fps dips directly from dips in gpu utilization

[elezraita]

Hello. I'll get right to the point. I'm getting performance dips from a solid 60 fps to 38 min on the way to Helgen upon starting a new game. I'll admit that I'm using a fair number of mods, both graphical and scripted. I just switched to Skylight ENB, and I'm using the COT edition in conjunction with Real Clouds v2.0 and ELE and ELFX (interiors only with no enhancer). I get 60 fps most of the time, but these dips have me a bit worried. I've disabled and enabled different mods (real clouds, Civil War Overhaul) and I've tried disabling AO, mist and different forms of AA. I've tried enabling and disabling vsync. I've tried letting the enb control vsync, and I've tried letting the GPU control it. None of these things really prevent the dips. Disabling Real Clouds, EdgeAA or AO may add a few frames, but the dips are still there, almost in all the same places every time. I tested this with Skyrim Performance Monitor, and it is obvious from looking at the graphs that the problem is not memory, my CPU doesn't appear to be bottlenecking the GPU as far as I can tell. The dips in framerate appear in concert with dips in GPU usage. I read somewhere that someone having a similar problem thought it was the GPU temp. My GPU never gets above 66 C and nvidia says that the max safe temperature is ~95 C. I wonder if that's the problem. I'll have to check and see if the GPU is set to never let itself get above 66 C. I don't know why that would be the case. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone has any ideas or if you have encountered this before? I've attached the Performance Monitor output and the load order I used for doing this test. I haven't made the merged patch yet; I doubt that would make much difference. Also, I'm using SKSE 1.7 alpha with Sheson's memory patch. I use nmm, and not MO. If people want inis, I'll have to post those later because I don't have access to them right now.

 

Specs:

 

CPU: Intel i5 4670K@4.2GHz (cooled by Cooler Master Nepton 280L)

RAM: 16Gb Crucial Ballistix 1866 MHz

Mobo: MSI z87 GD65 gaming

PSU: Seasonic 760 W

GPU: EVGA 780 gtx Classified (I haven't touched the clockspeeds)

OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit

Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB SSD (main and games)

WD Black 1TB 7200 rpm HDD (storage)

I currently play at 1920x1080. That will probably change at some point soon; the monitor was the last thing on my list.

 

 

 

 

Any help would be awesome. Thanks a bunch.

Edited May 1, 2014 by elezraita

[piperman123]

Is it perhaps happening when your game loads a new cell? Like you say, nothing in your performance indicates what's wrong and your specs should be more than you need so all I can think of is hdd access speeds slowing you down when a new cell is loaded (not 100% sure if that will cause this), a number of scripts starting up or a conflict (I'd assume a script conflict) causing the game to hiccup.

Nice rig btw :wink:

-Edit

Just ran through your boss log. That's not really a lot of mods lol so that shouldn't be the issue. I noticed a few script heavy mods but nothing that should conflict. Could you run the latency test in convenient horses (it's in its mcm) and post your results. I may be way off base but to me your setup looks like it should run perfectly like you say, so they're the only two things I can think of.

Edited May 1, 2014 by piperman123

[elezraita]

I've had problems in the past with cell loading. Editing my enblocal.ini seemed to help, and I cut down my scripted mods and went to lower res (mostly 2k) textures and what not. I'm running Skyrim off of an ssd. I should have put that in the specs. The problem seems to last longer than cell loading should, I think. However, maybe I'll toggle boarders and see if the drops correlate to crossing them. At this point, I'm starting to think that it's a problem with my GPU throttling down at when it hits a voltage limit, because I don't think it's a temperature limit. This is just speculation, and I have no idea why I would be getting near the voltage limit at stock. I'll check when I get home from work. I've been lazy, and I didn't do a manual overclock yet; I just used the OC Genie. I've been meaning to get around to it, but I haven't taken the time yet. I'm not really sure how the OC Genie does its thing, and what it actually affects. For instance, I don't know if it affects the GPU clock and voltages even though the GPU is not an MSI product.

 

So, what does the latency test actually do? I feel like I have a good amount of knowledge when it comes to modding, but I'm actually pretty new at it, so I still have a lot to learn.

[piperman123]

You sound like you know what your talking about to be honest ;) No, you're right your GPU shouldn't do that at stock but you could always try OCing, I imagine you'll want to do so anyway and check if it helps with the issue. The latency test in Convenient horses basically checks how much script lag you have. It will give you a min, ESTIMATED and max. Estimated is the one you want, it will be the big numbers and it should be no higher than 100ms and less than 50 is ideal. Quote from Convenient horses page:

 

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  Quote

 

 

Script Latency Issues:
Convenient Horses will not work properly if you're suffering from increased script latency. Latency Test is provided with the mod and is a good way to see if Papyrus event manager is responsive or not. Latency should at best stay below 50ms and never peak above 100ms. Increased script latency is usually related to dirty saves and build up of unexecuted code which can prevail even after the mod that was causing it has been removed.
SKSE 1.6.7+ has come with the way of cleaning orphaned OnUpdate() events from saved games which should help in fighting the save bloat. SKSE console command "ClearInvalidRegistrations" should be called when game is loaded and it will attempt to process all queued events that are stuck in the save. This might take hours depending on amount of bloat. You can queue this command to execute automatically on each game reload by adding following lines to DataSKSEskse.ini file:

