *shrugs*

Hmm...

[7531Leonidas]

I cannot give specific evidence that it will help, I just think that the fixed size pagefile gives the OS fewer decisions to make, when it does have to use/purge the swapfile.  I hope that you find what you need, good luck!

[radiusrsatti]

13 hours ago, AquilaTheStone said:

Out of curiosity, how does one prebuild Grass? Is that a DynDoLOD thing?

For MO2 users:

Spoiler:  

Show

2. Make sure you have the latest version of MO2.
3. Download the optional MO2 plugin from files section and put it in your /plugins directory of MO2 install. Make sure to restart MO2 if you had it open.
4. Open MO2 and click the puzzle piece icon. There should be a new option "Precache Grass". If it's not there check to make sure you installed the plugin correct.
5. Click the button and wait, if the game crashes or is closed before grass generation is finished MO2 will restart the game automatically until the whole process is finished. While the cache is generating a load screen with appear along with a message box in game saying that generation is occurring. Progress can be checked by opening the console or looking at NGIO-NG.log.
6. A popup will appear with the message "Grass generation finished successfully!" when generation is completed. Once it's done your grass cache should be in the overwrite folder, make a new mod out of it and call it "Grass Cache" or whatever you want, while keeping the .cgid files in the grass folder. Make sure to check for .fail files in your grass folder as you will see blank areas in the corresponding cells. Check crash logs and regenerate with problem mods removed.
7. Any time you change anything with your load order (such as landscape edits, grass edits, object placements, even grass config changes) you will need to remake the cache by running the "Precache Grass" option again. If you change only Overwrite-grass-distance and Overwrite-grass-fade-range, then you don't have to remake cache as they only affect drawing distance.

Not a DynDOLOD thing, but should be done after generating DynDOLOD if you use it

My experience with laptops is that they're not the best with modded skyrim, but I don't know anything about yours, and said experience is about 7 years old... depending on your load order and mods in use, precache generation can take a good while, with my load order, last time i generated grass cache, it took about 16 hours, but my skyrim is massive... it should only be done after finalizing all WRLD record conflicts in xedit, after generating DynDOLOD, and will need to be regenned any time you make WRLD record edits or nif/texture replacements that would affect grass types/textures and/or positioning/placement (or you will likely have floating grass)... the good part is that it saves engine processing power by eliminating procedural grass generation, doesn't affect your save, and can be regenned at any time

but to illustrate the effects, I was having fps drops from 60 to 5 outside whiterun... even continuing to look in the same direction after it fully loaded didn't help, still lagged greatly... after cache generation, it was almost smooth as silk, but still saw some drops to 50 fps