Body Mods Causing Performance Drop

[Palerion]

I have thoroughly enjoyed modding skyrim up to to this point, and have made my world rather beautiful whilst maintaining very nice framerate. I run at, for the most part, a constant 60 frames per second. Drops go into the 50's and, in intensive, effects-heavy fights in lush areas, drop into the 40's. The game truly looks amazing, I'm using Project ENB with COT, the necessary texture packs and then some in the texture pack combiner, the good old W.A.T.E.R. mod, some nice LODs, and verdant grass. It's stunning. My game was running faster than I could have imagined with visual fidelity and awe-factor that I only dreamed of.

 

So, satisfied with the environmental appearance, I decided to move on to making the inhabitants of skyrim look better. I started with no more blocky faces, then XCE, detailed bodies, faces, lips, high quality eyes (in this order). I started up skyrim and had some frustrating framerate and stuttering. I'd sit at 60 if the camera was aimed the right way, but turning, no matter where I was, Whiterun, indoors, the tundra region, I would experience hitches and drop into the 30's and even 20's in framerate. So I uninstalled it all, and installed the mods one by one. Once I was finished, the game ran well. Not as well as it used to, but well. Drops to the 40's were more frequent, but it was working. My next step was the Better Males mod (the underwear version; I'm not into the whole naked skyrim deal). I download and install the underwear version and the geonox faces, and BOOM, atrocious framerate and stuttering like before, but WORSE. Much worse. 30, 16, 10, the framerate was terrible overall. Just walking through Whiterun I experienced about 20-30 frames per second average with stutters. So I went to the Better Males page on nexus and found that I hadn't completed the recommended .INI edits. Upon completing the edits, the problem was largely fixed. I even added my UNP females (trying to find a vanilla, lore-friendly, not-sexy undergarment mod for that) and mature skin textures.

 

My issue is that all these body mods still hurt my performance way more than I had expected. I used to get mid-60% GPU load going through the plains outside whiterun (the tundra). Now, I'm getting mid-80's. Just from these mods. Not a person around, and my performance is severely hurt. My framerate is less consistent, wandering around the 50's, dipping into the 40's at times that I would expect it to be doing fine, and going low into the 40's and even into the 30's when I enter those giant camps. It's not stuttery, it's just largely decreased in performance in comparison to my previous experience in the game. I have a feeling this doesn't happen to everyone that installs these body mods. I take off Better Males and leave the UNP, the same issue occurs. It's a ridiculously horrible tradeoff for me, and it's frustrating; obviously if I'm given the choice between bad performance with more beautiful people that I may or may not even see, or awesome performance with vanilla people, I'll choose the awesome performance.

 

An important note: upon removing Better Males after the .INI tweaks had fixed the worst of the problem, my performance remained somewhat sub-par. I ran cache cleaner and the performance went back to the regular, awesome 60 FPS. I think whatever was in that file that made my performance drop was left behind, even after installation.

 

P.P.S: I'm not an expert modder, so if anything I've said makes no sense whatsoever, please tell me :D I appreciate any help you guys can offer.

[Oubliette]

Well, your problem is pretty easily explained. Most landscape beautification mods are more or less texture heavy but mesh light, when installing a bunch of those so long as you're careful you can easily have a beautiful game without too much performance loss.

 

However when you get to player and NPC specific mods you're going to get heavy on textures and meshes, I'm talking up to 4x's vanilla all over. This is a pretty constant drain on your system in any direction that there are NPC's loading, as well as where your character is because they'll be using them too. So when you're wandering in the countryside and you can't see anyone but your fps is still tanking, you'd probably find a bandit or something in that direction if you walked far enough.

 

If all you want is a better clothed look for your NPC's and aren't interested in clothing or hair replacers (again big FPS losses with either) then you can just look for a vanilla compatible texture mod, which should help with your FPS loss.

[Palerion]

Wow... Thanks!

 

I was afraid something was wrong with how I had modded. Usually if I see a mod decrease performance by a notable margin, either the mod warns that it is performance heavy, or I've done something wrong. Good to know it wasn't the latter!

 

On a side-note, do you know any way that I could optimize my game to handle this better? The characters do look quite beautiful. In all the haste of posting this thread, I neglected to post my rig:

 

GPU: GTX 970 4Gb (don't even know if they have a 2Gb, just felt the need to mention it)

CPU: 3570K

Ram: 8 Gigs

Standard 1TB HDD

 

I know there are all sorts of .INI edits that can be awesome for performance, I'm just not sure what, if anything, would help this. I currently use ENBoost and... Some other optimization thing whose name is not coming to me... But anyway it uses occlusion culling.

