Optimizing Skyrim & Improving Stability

[Prenihility]

So, i've always known about Tweakguides, and used that guide always for Oblivion and Fallout 3. I did notice for Skyrim it had moved to Nvidia's website. I want to optimize things so Skyrim is running with as much mathematical perfection as possible. I'm a little irritated that these so-called "Tweaks" are really just very precise changes to game settings, rather than the very general ones that you find in the in-game options. INI tweaking seems to be just that, at least when it comes to visuals. For loading, i suppose it isn't. I'm getting some poor performance in random areas. Such as the mine you have to go into for the Boethiah's Calling quest. FPS was on the low side in that particular section. Not sure why. And regardless of the mods i have installed, it really doesn't make sense on paper, given my hardware. I didn't extensively mod the game's visuals. Though it does look great. It's not like i'm running an ENB; which itself is still a poorly optimized, inefficient visual enhancement, hands down.

I think that my Skyrim installation has become instable. Though not to an extreme extent. For example, when going through the first section of the caves in Dawnguard where you have to find the Moth Priest knife, the lighting would change from dark to light instantly, flickering. And my game crashes almost guaranteed if i have loaded a save and try to load another save from within the game. It might take a couple of load attempts to get it to crash.

 

What can i do to fine-tune and further finesse my performance? I really feel i'm not getting as much performance as i should be getting, even with my mods.

 

 

[ironbender800]

things i do to make skyrim run as smoothly as possible.

 

1. optimize windows which means keeping startup and background programs to a minimum. As well as making sure its malware free.

 

2. Drivers and windows updates up to date. Guess would go along with optimizing windows.

 

3. As far as INI edits go a lot do more harm than good. Stick with the ones needed for certain mods to work as intended as well as the ones in the STEP guides.

 

4. Follow the STEP guides for at the very least skyrim setup along with all the needed tools. Like Mod organizer, LOOT, etc.

 

5. Carefully choose mods. Dont just install anything that looks cool. Strongly recommend STEP guides as a baseline. Keep conflicts and compatibility in mind.

 

Also keep in mind skyrim is running on an ancient engine and crashes and bugs will still happen even with a near perfect setup. Also even with the latest and greatest hardware performance still might not be that great if you load up with a ton of mods again due to engine limitations.

 

Good example is Oblivion. I have a 970 and 3570k hardware well past oblivions time and very solid by todays standards. But with ENB and several other graphical mods even oblivion a game thats 10 years old can bring my system to 30-40fps.

 

I personally do not see the need for 400 mods but i know people do it.

[Signette]

Sounds like GPU artifacts which is real bad... If you'd post your specs, that would be easier to tell about general optimization path.

[Prenihility]

Sounds like GPU artifacts which is real bad... If you'd post your specs, that would be easier to tell about general optimization path.

 

Hmm, that's usually a heat-related issue. Could be drivers, but i've never seen any problem like this ever before. Only in Skyrim. Only in that one area. Oh, and the reflections on water jitter about when i'm moving and looking at large bodies of water.

 

I'm running a an EVGA GTX 960 SSC with a Phantom 820. The thing idles with no fans at under 30 degrees celsius. Heat would be a crazy assumption. Not sure what's affecting reflections.

[Perraine]

Skyrim's optimization sucks! It's that simple, It has more holes and leaks in the memory cache than a Kardashian has handbags.

 

I'd recommend getting rid of anything with more than a 2K texture, (or even anything above 1K really) or downscale the textures manually (there is also a handy tool here on the Nexus for Optimizing Skyrim's Textures) because unless you spend 7 hrs a day taking closeup screen shots,(and not actually, you know, playing the game) they are completely totally and unarguably pointless, and they will kill your FPS and cause Skyrim to grind to a halt and crash.

 

Also check what, if any armor/clothing/item mods you may be running, as some modders have absolutely no idea what the "optimize" function is in 3D modelling programs, and as a consequence some meshes on the Nexus have more vertices and triangles than the entire rest of the meshes in game combined! These can take up HUGE amounts of memory and GPU power to render, for absolutely no reason.

 

If using an ENB, be very careful which one you pick, and if it doesn't say so in the description, check in the comments and see if there are any posts about which version of ENB it was made with, as they are not always interchangeable or forwards/backwards compatible, so some ENB Presets will screw up royally on later versions of the ENB Binaries.

[Shivala]

I like the name STEP... I would suggest modding step by step. Usually I start a play and mod it too my liking, and *then* start playing. For testing I go to difficult places for mods, like entering Dragonsreach, Solitude with a lot of NPCs and so on.

[vortexhlp]

EDIT: I have just found a guide that is very helpful and probably what I used (or something like I used) from back then. It contains advanced tweaks that should really boost the way windows / skyrim works. Here's the link: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32363/?

 

EDIT 2: I did the optimizations suggested in the article linked and I'm getting a smooth experience! Totally 60fps with the only exception that sometimes it jitters on those random moments (rare but it happens). Yay, so the biggest key was to unlock the other processors and change the timing. Another thing I noticed was that on boot, I had my ASUS A.I. set to power saver rather than performance, this helped a lot but doing the other things made it perfect. :D

 

 

I just started playing again yesterday... and by playing I mean installing mods. Oddly enough I'm hitting performance problems and am using less mods than before on a better setup.

 

I've got less than 100 mods installed, figured I wouldn't be playing for 300hrs+ again on this build so there's no need to go overkill. Before I had closer to 300 mods. Most of my mods are related to new equipment.

 

The visual mods I installed aren't 4K (they are 2K), but I used your typical tuning like LOOT, and cleaned up what was necessary. There are no particle ehancement mods either.

 

I don't have script-heavy mods like that mining mod, I think I only have less than 10 that uses any kind of scripts.

 

Since my last build I have an 8-core CPU running at about 37ghz at full capacity (not overclock) versus the core2duo that I had long ago and upgraded the motherboard to a gaming one with 8gb of speedy ram.

 

Yet for some reason I'm not getting the 60fps like I used to (it wasn't a constant, there were slow-downs usually in homes but it wasn't as it is today).

 

I'm not sure why that may be... I know last time I combined mods together and did something to tweak the memory and all that but still.. My videocard is overkill for what I'm running and of course my PC is well optimized on windows 7 64bit. I can't understand why it would be jittery, and I use LESS visually intensive mods than before. I know there's a guide I used a while back to really tune up the performance but can't seem to find it. The only thing I can think of is the ENB that I'm using but I tried a few different ones and they are pretty shitty in framerate too.

 

Any suggestions beyond the basics? Skyrim is an odd thing... lol I'll gladly use a different ENB if you know of one that looks good but doesn't kill the living daylights out of the framerate.

Edited May 10, 2016 by vortexhlp

[Shivala]

Any suggestions beyond the basics? Skyrim is an odd thing... lol I'll gladly use a different ENB if you know of one that looks good but doesn't kill the living daylights out of the framerate.

 

Is there a difference in jittering between 3rd person and first person? I once had my mouse driver create the jitter. Was a tough one to fix as well.

[Prenihility]

Well, I'm back and I'm looking to improve stability. Or at the very least, stop my crashes. Interestingly, I have gone through the entire Vahlok tomb with Tharstan without any crashes. And afterward, it crashed when trying to open the Map. And after loading up the game again, I tried opening the Journal maybe after 20 minutes of gameplay and it crashed on me. I have BOSS installed. I used it for Oblivion, and when I open the GUI I can switch between Fallout 3 and Oblivion. but Skyrim is unfortunately not on the list. Hmm... neither is New Vegas, but anyway, yeah - Skyrim.