Very Strange Frame Rate issues.

[garbonshio]

Hey!

 

thanks in advance for checking out my post and double thanks for helping me out.

 

So, I'm about 15 hours into my play through. far enough that i don't want to restart everything. When i initially began my play through, i consistently got 30-60 frames per second. lower in population centers like whiterun, and peaks of 60 in internal cells and dungeons.

 

in the last hour of play or so, though, I've noticed some strange happening with my frame rate. regardless of my location (out and about in skyrim, or in any dungeon or interior cell), my frame rate usually starts between 30 and 40 (again, high in interior cells, low in external cells), and slowly drops over about 15-20 minutes or so to between 5 and 15 frames.

 

This is especially frustrating because frame rates stay high just long enough for me to get into the game, but then slowly degrade to unplayable levels, regardless of whether i restart the game or reload a save, or reload a cell.

 

I have looked into save game bloat as a cause, but i don't think thats the issue. my first save was 10 mb. after a couple hours of play it went up to 15, and has stayed at 15 since.

 

Ive tried uninstalling texture replacers and turning down my graphics quality, but that hasn't helped either.

 

anyway, if anyone knows what this might be or how to fix it, please, please let me know. I really do appreciate any help you might be able to give.

[Lord Garon]

Not sure what game issue could cause that. I might suspect a temperature issue. Does the FPS return to normal if the computer is off or idle for a while?

 

An overheating device might throttle clocks/whatever to reduce system temps. The obvious guesses would be the CPU or GPU. You could check the temps and clock speeds as your FPS goes down to see if there is a temperature correlation. I don't have any temp monitors, except for BIOS, but CPU-Z and GPU-Z (Google them) will show you fan speeds, voltages, and clock speeds.

 

Other than that, have you run a malware scan recently?

Edited August 9, 2014 by Lord Garon

[garbonshio]

Not sure what game issue could cause that. I might suspect a temperature issue. Does the FPS return to normal if the computer is off or idle for a while?

 

An overheating device might throttle clocks/whatever to reduce system temps. The obvious guesses would be the CPU or GPU. You could check the temps and clock speeds as your FPS goes down to see if there is a temperature correlation. I don't have any temp monitors, except for BIOS, but CPU-Z and GPU-Z (Google them) will show you fan speeds, voltages, and clock speeds.

 

Other than that, have you run a malware scan recently?

 

I can tell you its certainly not an issue with temperature.

 

if i load up an old save game without closing the program, while I'm getting low frame rates, i get high frame rates (50+) in the old save. but if i go back to the newer saves, the issue persists. my cpu is at 7% during the times i have this issue, and my ram is at 42%.

 

Ill try a malware scan right now and get back to you in a few minutes. I use avast.

Edited August 9, 2014 by garbonshio

[garbonshio]

 

Not sure what game issue could cause that. I might suspect a temperature issue. Does the FPS return to normal if the computer is off or idle for a while?

 

An overheating device might throttle clocks/whatever to reduce system temps. The obvious guesses would be the CPU or GPU. You could check the temps and clock speeds as your FPS goes down to see if there is a temperature correlation. I don't have any temp monitors, except for BIOS, but CPU-Z and GPU-Z (Google them) will show you fan speeds, voltages, and clock speeds.

 

Other than that, have you run a malware scan recently?

 

I can tell you its certainly not an issue with temperature.

 

if i load up an old save game without closing the program, while I'm getting low frame rates, i get high frame rates (50+) in the old save. but if i go back to the newer saves, the issue persists. my cpu is at 7% during the times i have this issue, and my ram is at 42%.

 

Ill try a malware scan right now and get back to you in a few minutes. I use avast.

 

I've run the scan and my comp is super squeaky clean.

 

I did also look into gpu overheating issues, and I believe its possible i may have been wrong when i said that couldn't be the problem.

 

The gpu does get very hot while playing, the fans speed up, and then when my fps bottoms out, the fans ease up a bit and the temperature goes down. Im not sure why I'm suddenly having this issue, as I've never had it before. Is my Graphics card kicking the bucket? or a bottle neck maybe?

[Lord Garon]

WHOOPS, ninja'd...

 

Okay, the GPU will run hotter the harder it's pushed, so its not surprising a lower FPS will lower temps. The question is whether the card will/can throttle itself (reduce internal clocks) when too hot. The reduced clocks will lower processing speed and FPS.

 

Can you monitor the clocks as you play, ie, GPU-Z or something like that? Or get some actual temps?

