Another stutter/lag thread.

[UgTheViking]

Hey all - I am getting the dreaded lag/stutter issue that many talk of. However I am getting it only on my character. They move very choppy. Everything else is running smooth. It doesnt seem to matter if I run the game on low, medium or high or if I run 2 mods or 20. In the ini. files I have shut off godrays and set ipresentinterval from 1 to 0. Still makes no difference. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

My system: AMD-4100 quad core, 8 GB, 64 Bit

[UgTheViking]

Ok, am still getting lag/stutter, however now effects the whole game. You can see it in the smoke, waving flags, etc.

I tried running it in windowed, borderless mode and it runs fantastic....for about 10 minutes, and then starts the little skip, lag again.

I haven't been able to find any suggestions to this other than the ones I have mentioned.

Any clue here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Edited November 8, 2016 by UgTheViking

[JimmyRJump]

Could be a buffering issue. What sort of GPU are you using (how much RAM does it have)?

 

Having a look at ENBoost never hurts. The latter lets you use system RAM as Video RAM in fooling the game to think the former is actually part of the latter. I'm still using it despite having 16GB of system RAM and having meanwhile gotten an 8GB GPU. Also check ShadowBoost, but be advised that one makes shadow behave in a peculiar fashion in that the game doesn't load shadows that are further away and loads the lot as you get closer, giving some strange effects. Personally, I can live with it.

 

Although it has ameliorated with more recent updates, FO4 still has enormous V-RAM spikes, going over 10GB of use in small bursts. To counter that, also have a look at Hein84's Vivid mods. They make the game look way better and at the same time smooth-out gameplay because the textures load better.

[UgTheViking]

Hey there- Thank you for the reply. My total available graphics memory is 4864 mb, Win 10, 64 bit, 8 GB.

My shadow settings are on low. I am running all of Hein84's vivid mods. After 2 days of fighting with ENBoost (due to my own ignorance) I have it installed and seems to be running correctly. I have tweaked the ini settings as suggested. My game is running smoother but still gets that little damn stutter after a few minutes.......???

It seems to happen after I talk to someone but I have not confirmed that 100 percent.

Edit: Nope. Makes no difference if I talk to anyone or not.

Edited November 9, 2016 by UgTheViking

[UgTheViking]

Ok, am going to beat a dead horse a few times here just out of frustration. I have tweaked the ini files a 100 different ways, with/without ipresentinterval, bignoresmoothness, windowed/borderless, etc. I have tweaked the ENBoost ini file a 100 different ways. I have started a new game. I have run settings on low/med/high. I have updated drivers. I have done anything I could find on the subject.....and still, get the damn little stutter lag .....and it always starts after about 5 minutes of the game running smooth, so I know how the game should and can run.....Friggen frustrating.....enough to drive a person back to playing Skyrim, except you know how hard it is to make Power Armor from fur hides?

[UgTheViking]

Hmm.....This is prolly no longer a FO4 Technical issue, but I am rather baffled. I hadn't played Skyrim in a month or so ,since I was screwing around with FO4, I went back tonight to play around.....and I'll be damned...it is giving the same damn stutter/lag as FO4, in the same manner. Runs great a few minutes, then *bam* Skyrim has never given me this problem before.....I have deleted cookies on my comp, run defrag, etc. The only thing I can even remotely think of that connects the two games , is Windows 10 had an update somewhere in those 30 days ......Could that possibly be the problem?

[BipolarOne]

Well I've been legacy'ing characters by ~player.getav experience && ~player.modav experience # just to move the same basic roleplay characters to different builds of the game, which now is mostly from changing the load order or merging more mods. Batch files do the rest of it which is mostly just crafting material. There is a lot of stuff that gets lost, though I noticed this last time upon using the same clean savegame from a backup copy, that the game ran smoother.

 

Going with that we used a mipmap skip of 2, which is similar to a medium texture size setting, though in the configurator which increases texture streaming distances, which appears to grab the max size texture map for everything nearby anyway. So this texture streamer part of the .exe is really only ever dealing with whatever mipmap texture size it needs based on the other distance slider settings and what is loaded (which is roughly set at 30% or below).

 

Nvidia experience had tweek recommendations for that, but I tend to use the 500 series base for that +50% if it will run it because it was the minimum requirement of the game plus Nvidia's testing. The only problem with that is the combat range for potential target acquisition, hence the +50% but roughly basing the other sliders besides actors with that, because it's a medium powered gaming rig and gameplay becomes more important than however scenic distant worldspace becomes with mods/tweeks/ENB.

 

Though also from that we were able to reduce texture filtering from HQ 8X to HQ 4X, but still with the game's TAA +FXAA +ENB however the amount of VRAM ENB is allowed to use was reduced from a setting to allow some RAM for windows to much tighter as a way to keep graphics outside of RAM an virtual RAM as much as possible.

