Skyrim Stuttering. Can't figure it out.

[Miguelr23]

well you card is very weak and while it has 1gb of vram it seems to be drr3

either your card is maximizing vram, doesnt have enough bandwidth to load textures or both

[Lord Garon]

Several things will cause stutter, but I'm afraid I would suspect the 6570, especially if its a gddr3 version. I ran on a similar geforce card and stutter was a fact of life for me. Resolutions over 720p also caused FPS loss. And contrary to popular opinion, my system performed much better overall with v-sync enabled. If you have a lot of ini tweaks, I would go back to vanilla. A LOT of performance tweaks out there are actually counter-productive, especially when they interact with each other.

 

To check the card's performance, go down in screen resolution AND lower Texture Quality and AA. You want a BIG texture and frame buffer reduction. If there's a significant decrease in stutter, your graphics card is playing catch-up. Check in both Windowed and Fullscreen modes to see if one performs better. Test indoors and out; indoors USUALLY has much better performance. Start playing around with lower game and CCC settings to see if you can get acceptable performance and looks. Make sure you don't have the same settings enabled in-game and in the CCC.

 

If the stutter remains constant, you may have some mod issues beyond graphics. You might try disabling the most recently added mods and see if any impact the stutter.

 

Also, your Unofficial Patches are out-of-date (its why your load order looks funny, newer versions load differently). If you've had all those other mods for a while, you should see if there are any updates for them; newer versions may have performance bugs fixed or improved.

[Ajanti514]

NMM says that Unofficial Dragonborn Patch.esp is marked as an esm, the patches run fine though. I'm going through all the mods to see if I can pinpoint the problem. So far, I haven't found anything.

[Ajanti514]

Several things will cause stutter, but I'm afraid I would suspect the 6570, especially if its a gddr3 version. I ran on a similar geforce card and stutter was a fact of life for me. Resolutions over 720p also caused FPS loss. And contrary to popular opinion, my system performed much better overall with v-sync enabled. If you have a lot of ini tweaks, I would go back to vanilla. A LOT of performance tweaks out there are actually counter-productive, especially when they interact with each other.

 

To check the card's performance, go down in screen resolution AND lower Texture Quality and AA. You want a BIG texture and frame buffer reduction. If there's a significant decrease in stutter, your graphics card is playing catch-up. Check in both Windowed and Fullscreen modes to see if one performs better. Test indoors and out; indoors USUALLY has much better performance. Start playing around with lower game and CCC settings to see if you can get acceptable performance and looks. Make sure you don't have the same settings enabled in-game and in the CCC.

 

If the stutter remains constant, you may have some mod issues beyond graphics. You might try disabling the most recently added mods and see if any impact the stutter.

 

Also, your Unofficial Patches are out-of-date (its why your load order looks funny, newer versions load differently). If you've had all those other mods for a while, you should see if there are any updates for them; newer versions may have performance bugs fixed or improved.

Thing is, I've run Skyrim on High with XCE, SMIM, WATER, and a few small texture improvement mods without a problem before. I'll check for updated mods.

Edited April 23, 2014 by Ajanti514

[Ajanti514]

Okay I figured out what was going on. For some reason SlavePackRiekling.esp was causing this problem. BOSS warned me that the esp was going to cause problems and I ignored it. Luckily I got a clean esp installed now. I still don't see how the mod managed to cause that though.

[Lord Garon]

Okay I figured out what was going on. For some reason SlavePackRiekling.esp was causing this problem. BOSS warned me that the esp was going to cause problems and I ignored it. Luckily I got a clean esp installed now. I still don't see how the mod managed to cause that though.

 

Good for you.

 

Skyrim is a very complicated piece of software, no matter what people believe about games. Mod changes have to exist within the limits of Steam, Skyrim's world, the scripting engine, game engine constraints, ini file changes, other mods, and user system settings. There is an almost infinite number of possible setups and an almost infinite number of ways to mess things up. When I load my current game setup in TES5EDIT, it parses several million game records, any one of which could crash, freeze, or corrupt Skyrim. Its actually amazing to me that mod authors can get anything to work in Skyrim at all because the CK is not exactly perfect, there are bugs in the script engine, and no one outside of Beth developers knows the actual structure of Skyrim game files.

 

As players, the best thing we can do is let the mod authors know about issues we find. Don't complain to them. Just politely let them know of the issue (usually on their mod page forum), what other mods you have, and how to re-produce the problem. Most mod authors strive to create reliable mods but not every mod will, or can, work with every other mod.

 

And, yes, a mod can cause almost any issue known to Skyrim. Scripting problems, for example, can cause stutter.