 

EDIT: I'm not familiar with GPU monitoring software, but there are free utility programs out there that can give temps (I believe). I would google around for a utility for your card that might display temps.

 

EDIT2: This may NOT be your problem if the heat issue is not causing reduced performance. GPU's get hot. You could just be still and stare at the ground a while to see if frame rate inches back up.

Edited August 9, 2014 by Lord Garon

[garbonshio]

Ill give it a try. i don't have gpu-z, but i have evga precision X. I can alt-tab out of skyrim to look at gpu temps and so far i haven't seen temperatures above 60 Celsius.

 

new thing: lots of meshes and textures in walls and player clothing are no longer loading in.

 

also, the issues I've been having are now present in older saves, where they weren't before. I have no idea what the hell is going on with my computer or my game, and i have no idea why this issue has propped up in the last hour of gameplay.

Edited August 9, 2014 by garbonshio

[Lord Garon]

Alrighty. Its not gonna die at 60C. What video card and how much vram do you have?

 

If your video card runs out of vram, from HD textures, high uGrids, etc, it will swap out to system ram and usually virtual (paged) memory. This will slow down your card, can cause TEXTURES NOT TO LOAD, and usually causes stutters in gameplay. You can test that by going to an indoor location, which should bring your texture load down and FPS back up. Go back outside and see if you get the decreasing FPS again. Changing Texture Quality to LOW and turning off AA on the Launcher screen will also reduce texture vram loads, for testing.

Edited August 9, 2014 by Lord Garon

[garbonshio]

i have 8 gigs of ram. Ive actually turned off 80% of my high res textures for this play through. the game is actually almost vanilla in appearance.

 

I've experienced my issues with textures not loading and frame rate drop both indoors and outdoors. and if this was a memory issue, why is this just happening now?

 

Here are my specs:

 

geforce gtx 770

amd fx 6 core

8 gb ram

auus msa99x evo r2.0 mobo

Edited August 9, 2014 by garbonshio

[Lord Garon]

Well, we're trying to figure out why its happening. :thumbsup:

 

The memory I'm talking about, vram, is the amount of memory on your gtx 770. I believe the standard 770 has 2GB of vram, which can easily be filled with only one HD texture pack and a few hi res mods like SMIM or SFO.

 

A really good test at this point would be lowering your Texture Quality to LOW. That will cause Skyrim to render textures using a lower res mip map of all texture files and reduce your vram load by, essentially, half. That "should" eliminate a "full vram" issue and lead us in the right direction.

 

Can you give LOW quality a shot and see if it improves your symptoms? BTW, I'll be here for another 30 minutes or so, if you want to keep on with this.

 

EDIT: Do you run an ENB?

Edited August 9, 2014 by Lord Garon

[garbonshio]

Well, we're trying to figure out why its happening. :thumbsup:

 

The memory I'm talking about, vram, is the amount of memory on your gtx 770. I believe the standard 770 has 2GB of vram, which can easily be filled with only one HD texture pack and a few hi res mods like SMIM or SFO.

 

A really good test at this point would be lowering your Texture Quality to LOW. That will cause Skyrim to render textures using a lower res mip map of all texture files and reduce your vram load by, essentially, half. That "should" eliminate a "full vram" issue and lead us in the right direction.

 

Can you give LOW quality a shot and see if it improves your symptoms? BTW, I'll be here for another 30 minutes or so, if you want to keep on with this.

 

EDIT: Do you run an ENB?

Hello! i had to hit the hay last night. work in the morning. If you're still around and still interested in helping out, i did try your suggestions.

 

I lowered skyrim to the lowest possible settings on everything. the issues still persisted. is it possible that its a scripting issue in the game?

 

yes, i do run an enb. real vision. I've never had issues with it though.

 

i did notice a gradual increase to the number of ctd's i got as i played through the game. i used to get them once an hour. thats an acceptable amount for me. but as i got closer to when i started experiencing this issue, it gradually increased to once every half hour or so. I don't know if that has anything to do with anything.

 

I run frostfall. i noticed when the frame rate drops low enough, i get a message saying my scrips are updating at 26 seconds.

 

i also did use Tes5edit for the first time on this install of skyrim.

 

i left skyrim running for an hour or so, staring at a wall. The frame rate dropped all the way down to 2. When i open menu's the frame rate immediately shoots up to 60, but when i close them they drop way low again.

 

again, thanks so much for your help.

Edited August 9, 2014 by garbonshio