Trees not swaying on ATI cards?

[wickham]

I installed this mod: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=48 . After first starting the game with the fix applied I noticed that the trees were swaying. Prior to applying the fix only grass and shrubs were swaying in the wind, while the trees remained stiff, and I wasn't aware that trees were supposed to sway as well.

 

Since the above mod has Skyrim detect ATI boards as NVIDIA boards, I was wondering whether there are other ATI users out there that have stiff trees in vanilla Skyrim. So far, I haven't been able to get the trees to animate when the board is detected as ATI, regardless of the settings used. BTW, I have a Sapphire 4850, 512 mb, the latest 11.10 driver, and running Win 7 64 bit.

 

 

EDIT: After some thorough testing I got to the bottom of it. Apparently it's a memory saving feature. I don't know if it's ATI or NVIDIA specific, but I'm guessing it works very much alike regardless of graphics board.

 

I got the settings to a point where if I bumped up shadow detail, distant object detail, actor fade or object fade (everything else being maxed out through skyrim launcher options) the tree animations would either become a slideshow (the anims, NOT the framerate) or stop completely. But if I bumped object fade for example and dialed down other settings the anims would work again. More so, on certain combinations of settings the tree animations would work when looking at empty mountain sides and map edges, then become jerky and eventually stop as I turned towards settlements. The tree anims also stop when the tree is not in the field of view, so for example if you're standing in the shadow of a tree, looking towards the tree, you see the anim, then when you turn your back on the tree and look at its shadow, you will see the anim stop eventually. It stops immediately if you're past a certain distance from the tree, but if you turn again towards the tree the tree animation resumes.

 

So it's clearly a case of the engine killing certain processes to maintain others. I hope this gets fixed somehow, because I hate seeing all the trees freeze up whenever there's a little more stuff going on than usual on screen. It's also a very poor design decision, as far as I'm concerned.

Edited November 12, 2011 by wickham

[wickham]

Bump for found solution.

[rluto77]

I have also noticed this and it is truly maddening.

 

Please, someone find a solution.

[sertopico]

I own a GTX470 on a [email protected] and 4GB of RAM and I'm suffering the same issue... I think the tree branches and leaves animations, as well as other features such as shadows, are calculated by the CPU, so, when there is a complex scene to draw, the game cuts off tree animations to spare resources... But it's very ugly to see... Sometimes trees are moving well, other times swaying becomes choppy and slow-mo, even if the game is running with a good framerate... It all depends from the complexity of the scene, in fact the swaying changes if you change the camera angulation... I hope they'll fix this very annoying bug, and that they'll use GPU a little bit more... This game is too much CPU dependent... :(

[bluebeach1]

Bump for found solution.

 

Trees animated will stuttering if FPS drop below 30 , and below 25 it'll stop completely .

Only solution rightnow is change the setting so FPS can't drop below 30 :) .

 

Other than that i don't know . Hope someone find a way to fix it .

Edited December 16, 2011 by bluebeach1

[danger77mouse]

Thanks for digging into this a bit further as I have been trying everything now for a good balance, but no matter what it's hard to determine the best settings in SkyrimPrefs.ini to obtain really nice shadows, HD textures, good draw distance with actually keeping a good fps on swaying branches! Went bare bones just to try to get everything working. Originally thought it was a mod creating this problem. When in reality it appears to be how the game is coded. A severe fix is needed for this, at least some clear setting adjustments.

[OLtos]

Hi,

 

I spent a couple of weeks, real time, galloping along the East West Road out of Riften. It's a beautiful place but those trees simply would not sway correctly. Either they would not sway at all, or they would sway for a while then quit, and at times they would go into a stop action movement that was truly annoying.

 

I installed FRAPS to check my frame rate. And true enough at a certain FPS, for me slightly above 26 FPS, those tree animations choke out. I believe the ini file calls them "LeafAnimation". So I messed with my settings trying to get my FPS up. Succeeded in doing so, but that did not solve the entire problem. I did get the trees to sway for a longer period of time, but after a few minutes they would always choke out and die.

