Fixing/improving large, frequent stutters

[ViralDust]

Hey all, hopefully someone can help me with this.

 

I recently reinstalled F4 with a bunch of mods, after being away from the game for a year. Nothing too crazy, some texture mods and things (in terms of mods that could cause lag), the game looks great, and I am able to get 50-60 FPS in most places, which is fine with me. Sometimes it dips down to 30-40 in cities, I'm okay with that. I'm not a huge 144hz "EVERYTHING HAS TO BE 100FPS" type of person.

 

The problem is that I get stutters, a lot. It's as if the game is loading while I'm walking around. It doesn't usually happen inside or in enclosed cells like Diamond City, really only in the open world. The game will hang for a couple seconds, then keep going, and it will do this usually in bursts, maybe 2 or 3 hangs of a few seconds each, then it's 60 FPS for another 30 seconds to a minute, then same thing.

 

My graphics settings are mostly on high/ultra, it doesn't seem to be a problem because I get decent frame rate.

 

I have a GTX 770 (2GB VRAM, not ideal I know, but should be good enough) with 16GB RAM, and an i5-4670K. Computer is 4-5 years old but the RAM is brand new. My specs aren't amazing but they should be fine.

 

I've tried tons of fixes, iPresentInterval=0 and enabling Vsync in NVIDIA Control Panel (both Vsync on and Adaptive), godrays off (graphics settings in general when turned down to medium/low didn't fix anything), ENBoost is installed, tried both with and without the VRAM patch thing it has enabled, didn't seem to help. For that matter, I heard that RAM used as VRAM will always be slower than actual VRAM so it can slow down your machine, is that true? Right now I have that feature disabled, I dunno, it didn't seem to help, I had it set to 4GB in total because with mods my F4 uses about 10-12 GB of RAM. I've run in Borderless Windowed and Fullscreen, didn't make any difference except in Fullscreen I get screen tearing. I've been messing with the settings in the NV control panel and trying various other .ini file fixes, I have Exterior Cell Buffer set to 49 and iNumHWThreads set to 3 in my Fallout4.ini, that actually seemed to maybe have helped a bit when I did it. Maybe. In the control panel I have Vsync on, no triple buffering, threaded optimization on, 2 pre-rendered frames.

 

Anyway, there's some of what's happening. It's not unplayable, but I'd REALLY like it to just be smooth without stuttering, even if that meant longer load times or something. The game looks great and I'd like to avoid turning graphics settings down, which I don't think I should have to do since my FPS is IMO completely acceptable right now.

 

What do?

Edited January 4, 2018 by ViralDust

[KnorKater]

"It's as if the game is loading while I'm walking around." - because that is exactly what it does. It's called texture streaming, loading ever larger textures the closer you are to an object.

"I heard that RAM used as VRAM will always be slower than actual VRAM" - yes, when it comes to graphics. The VRAM is directly on your graphic card, while the normal RAM sits on your mother board. This means that information needs more time to travel. It's not much for small amounts, but it accumulates to a significant value. Anyhow, under normal circumstances you should never have to disable this feature, since the extra space comes in handy at times. Better have a bit more of slower memory available than run out of it. The card will prefer using its own memory anyway, unless it's filled.

 

The problem you're refering to is called hitching, and is quite comming, unfortunately.

What texture mods are you using? You should avoid anything larger than 2k with your amount of VRAM. Does this still occur with no mods installed? Is your game installed on an HDD or SSD?

And did you revert the changes you made before trying something else? Most don't do anything anyway and some are more likely to cause even more problems.

Personally, I got rid of this by running borderless window mode and setting shadow quality to medium (and not using any driver tweaks).

PS: "my F4 uses about 10-12 GB of RAM" That's really a whole lot. I'm using ~230 mods and my game rarely uses 5GB or RAM. But then I don't use anything that adds higher quality textures.

[sopmac45]

I do not use any graphic mod at all and I have been posting several times how did I manage to get away and play my game still with decent visual and graphic.

