Fallout 4 - pre-beta vs beta performance for larger save file(s). Is it just me?

[Vulon]

Up until a few days ago, I had been playing a completely vanilla playthrough of the game clocked at over 100 hours. I then decided to try out a couple of mods; nothing major. Just a couple of clothing/armor retextures and standalone variants. I opted out of the latest Steam beta build and reverted back to pre-beta since the beta launchers actively disable plugins, and ever since, I've noticed some interesting changes to stability and performance.

 

I double-checked to ensure that my .ini settings were the same for both beta and pre-beta builds after first noticing that my framerate was, for the first time, exceeding 60fps by a very small margin in certain locations, yet prone to stuttering and slowdown in other locations that hadn't been problematic in the pre-beta builds. Since the frames weren't going above and beyond 60 by a huge margin, I decided to leave my frames uncapped (I hadn't bothered to cap them at 60 prior to this because I normally hit around 45-50fps) for a time, but capped them after experiencing a number of physics and animation glitches to see what sort of difference it would make.

 

I also began experiencing texture pop-in on a more frequent basis. I'd heard others complain about this issue, but had only experienced it perhaps three times in total before reverting to the pre-beta build. During my last session alone I experienced this in four different interior cells; the longest instance took about 10 seconds to properly load the texture.

 

By far the most irritating issue, however, is a sudden, dramatic increase in load times. In the pre-beta build, the longest load times I had to sit through were around 20-30 seconds. Now it's about a minute on average when fast travelling from just about any given location to another. To be fair, I'm not entirely sure whether this is because I reverted back to the previous build or because my save file is simply getting bloated (it's currently 12.5mb). I began focusing much more on building up my settlements more extensively and establishing trade routes after reverting to the pre-beta build, and it's possible that this is another factor in the overall dip in performance.

 

I've also experienced two infinite load screens, one CTD, and a number of visual glitches -- wonky power armor enter/exit animations, weird stuff involving settlers, one instance in which the game's color scheme was locked into recon mode after I sniped an enemy from a distance -- since reverting. Despite some performance hiccups in the beta builds, it was actually the smoothest early build of a Bethesda release that I'd ever played. I experienced about six random CTDs and very few bugs in over 100 hours up until this point, and two of those CTDs I know were my own fault, since I was tinkering around with the console rather haphazardly.

 

TL;DR - Has anyone else who played with the beta updates installed (and accumulated save file(s) roughly 10mb or larger) before reverting back to pre-beta noticed any major differences in game stability and load times?