FXAA Injector Dropping Performance Significantly

[kettering]

Not sure what's going on! Without injectors/shader mods, I can run my game on high/ultra settings without any lag at all. I have a number of different mods on currently (4GB, Flora Overhaul, Improved Destruction, Essential Companions, Realistic Water and Crafting Meltdown) and they don't impact performance. If I just install the .ini files, the game runs fine. If I use the actual injectors though, not only does the game take 2-3 minutes to even load, but the FPS slows down to about 17. It's the same FPS in high as in ultra, and only marginally better in medium and low.

 

Computer specs:

 

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Toshiba Satellite P750

Intel® Core i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz

6GB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M (latest drivers)

DirectX 11

 

(I'm not a computer genius so if you need any other info please let me know.)

 

I figure I should definitely be able to run these without difficulty. I've tried most if not all of the performance fixes they've given me, including ini fixes, disabling vsync (it was already disabled), ENB patch, enabling/disabling supersampling/SSAO, changing shadow details and whatnot in the launcher, editing enbpatch.ini (which made it so I couldn't run my game at all), but none of them have worked. Wondering if anyone has any other suggestions for something I might be able to try, or if I'm just SoL for now?

[Tair]

The FXAA mod is a post-process shader, meaning it makes use of (depending on what settings your profile uses) highly-sophisticated and demanding shader effects that are rendered after Skyrim's base graphics. It's basically a bloom on steroids. As such, it has the potential to cause tremendous performance loss.

 

It really depends on how you have FXAA configured. Some settings are more demanding than others.

 

The other mods you mentioned are primarily texture upgrades, and unless you're in a situation where you're really hurting for RAM, those generally aren't going to produce a noticeable impact on your FPS... Though they can impact your loading times.

 

At 2.0 GHz, your'e also already pretty CPU capped for running Skyrim on high settings, as far as I know.

[kettering]

Ahh, ok. I guess it's just my computer ignorance then, combined with the fact that I'm trying to get max performance on a laptop, haha. Thanks for the reply!

[Tair]

No problem. Some of the FXAA profiles are nice, but none of them are really perfect. Your best bet for ramping up visual quality with minimal performance loss is to keep upgrading the textures, as you've been doing.

 

I would suggest doing incremental backups of your Data folder... In the unlikely event that you find some textures actually give you a negative performance hit, you can easily revert. Or just use the Nexus Mod Manager, I guess.

[MorwynKelm]

The specs you list aren't detailed enough to say for certain but here's what I can see; your CPU isn't the issue, it's your video card. In fact, that you can play it at all is due largely to your CPU. The 540 is going to be a major bottleneck and the lag you're having is the result of texture data and limited threads having to swap data around. Be glad you can run it as high as you do on your laptop. As a base reference, consider what I use to run heavily tweaked ultra;

 

Intel QX9650 @ 4.0Ghz

16GB DDR3 @ 1600Mhz (FSB 400Mhz)

Dual HD6970's for QuadFire for a total of 4GB of DDR5.

 

I run a raid, 4x HD's and 2x SSD's.

 

My machine eats anything and I expect it to. My brand new Gateway laptop? It's a great performer (much like yours) but it's not for high end gaming.

[Zakafeinx]

u can play skyrim on medium/high just fine with a 540m. Any mod that replaces the d3d9.dll will mess up optimus, making ur laptop use the intel hd card instead. That's why the poor performance. No fix as of yet it seems...

[MShoap13]

Go in your BIOS and disable the Intel HD graphics.

 

You may still see a slight performance hit on a 540M however.