 

Graphic mods and ENB are superb but they were the cause for my rig to drop FPS and get a lot of stuttering. I have a decent rig, Nvidia 1070, 16gb RAM, SSD, i7-6700, Z170 MSI mobo but FO4 does not give a damn about how good our rig are. The game engine does not help at all.

 

Instead using graphic / ENB mods, I decided to shut off the AA filter, turn off my god rays, lens flares and blur and keep some others at high instead ultra. My textures are on ultra though. Turning off god rays ( using console command type gr off ) will help you a lot. I also keep my resolution on 2560 x 1440 so this way, my game looks fantastic but leaning on performance. I tried everything but this was the best solution ... also I do have a 144 hz monitor and my FPS vary a lot depending on where I am at that moment.

 

I also recommend to validate your game files via Steam. If you CTD or add / delete a mod or use LOOT, also validate the game files via Steam. Make sure that FO4 is not updating and also, after you validate the files, your graphic card will be set automatically to its default so you would have to manually set it up to what you want using the game icon menu on your desktop and start playing again via FO4launcher ( if you are using it ).

 

Validating files has helped me in the past to fix some stuttering.

 

NOTE : I found really funny that I am using a lot of graphic mods + 1 ENB in my Skyrim SE game and my FPS stay no less than 56-57 and instead of 70 mods that I am using in FO4, I have 110 in Skyrim. Point is that FO4 engine is worse than Skyrim I guess being an older game.

[ViralDust]

 

 

"It's as if the game is loading while I'm walking around." - because that is exactly what it does. It's called texture streaming, loading ever larger textures the closer you are to an object.

"I heard that RAM used as VRAM will always be slower than actual VRAM" - yes, when it comes to graphics. The VRAM is directly on your graphic card, while the normal RAM sits on your mother board. This means that information needs more time to travel. It's not much for small amounts, but it accumulates to a significant value. Anyhow, under normal circumstances you should never have to disable this feature, since the extra space comes in handy at times. Better have a bit more of slower memory available than run out of it. The card will prefer using its own memory anyway, unless it's filled.

 

The problem you're refering to is called hitching, and is quite comming, unfortunately.

What texture mods are you using? You should avoid anything larger than 2k with your amount of VRAM. Does this still occur with no mods installed? Is your game installed on an HDD or SSD?

And did you revert the changes you made before trying something else? Most don't do anything anyway and some are more likely to cause even more problems.

Personally, I got rid of this by running borderless window mode and setting shadow quality to medium (and not using any driver tweaks).

PS: "my F4 uses about 10-12 GB of RAM" That's really a whole lot. I'm using ~230 mods and my game rarely uses 5GB or RAM. But then I don't use anything that adds higher quality textures.

 

 

 

Alright, thanks for that detailed response. I re-enabled ForceVideoMemorySize as you said.

 

I have 200+ mods as well, haha. In terms of graphics, particularly outdoors, I have Immersive Wasteland Grass, Radiant Clouds and Fogs, Vivid Fallout All in One, WET, Flora FX Overhaul, and True Storms. I have ENBoost but no actual ENB preset. I'm not sure about no mods, I installed stuff before trying the game this time, because I'd played vanilla enough at launch and wanted to see what was new. I don't have anything 4k, no. AFAIK. Edit - I really like Vivid Fallout. You might tell me that it's too much for my machine but the game looks so good!

 

I have an HDD, not an SSD. If anything, I suspect this might be a problem, and unfortunately, it's not really fixable. My HDD was just average when I bought it, so I guess it's pretty slow at this point. I didn't realize that it would affect gameplay and not just loading times. FYI, loading times for me aren't that bad, usually 10-30 seconds. I'd like to have a nice SSD but I wouldn't like paying for it quite so much. And I don't know how easy transferring everything would be, I think suffering would be easier than going through all that trouble.

 

I've been undoing some things, yeah. Most of the stuff hasn't made any difference. I do run windowless and I did turn shadows down to medium because I know that especially in cities that's the killer, and godrays are off. I know 10GB is a lot, I dunno what the deal is. I guess that's including the OS, I just read that number off the Task Manager as total usage. I was maxing out my 8GB playing XCOM 2 a few months ago so that's why I upgraded. It just seems like I always use a lot of RAM for some reason. Mooooods! Haha.