 

After a large amount of testing with various shadow settings we ended up using a 4000 draw distance and 4000 DIR overrided by a 250 shadow LOD setting to glitch it out into what we would call a player usable area of HQ shadows as a way to bypass FO4's nice but kind of bulls*** optimized non-baked shadow hardcoding (for lack of a better word) which plays on Sun Update 0.2500 && Sun Timescale 0.1250 to keep it from flashing or glitching while allowing Ultra Volumetric Lighting & Godrays (though this is only possible by a batch file for Ultra godray performance on Nvidia) and actually doesn't add that much to a scene, but we use it.

 

There were mods for stutter, but in my testing it didn't make a bigger difference than using better settings/config for the original program and/or ENB. IMO it's all just different paths to the same thing which by and large depends on the computer system. However the save game did factor into it, as I've seen games based on the same backup character save much later fall into stuttering & micro-stuttering, though the version of the game and the mods factor into that a bit.

 

In a month or so I'll end up updating the game, but from un-installing an cleaning up the drive. Getting updated mods in a better order and merged together as it's installed as a way to get a better build of the game. Though me saying that, I would also plan an amount of time to test the vanilla game +DLC where TOP + FAR or a composite support texture optimization mod (as in dealing more with non-defuse maps) if possible. This way it's in the build an the testing is there to prove the performance of the game, add ENB to that, an continue, with the lot of it to be laid as groundwork to install another 80Gb build of FO4 with 400 mods (Because it's a s*** game on PC without it IMO) Then that maybe leading to next year when we can buy a better XBO/PS4 to run some certified games for a change, but possibly a more refined FO4 if you will.

[UgTheViking]

Thank you very much for the reply and all the info. I even understood....er....some of it. At this point I'm not even sure what the core of the damn problem is. Both FO4 and Skyrim were working fine and then after Windows 10 updates (Which I cant uninstall or go back to an earlier restore date) neither are playable. I even switched video cards from AMD to a Nvidia GE Force and the results were even worse so I switched back.

I am at a loss here.....so, suppose I have to wait for another update or for someone to make a miracle fix.

Anyway, thank you again.

Play on.......until an update or something. Heh.

[BipolarOne]

Well, I did see some stutter related to older mods that included a large amount of required identical to master records, and some mods replacing vanilla textures and/or large changes to an area, that either caused stutter or possibly caused stutter (micro stutter too). There was another player that attributed FO4 & Skyrim SE stutter to windows 10. If it was me I would do a clean install build. Then develop a character that you liked or a bunch of them. These savegames might stutter or not, but would serve as a backkup savegame you kept in storage somewhere. Start a bunch of new games an back it all up after testing.

 

Then mod the S*** out of the game. Use those backup savegames to start it (but you know get the characters outside of Vault 111 & maybe even talk to Codsworth that first time, or not I use a back up save from just before taking the vault 111 elevator) Once the game is modded, load it up, an launch that save over and over in tests for stutter. The working area I use for this is Vault 111 settlement or Sanctuary pretty much, but that could be changed to Vault 98 settlement or Vault 88, hell or Diamond City plus any other settlement I wanted to legacy start in @ level 176. You know, move it around.

 

One fella dropped his settings to really low in order to get a steady 60 FPS, and another fella said that some video cards struggle with the game. This is a medium powered rig so mainly to get it to run smooth I optimize the settings/configs and stay away from mods that cause stutter. That being said it's an older version of the game (I have 4-5 Steam created backup install discs in various versions of FO4) I wanted a final version or what to me equated as a post Nukaworld patch version (didn't much care which or what) which ended up being 1.7.15.0 and a matching F4SE.

 

It could be temporary, you know, and rectify itself. In that case "I wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about, again". At any rate my experience with it was pretty bad near launch, I eventually ran it in a custom framerate (and alt tab'ed a lot), which eventually burned up an old video card for other reasons. It never hurts to have an extra video card laying around for diagnostic purposes. I switched from PNY budget cards because I had the extra money to try EVGA which burned out too soon, at which point I switched to ASUS video cards to match the MOBO (and because ASUS has been making that other stuff for long enough now to suit me).

 

So get a good brand at a good price. Also some issues are particular to Nvida or ATI/AMD tech, so smart offices will keep a PC that has both, also consoles are built with ATI/AMD tech. I don't have a preference, I have a budget for my gaming hobby, and mature mental controlled disciplines to insure it remains a healthy hobby. Which means I took time to allow myself to be able to ignore things or walk away from games at times. Pretty much the old standard was a 60 series Ti on Nvidia, but that going into cards with at least 3Gb of Vram from game benchmarks on Skyrim, BF4, COD, and so on to run modern games in 1080p basically.

 

So I mean I don't side with the gamers opting into 70 or 80 series and/or i7 for gaming on the intel side (because that stuff is for encoding and streaming) MOBO either, the extra money is spent on SSD and MOBO with PCI-E 2.0 & SATA III interfaces for the SSD. Stay medium powered an cheaper (because it will burn up anyway) Then you can buy XBO/PS4 if you wanted certified games, or better things IMO. That might change if I opted into 4k or some other activity that required it, you know in a spectacular explosion of budget.

[damanding]

It sounds pretty similar to what this user described and I'm not sure they ever found a solution: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/4967890-does-anyone-have-any-advice-for-dealing-with-the-bethesda-stutter/