Newly developed Lag Spikes with 980Ti

[Markley454]

As the title explains, I've recently come across a bad issue where my game will run between 50 and 60fps, but every few seconds, I'm getting really bad lag lasting anywhere between a second to half a minute.
Everytime it does so, my MSI GeForce GTX 980Ti 6G sounds like it stops. In MSI Afterburner, I can see that every time it lags, the graphs reflect it with drops in Core Clock and Power.

The GPU never goes above 71 Degrees Celsius, so I don't believe it's throttling.

I do have alot of mods, alot of them being texture mods, but I go with the 2K Performance Texture Mods, because I understand that 4K is overkill, however, I don't believe my mods have anything to do with it, because I get the same exact issues with all my mods removed on a new save.
I do have an ENB, but my performance is exactly the same with or without it on.

I play 1080p @ a capped 60fps, Fullscreen/Borderless.
Details were set to Ultra, and then had my Shadow Detail set to High, Shadow Distance set to Medium, and Godrays set to Low.

Adjustments made in Fallout4Prefs.ini are as followed;
iPresentInterval is set to "0"
iTexMipMapSkip is set to "-1"
uGridsToLoad set to "7"
uExterior Cell Buffer set to "64"

My enblocal.ini changes are as followed;
[MEMORY]
ForceVideoMemorySize=true
VideoMemorySizeMb=32768

like I said, with these adjustments, I'm getting a steady 60fps in the "country," and in the city, I'm running roughly mid 50fps with drops to mid 40s every so often when I'm not getting my really bad frame "hitches" or Lag Spikes, or whatever you want to call it.

Here's my PC specs.
OS= Windows 10 Home 64-bit
CPU= Intel Core i5 4670 @ 3.40GHz
Motherboard= ASRock Z97 Killer (Updated BIOS)
RAM= 32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (11-11-11-28)
GPU= MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6G

[steve40]

1. MSI Afterburner is notorious for causing lag.

2. VideoMemorySizeMb=32768 looks way too high.

3. You've tweaked uGridsToLoad

Edited April 3, 2017 by steve40

[Markley454]

OK, so what's recommended for VideoMemorySizeMB and uGridsToLoad?

[JimmyRJump]

ENBoost RAM size should in theory never exceed 12GB (12288MB).

uGridsToLoad vanilla setting is five.

 

I've been using MSIAfterburner for fifteen years and never had any problems with lag in any game, including FO4.

 

Stutter and lag in FO4 are mainly caused by bad RAM allocation and all-round sloppy optimalisation and will always be present, no matter how much you tinker with any settings available.

[Markley454]

I have made a few changes.
uGridsToLoad=5
Found that "iNumThreads=4" was missing from the .ini files, so I added that line right above "iNumHWThreads=4."

Also, I found where I can overclock my Ram through the Bios. Noticed that they weren't doing as advertised, and that I needed to apply an XMP Profile, and changed a few things to get it up to where they were advertised.

After doing this, the game runs a hell of a lot smoother, but still has it's momments wherethe game pauses while it tries to load up more of the world as I'm exploring. It is a lot more playable at least.

I'll change the ENBoost Ram Size to 12288, and see if there's more improvement.

Thanks guys.

Edited April 3, 2017 by Markley454

[Kodiak412]

I also have a 980ti and I had this issue when Skyrim SE came out. After a lot of research and a lot of other issues I downloaded NVidia Inspector and caped the FPS at 59.7. Many said that these Beth games will have issues with the game running at greater than 60 FPS. As soon as I knocked it down to 59.7 all those issues went away. If you capped it at 60 perhaps you could try to cap it at just a hair lower. Maybe that will stop those lag spikes. This worked for me. Good luck.