 

 

 

I do not use any graphic mod at all and I have been posting several times how did I manage to get away and play my game still with decent visual and graphic.

 

Graphic mods and ENB are superb but they were the cause for my rig to drop FPS and get a lot of stuttering. I have a decent rig, Nvidia 1070, 16gb RAM, SSD, i7-6700, Z170 MSI mobo but FO4 does not give a damn about how good our rig are. The game engine does not help at all.

 

Instead using graphic / ENB mods, I decided to shut off the AA filter, turn off my god rays, lens flares and blur and keep some others at high instead ultra. My textures are on ultra though. Turning off god rays ( using console command type gr off ) will help you a lot. I also keep my resolution on 2560 x 1440 so this way, my game looks fantastic but leaning on performance. I tried everything but this was the best solution ... also I do have a 144 hz monitor and my FPS vary a lot depending on where I am at that moment.

 

I also recommend to validate your game files via Steam. If you CTD or add / delete a mod or use LOOT, also validate the game files via Steam. Make sure that FO4 is not updating and also, after you validate the files, your graphic card will be set automatically to its default so you would have to manually set it up to what you want using the game icon menu on your desktop and start playing again via FO4launcher ( if you are using it ).

 

Validating files has helped me in the past to fix some stuttering.

 

NOTE : I found really funny that I am using a lot of graphic mods + 1 ENB in my Skyrim SE game and my FPS stay no less than 56-57 and instead of 70 mods that I am using in FO4, I have 110 in Skyrim. Point is that FO4 engine is worse than Skyrim I guess being an older game.

 

 

 

Thanks for that. Really though, your setup is a lot better than mine. I don't really have frame rate issues, just stuttering. I'm okay with not always hitting 60 FPS. I have turned things down but it hasn't done much. I also have a pretty cheap monitor, it's just a regular 60Hz 1920x1080, nothing fancy like yours. There is the option to 1.5x upscale the resolution in the launcher, that's about all I have. I've never tried that.

Edited January 4, 2018 by ViralDust

[ViralDust]

I checked again, and you're right, F4 is using 6-7GB, not 10. I must have had Firefox open at the time as well. But still, the stuttering is still there. Even when I'm not moving, and there's no NPCs, just walking around a broken building. I'm going to try increasing the VRAM size using ENBoost, but it almost seems as though when I went from "off" to "on" with 4GB, it got worse, not better. I dunno.

 

Edit - My CPU usage is constantly spiking from basically 0 to around 50-80%, whenever there's some stuttering. Dunno what that's from. Does that help?

Edited January 5, 2018 by ViralDust

[bajs11]

With that many mods you may need to upgrade your gpu in order to get less stutters.

The 770 should be fine without mods but with a lot of mods installed I have discovered that even with the gtx 1080 and i7 you may still experience stutters every now and then at 1080p

[ViralDust]

With that many mods you may need to upgrade your gpu in order to get less stutters.

The 770 should be fine without mods but with a lot of mods installed I have discovered that even with the gtx 1080 and i7 you may still experience stutters every now and then at 1080p

Hmm. So the fact that I can hit 50-60 fps in "normal" conditions doesn't mean anything then? I figured since I could do that, my GPU was doing okay. Is that really the only thing? It seems frustrating that the game is just that way, and there's nothing you can do. I just don't understand why I alternate between 50 and 0 fps like that.

 

I would get it if my game was chugging at like 20 fps and then dipping, but it's not, it goes from completely fine to locked up, on and off.

Edited January 7, 2018 by ViralDust

[bajs11]

the problem is that in certain areas like downtown Boston or where there are a lot of enemies and/or clutter the fps would drop quite a lot

The same problem also existed in FO3 and NV which I did notice a huge improvement in both frame rates and stability back when I upgraded from the ATI HD 6750 1gb to gtx 970.

I wouldn't be surprised that I will experience the same kind of improvements when I upgrade from my current gtx 1080 to it's successor in the future.

It's stupid though that you would need something that is far above the recommended specs to be able to run a heavily modded game

Edited January 7, 2018 by bajs11