Stutter/Lag Spike every time an NPC talks.

[Highwayman300]

A lot of the times any NPC talks in the vanilla game, the game will stutter and freeze for half a second before returning to normal. The game only does this during NPC conversations, and never during anything else. Spawning actors in combat or other forms of stress testing don't seem to cause it either. It doesn't seem to be a hard drive/SSD issue as everything else runs fine. VRAM/RAM and CPU seem to be doing well, sometimes a bit low for the amount of things in screen happening at the time. The game runs at a steady 60 fps all the time.

The stutter can happen whenever NPCs talk on their own with others as well. I have not made any changes to Skyrim.INI, if any are needed/recommended I would be happy to apply them.

Specs:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015PYZ0J6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Any help would be appreciated as I'm almost running out of options. The only time I had this issue before was when installing several large mods with hundreds of voice files in oldrim, and even then it never happened all the time.

[thumbincubation]

I have had the same problem, since I first started SSE. I don't know what causes it. I've played with load order, cleaned masters, you name it. No idea. I hope someone who knows can help us both.

[Highwayman300]

It might be worth taking a look at regardless of what some other people say, but after deleting the "audio cache" line in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch INI, the problem seemed to have banished. It still needs more testing however.

[thumbincubation]

Thank you Highway. I will take a look at that, too. Much appreciated.

[Highwayman300]

After some testing, I think deleting the line didn't particularly helped with this issue, although I notice that audio lag occurs way less often now at the very least.

Maybe it is related to an audio threading issue? Taking a look at the default Skyrim.INI, it doesn't seem to have any threading settings of any kind.

[Highwayman300]

Apparently it could be related to audio drivers as well, although it seems I have everything updated. Realtek, Nvidia's and Intel's should be working fine.

After some testing, it seems that the problem is also persistent in some other games as well, most notably Fallout 4, which shares a lot of things with special edition. What troubles me however, is that the issue doesn't seem to exist in oldrim at all unless installing heavy mods that rely on audio files such as "Interesting NPCs".

[TheMastersSon]

I've seen this on systems with hacked, poorly written or in a few cases intrusive/malicious audio codecs, especially mp3. Many codec packs rearrange priorities for default system codecs in addition to installing their own. The fact that it's happening across game titles at least steers you toward the right direction of the problem.

[Highwayman300]

I've seen this on systems with hacked, poorly written or in a few cases intrusive/malicious audio codecs, especially mp3. Many codec packs rearrange priorities for default system codecs in addition to installing their own. The fact that it's happening across game titles at least steers you toward the right direction of the problem.

How would I begin on fixing such problems? I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about codecs and coding. I haven't installed any codec packs at all as far as I know however.

[TheMastersSon]

Check your installed programs list (in Control Panel/Programs/etc) and see if anything looks unfamiliar, suspicious and/or possibly related to audio. In most Windows versions you can sort this list by date to get a chronological history of what's been installed on the system. If your audio problem started at a certain point in time, look to see if anything was installed at or around that same time.

 

If you're running SSE from your hard drive and not the SSD, when's the last time the drive was defragged?

 

If nothing else helps, a fresh reinstall of your operating system would likely fix your problem, but it won't tell you what caused it.

[Highwayman300]

I do not know if it helps, but disabling audio drivers in their entirety didn't seemed to fix the issue at all. I'm starting to think it might not be related to audio at all. After some testing, it seems the problem is way less noticeable in Fallout 4, and only happens in that game under specific circumstances, while in SSE happens at random.

Most noticeably it happens when an NPC says "goodbye", while it rarely happens before it engages in conversation.

If Fraps is correct, the game loses around 5-8 frames whenever the stutter hits.

The game is indeed in the HA and was defragged 3 days ago. Disck checks show no issues. I feel that reinstalling Windows is a bit too far just for one game, so if possible I would like to nail the problem before going to such extremes.