Merged plugins causing fps drop

[brylem]

Greetings. I don't know if this belongs on here exactly but here goes:

 

Using certain merged plugins for New Vegas causes my framerate to drop down to abysmal numbers (0-3 fps). I've yet to pinpoint which, but I was wondering if this was caused by the amount of records merged into the plugin or whatever. This has happened to me before when I merged a couple of weapon mods into a single plugin, but the framerate dropped to just around 10-15 from an average of 30. Ultimately it ended up in me just having to not use that plugin.

Edited October 14, 2017 by brylem

[dubiousintent]

You can't just merge plugins together without paying attention to a number of factors. Suggest reading the wiki "Merged Plugin Guidelines for Personal Use" article for at least some of those considerations. The number of records does not make a difference that I have seen. A proper set of merged plugins should not experience any FPS drop if they don't when installed separately.

 

Are you using a "post-processor" such as ENB or SweetFX? Those are much more likely to cause a drop in framerate.

 

-Dubious-

[brylem]

I used ENBoost but when I found out that using ENB with Nevada Skies without enabling HDR turns the skybox black, I deleted it following the author's instructions. No effect whatsoever upon uninstallation. The instructions only require me to delete two files though. Perhaps deleting all files that originated from ENBoost would have an effect.

 

Also, from what I've read in that wiki, the chief things to avoid doing are merging mods that have self-referencing scripts and mods that have their own MCM menus. This framerate drop happened even when I was simply merging mods that added individual weapons, which had no self-referencing scripts or MCM menus as far as I could see.

[dubiousintent]

The wiki also points out that you can't ignore where a mod belongs in your load order. They have to be contiguously located (without any intervening mods that you do not intend to merge) to be grouped together in a given "merge set". That separation can happen even with individual weapon mods. You can move plugins up or down in your load order, and then see if LOOT moves them elsewhere. If it does (based upon their masters and dependencies), you shouldn't fight it. But you can try moving several plugins around until you do get a "set" of several contiguous plugins that LOOT is then happy to leave alone. (In many cases, LOOT only insists upon a plugin being below another specific plugin and doesn't care exactly where it lies after that.) Those sets can then be merged into a "merged plugin" file, and you can have several such "merged plugin" files.

 

But even before merging plugins, you need to have resolved any FPS drop issues with the individual plugins present first. Merges are not going to miraculously solve that, but they can cause the problem if the above is ignored.

 

-Dubious-