I found out why Skyrim stutters?

[bcofer]

Caution - long post:

 

I dreaded having stutter and CTD issues in Skyrim, since I pretty much was forced to stop playing FNV because of them.

For FNV, it turned out my antivirus was the issue. Not because it thought any games or mods were bad, but because it kept checking to see if I was idle to run some background task or update check - lots and lots.

 

Sure enough, woes soon started in Skyrim also. BUT, after following all the tips scattered across here - upgrading drivers, turning this and that mod off, I found some things that helped.

 

First, I had one armor/costume mod with ridiculously large textures. Fine in 3rd person (when the textures were visible) but not in 1st (when the only textures/meshes visible are hands and arms). Weird, but dropping that piece helped.

 

Secondly, a small idle mod actually included the entire extracted animation bsa. Everytime the game tried to havok (isn't that a verb?) it would stop and search the bsa, then re-search the extracted folder. I was checking video and cpu performance issues, not HD access. More removing files, and more improvement.

 

Lastly, I finally discovered that Steam, although set to be turned off while I'm actually playing, had updated itself and apparently tured itself back on. Spotty internent access, spotty gameplay.

 

Now, fairly modest and aging rig and video, and playing on ultra with most of the extra pretties turned off, Skyrim is sailing right along.

[vertex23]

Sooo...what animations and what armour was doing it?

[Lifferds]

I decided to start a new game w/ a new character to see what would happen and guess what. No stutter. I definitely think it is in the save game, possibly ABomb related?

[vertex23]

Bump

 

So I turned off Bethesda's HD textures, and sure enough - just like jezamarie, the stutter completely stopped. I could even run into Whiterun without any problems! It's a little drab not being able to use the better textures in areas that the true HD mods haven't hit yet. But being able to actually play the game is well worth the price.

 

(Also, don't forget to remove the "HighResTexturePack01.bsa, HighResTexturePack02.bsa," from the Skyrim.ini file).

[MightyZ0G]

I had a little stutter after trying some of the ENB series mods plus the HD pack and various other mods.

my fix was to get rid of the HD pack and ENB and use Pluto's realistic lighting, replace my d3d9.dll with one generated using this d3d9gen and then ran the game with GameBooster using the gamebox and gb desktop and turning off explorer while games are playing.

 

edit to say that I am getting an average of 50 fps (steady 60 in buildings and dungeons) most of the time but for some reason it drops down to 35~45 in Morthal :/

 

but considering that I can see Azura's shrine from the patio of Proudspire (on a clear day) I can live with the low frame rate in a few places as long as it's smooth

Edited May 9, 2012 by mighty zog

[spenland72]

I had terrible lag in Whiterun too. During day time, down to 2 frames per minute at times! after trying lots of graphics card tweaks and many other things, I finally solved it, not perfect in worst parts of whiterun but more than playable.

 

I disabled HighRes Texture pack 01, 02 and 03 in mod manager (something I had done before to no success)

I deleted my skyrimprefs and skyrim.ini (Documents/My Games/skyrim)

Reinstalled my Cleaned (by TES5Edit) mods for Update.esm/Dawnguard.esm/Hearthfire.esm) original vanilla.esms still in data folder!

Launched skyrim from steam to reapply ini files and reset graphics.

Ran LOOT to set mod order again.

Launched skyrim again with SKSE shortcut.

Unplayable stuttering finally gone, for good I hope,

Those HighRes texture packs are very old:P

 

Only just tested it but took a day of pain, and seams ok at mo, thought I had broken my game! Thanks to all the great modders who really understand all this stuff!