 

I began to suspect some kind of memory leak, but that was not right. So my guess was that something was filling up and when it got full things quit working. On a lark every time the trees stopped I ran "PCB" (PurgeCellBuffer) from the console. That would get them moving again, but never for long. So then, I tried this command in the Skyrim.ini file

 

bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=1

 

to turn on a feature where skyrim would automatically "try" to purge the cell buffer. But,... this command works on an algorithm that only clears out stuff you are not using. It prolonged the amount of time my trees would sway, but after a while they would still choke out and die.

 

Then I had an epiphany. It now appeared that the choke point was this "cell buffer". Well that has been around in the elder scrolls ini files since god drew up the spec for dirt, way back when you didn't have gigabytes worth of memory on your system and video card: back when a fast computer was a Pentium II. Maybe, I thought, I had enough system resources that I didn't need to buffer anything. So I went to the SKYRIM.INI file and set this command to 0

 

uExterior Cell Buffer=0

 

0 apparently turns off cell buffering entirely. It worked. My tress no longer stop animating unless my FPS drops below 28 FPS, which with a four year old video card happens from time to time.

 

I have the following system. This is probably not the weakest system for which this solution will work.

------------------

System Information

------------------

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.120503-2030)

Language: English (Regional Setting: English)

System Manufacturer: Dell Inc.

System Model: Studio XPS 7100

BIOS: Default System BIOS

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1035T Processor (6 CPUs), ~2.6GHz

Memory: 6144MB RAM

Available OS Memory: 6144MB RAM

Page File: 2738MB used, 9546MB available (Note: I keep all my virtual memory on a dedicated partition)

 

 

---------------

Display Devices

---------------

Card name: ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series

Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Chip type: ATI display adapter (0x9442)

DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)

Display Memory: 3318 MB

Dedicated Memory: 503 MB

Shared Memory: 2815 MB

Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Monitor Name: Acer E211H

Monitor Model: Acer E211H

Monitor Id: ACR0101

[Deleted4169753User]

It's completely dependent on memory resources available. I had a GTX 480 with high resolution textures installed and a custom ENB. In 1st person, if I look at the tree dead on the branches don't animate, but all the other trees at the corner of the camera, or I should say trees that are not in focus animate properly. If I completely turn off ENB with F12 the game engine allows the tree's branches to animate properly. It's weird. Try it. I've since upgraded to a GTX 680 with high resolution textures installed and a high-quality ENB with SSAO and trees animate properly. So I'm assuming the more video memory available the less the game engine will sacrifice effects for a higher FPS.

[xoen]

sorry for asking, but swaying is using cpu, or gpu power?

trouble is more visible with vurts mods, and it is ennerving(nv card here).

it is hard to agree that free vid mem is responsible, if swaying is counted on cpu, isn't it?

well..it it as hard as believing, that swaying is counted with physix(just imagine such scenario when BRANCHES have its own weight and gpu counts all the scene...sigh).

of course, it will be like this in c.a. 20 yrs..i hope so.

sorry for slight OT, but as gamer for 26 yrs, i still see same issues, lack of technical progress, and rising prices for nothing.

 

ok, back on topic:

anyway, swaying problem looks like swaying PRIORITY is set too low, whatever it runs on, so lack of power=jerky sway or lack of sway at all, i wonder, if such priorities may be affected with some function in .cfgs(notice that multithreaded trees set to 1/0 is not changing situation...oh multithreading, so it is counted on CPU)...

 

btw is there someone, that remember morrowind with hardware truform turned ON?

TEN YRS ago(or so)? i had such gfx card, it was truly something...with dx8;

hehhh..let's talk about dx11 FEATURE named tesselation...

 

sigh.

Edited July 12, 2012 by xoen

[hideaki411]

my trees won't move on mine either. ati sucks. now nvidia upgrade i want.