 

 

 

You say you've had issues with cell loading and have adjusted you ini files? Did you increase ugrids because that really doesn't sound worth all the hassle it will cause you. Also most those tweaks will have a negative impact. Check here for an easy how to and here for an in depth guide and here for a S.T.E.P. guide. Most trusted guides will warn you that most settings in the ini files should be left well enough alone. I personally use a slightly edited version of EWI's ini files (top rated one the nexus and following those links you can see they don't make 'over the top' changes). Sorry, I rambled a bit there -.-

[elezraita]

Nice, that sounds pretty useful. I'll try that. And no, I don't play with my ugrids higher than 5. I use the cell stabilizer, so if I want to take a screenshot or something, I can just change the ugrids in game and not save. It's not worth it to play with higher ugrids, from what I've read. Some people supposedly don't have problems, but it seems like I've got enough issues without worrying about that. I just meant that I tried different values of the VideoMemorySizeMB in the enblocal.ini. Raising it seems to have helped with the cell loading. However, maybe I'll try lowering it again to see if that solves this problem. From the performance monitor graph, I doubt it will have any effect, but it's something else to try. I also use EWI's ini files. I suppose that's something left over from when I tried RealVision enb. I just never changed back because those inis just worked for me. What kinds of changes did you make to your inis?

[piperman123]

Ok, then. All sounds good. You know the the video memory setting in enb local should either be set to your vram+ram-2048 (don't know why that would work though) or your vram (3072mb) right? I've tried both and they both seem to work exactly the same.

I was getting really bad script lag so I changed these:

 

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[Papyrus]

bEnableLogging=1

bEnableTrace=0

bLoadDebugInformation=0

fUpdateBudgetMS=20.0

fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=20.0

fPostLoadUpdateTimeMS=500.0

iMinMemoryPageSize=128

iMaxMemoryPageSize=512

 

iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=76800

 

 

Apparently if you cap your fps to less than 35 it allows you to increase the budget ms to 20 giving the scripts more time to catch up. I had a massive discussion with someone on here about it if you want to read more. I only get up to 50 and average out at 33 anyway so wasn't a loss for me.

Edited May 1, 2014 by piperman123

[elezraita]

You are right: my load order is rather tame compared to some of those in your thread and I have 3072 Mb of vram. I'll definitely have to do a latency test and remove mods as may be necessary. I love enhanced blood, but it isn't absolutely necessary. It looks like you have a merged immersive patrols plugin. Did you merge them, or did it come like that? If it's stable, I might try merging mine. It's always nice to reduce the number of esps. Is it stable?

[elezraita]

So, I just did the latency test and I was getting in the 40-45 mostly. Granted, this was in Helgen Keep at the beginning of the game. What would you say that means about the budget tweaks?

[piperman123]

Haha, yeah I have way to many mods, I've added a couple dozen since then too.

 

I got the merged patrols from the mod page. The author has merged them himself so they're perfectly fine and yeah, it's definitely nice to have 1 esp instead of a dozen. Your script latency looks perfect then but I'd try using cocwhiterunorigin to teleport to whiterun to see if it is higher there, or get into a big fight. You say it was in 40-45 mostly, but what did it peek to? And did you see any correlation between it and these dips? It doesn't seem like script lag then so I'm at a loss, sorry.

 

I've checked your load order again and I can't see any conflicts except, maybe, AOS and CoT? Seeing as they are both Audio overhauls, or is there a version of CoT that just does weather?

[elezraita]

So, AOS has about 1500 patches for various mods, and one of them is COT along with six other mods I run. I actually merged all of those patches ( except the AOS_Skyre patch) into one using TES5Edit. When I get around to making a merged patch for my entire load order, I'll check to make sure all the appropriate values are loaded.

 

Next, you are right that I should coc to Whiterun or Riften and do the latency test there. I've never seen any huge problems in Whiterun when my CPU has been overclocked, but Riften is a different story.

 

Lastly, I checked my gpu settings using evga precisionx, and they appear normal: the set target temperature is 79C. I then went back to stock CPU speeds and ran the same tests as the night before. What I saw was a corresponding dip in the max gpu utilization percentage and max temperature. The gpu temperature peaked around 59-60C at CPU@3.4GHz opposed to 66C@4.2. The frame rates were also correspondingly lower by an average of 10. I'm forced to tentatively conclude that the processor is bottlenecking the gpu even at 4.2GHz because of the Skyrim engine. I'm going to take the time to find a higher stable overclock manually and test it again at 4.4 or 4.6 with an optimized cache frequency if I can manage it safely. If that works, then I'll try overclocking the card. However, I suspect that overclocking the card won't help much for Skyrim, since it is so CPU dependent. I'll let you know how all that goes if you're curious. Thanks for your help.

Edited May 2, 2014 by elezraita