[Kriiks]

Body models and textures can have very big impact. Even more, if you have mods, what increase NPC amount in cities, additional bandits spawns, more patrols on roads etc. 4k body textures are quite big "fashion" nowdays, but if you have loads of NPC's around you... everyone of them taking up 100-200mb vram, then it starts hurting your game performance. So check your game bodymodels texture size too. Unless you like running around with chainmail bikinis and take pictures with 25 fov, you really dont need so much for normal gameplay. Or just keep 4k as separated option for screenarchery.

And even if your standard body textures aren't so big, if you like to have loads of custom followers around you, some of them have very high resolution textures packed in. Again worth checking.

Running Skyrim from SSD helps too (loading times from disc are way faster). Specially if you mod it to very texture heavy state.

If you really like certain 4k texture and there isn't lower resolution available, you can try DDSopt.

Or you can try semi-automated version SMCO: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13529/? All depends, how much you want to compromise between texture quality vs fps.

And I do not want to say that every 4k texture is bad, I'm using some too, just if you're using too many, it starts taxing your system, so you have to choose wisely and think, is it actually required on certain object or for what purpose.

[Palerion]

Man, things are really screwed up now. I gave up on all the body mods. Removed Better Males, UNP, Mature Skin, and anything that had to do with XCE.

 

The problem is, the performance hit is still there. The way that, last time, a quick run of CCleaner worked like a charm, it didn't this time. I ran that, advanced system care, anything that would clean out the leftovers of any of those mods. I don't know what to do now. I'm still running at about 99% GPU usage with average 50's-40's, dips to 30's. Something's really messed up. I have all ESMs disabled right now except the main DLCs, aMidianborn textures, better dynamic snow, climates of tamriel, verdant, and project optimization. That's like, one fifth of what I was running back when I sat at a strong, beautiful, constant 50-60 FPS at 65% GPU USAGE. And, my VRAM is fine mind you, sitting under 1GB out of my 4GB card currently. Back when it ran at 65% load with better framerate, it loaded up about 2.5GB of VRAM. I have no clue what to do, but it's as if downloading those body mods has ruined my game. I've tried verifying the game cache, too; didn't work. This is extremely frustrating.

[IsharaMeradin]

Are you using the same character run with all these mod changes?

 

Something you will note even with the base game sans mods, the further into the game you go the more performance hit you'll get. Why? As you progress through the game you encounter more and more things that the game has to keep track of and store within your save files. This is why you see so many people complain about how bad their game has gotten around level 50 or so when it was smooth as butter at level 1.

 

Also, if you are using the same character, just because you've disabled mods doesn't mean that they are completely gone. Only true way to clear out a disabled/uninstalled mod is to start a brand new game. Also, disabling is only valid for plugins (ESP/ESM) with or without a BSA. Anything with loose files will never ever be truly disabled without a full uninstallation.

[Palerion]

I went back to an old save and the performance was the same. Created a brand new character; performance was the same. Would deleting local content in steam by any chance eliminate whatever this problem could be? I could swear it's something left behind from one of those body mods.

 

Otherwise, are there any other programs I could use to try and clean up my skyrim? My mind is completely blanking in terms of fixing this.

 

 

EDIT: On a sidenote, it may be worth mentioning that my nexus has been giving me errors when I try to uninstall certain mods, starting with the Better Males mod. Forced me to close out Nexus and gave me trace logs. Not sure if that's of any importance to the issue at hand.

Edited January 31, 2015 by Palerion

[IsharaMeradin]

Give this a try. You'll need to re-install all your mods but you'll be sure that you have nothing left behind lingering from anything you had previously installed and removed.

http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Make_Skyrim_Vanilla_Again

 

After getting it back to "vanilla" might I suggest using either the NMM .60 alpha or Mod Organizer so that you can use the profile features. It makes it easy testing one profile that has no mods against a profile that has a bunch of mods.

[Palerion]

Aw, man, I should have come back sooner, didn't expect such an efficient reply. I already followed someone else's vanilla-zation advice, unfortunately, but it probably did about the same thing. My game is now running vanilla with only about 33% GPU load and ideal FPS. I'll start to slowly add mods and see what happens.

 

I'll be sure to report back whether or not the process works swimmingly or gets completely out of hand. My only other question is, my mods in NMM still show as installed; would there be any error in pressing uninstall, now that I've deleted the .ESMs and such?

[IsharaMeradin]

You could try but NMM might flip out on you.

If you are absolutely 100% sure that you removed everything that NMM put in, you can delete the install info that NMM uses to indicate what has been installed.

 

With NMM 53.2 you are looking for

Nexus Mod Manager > Skyrim > Install Info >

delete everything in this folder.

 

With NMM 60.0 alpha.... Not sure. I only used it briefly to discover that it wasn't yet friendly with making mods and switching profiles at the same time. It is fine for playing with mods and switching profiles tho.