Another "My Skyrim is stuttering" thread

[JudgmentJay]

Hello everyone,

 

I'll get right to the point: My Skyrim stutters when distant land/trees/etc load in while in heavily-wooded areas. The area I use for a benchmark is the path leading N/NE down the river from Ivarstead. If I sprint down this path on a horse I get some pretty hefty stuttering every time new assets load into view. Again, this does not occur in non-forest areas.

 

For mods, I followed the STEP guide, so I have a significant number of high-resolution textures. I did however pick and choose which ones to install in order to keep my VRAM usage under 2GB. One additional mod I've installed which pertains to this issue is Skyrim Distance Overhaul, which greatly increases the number of LOD objects. I've also done the z-fighting tweak, which in turn increases draw distance for LOD objects/trees.

 

I run at 2560x1600, 2x MSAA, 2x SSTrAA, and 8x AF (via nVidia control panel). I have all launcher settings maxed with the exception of sky reflection and Item fade (set to 8 ).

 

My specs:

Rampage IV Extreme

i7 3930k @ 4.7ghz

16gb 1600mhz DDR3 8-8-8-24

3 GTX680 2GB Tri-SLI

2 240GB Intel 520 SSDs in raid0 (64k stripe size)

 

I've done quite a bit of research online, and here's what I've tried/ruled out:

1. Not a VRAM issue. VRAM tops out at about 1850 on the previously mentioned benchmark.

2. Not a CPU stress issue. Usage hovers around 30-40%.

3. Not a save game bloat/script error issue. This occurs on a fresh install and a new game. Papyrus logging shows no errors/warnings.

4. Not a mod issue. This happens with or without mods.

5. I've tried disabling SLI and running on a single card.

6. I've tried disabling vsync and also FPS limiting.

7. I've tried running in Steam's offline mode and disabling the overlay.

8. I've tried several different nVidia drivers (clean installs).

9. I've tried enabling PCI-e 3.0 via the nVidia patch (I thought this was going to fix it for sure... thought I was running into bandwidth limitations).

 

I'll be honest, the problem mostly goes away when I disable the z-fighting tweak; however, I *shouldn't* have to do this. I'll do it if I absolutely must, but my PC is a monster. It's capable of running this.

 

The only thing I can think of at the moment that I haven't ruled out is that it's HDD-related. Maybe I'm running into throughput limitations or perhaps my stripe size is too small, but I was thinking that if I broke the raid up, formatted the drives, and did a fresh Windows install on one drive and used the other for Steam/games it might fix the issue.

 

Thoughts/input/solutions I could try would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for reading!

Edited July 13, 2012 by JudgmentJay

[wysiwyg]

Your specs are kind of like mine except I have the GTX690 instead. Also, walking next to a campfire outdoors causes stuttering for me. In my case it was the ENB post processing and if I disable it the stuttering stops. So, I'm still tweaking it a bit myself.

 

Here are some things I did to help out:

 

1. Are you using ENB or RCRN? Try disabling post processing temporarily when it stutters to see if that's where the issue is. Shift-F12 for ENB, pause for RCRN (I think).

2. Unless you use RCRN turn off AA for Skyrim and use SMAA instead.

3. Lower range for item fade distance to about half. You generally can't see those smaller items anyway.

4. Use a FPS limiter and set it to 58 and not 60. That way it doesn't constantly switch the adaptive v-sync on and off. Nvidia inspector has settings for this and so does ENB and EVGA Precision.

5. Did you increase your uGridsToLoad from the default of 5? Lowering it back is a giant pain to avoid invalidating your save but if you went higher than 7 it might be the fix of last resort. Each Nvidia card has only 2GB (which is my biggest gripe) and having more than one of them doesn't help much since each card pretty much loads copies of the same textures anyway. I really wish they went with 3GB+ myself.

 

Edit:

 

6. Did you try using the texture optimizer mentioned in the STEP guide? Back up your textures first though and use the safe settings. That will reduce some of your larger textures after applying all of those mods. Reinstalling mods puts the original textures back of course.

7. Turn on papyrus script logging and check to make sure you don't have a bunch of script errors every time you change cells from some bug or other. I had the now vanquished Potema constantly trying to cast spells at me from across the continent resulting in repeated script fails. I had to get creative to cancel that out.

Edited July 13, 2012 by wysiwyg

[JudgmentJay]

1. I'm using RCRN, but the stuttering happens with 0 mods.

2. Using RCRN, so I'll keep using AA. The stutter occurs with AA completely off as well.

3. My fade distance is indeed halved.

4. I've tried limiting FPS to 58.

5. I did not increase my uGrids.

6. I did use the texture optimizer.

7. As stated in my original post, I enabled logging on a fresh install and new character, and while there were 0 warnings/errors, stuttering persisted.

 

I noticed that if I'm in first person view on foot the stuttering does not occur, even while sprinting. 3rd person on foot still has stuttering but it's very greatly reduced. I think it's the increased viewing area of 3rd person + the horse speed that's causing the stuttering. Like I'm moving through the cells too quickly or something.

[wysiwyg]

I think the same textures load regardless of first/third person view so I could be wrong but the extended LOD would certainly increase the number of textures swapping in and out of GPU memory. You could always try moving skyrim off of the SSDs to a hard drive as a test but I do the same thing and only ENB post processing with has ever caused stuttering for me at 2560x1600.

 

Did you use FRAPS to check your FPS? That still works with RCRN. My stuttering happenes when FPS is still around 58-60 which is obviously different than having the FPS dive.

 

What about closing MSI Afterburner/Evga Precision, etc.? I've had problems with the EVGA OSD server running and getting in the way of directx injectors even though I'm not using it. Afterburner didn't do that so I switched.

 

Did you use Nvidia Inspector to change the Ambient Occlusion compatibility to 0x00000015 (COD:MW2) and the AO setting to Performance instead of High Quality?

 

If you use the beta drivers check Nvidia for the newest version if you aren't using 304.79.

 

That's probably all I have to suggest. I have the Mini-ITX version of the Rampage motherboard, an i7-3770k CPU, 16GB of memory, SSD drive for gaming, and use the GTX690 @ 2560x1600 instead of 680s.

[JudgmentJay]

Did you use FRAPS to check your FPS? That still works with RCRN. My stuttering happenes when FPS is still around 58-60 which is obviously different than having the FPS dive.

Yeah, my FPS dips to 50 when I get the stutter, then hops right back up to 60. It's a ~1/8-1/4 second freeze.

 

What about closing MSI Afterburner/Evga Precision, etc.? I've had problems with the EVGA OSD server running and getting in the way of directx injectors even though I'm not using it. Afterburner didn't do that so I switched.

I use EVGA Precision X, but I don't have any OSD running. I do monitor the temperatures of all 3 cards and the vram usage of one though. I did try playing with Precision closed, but it didn't make a difference. I'll give it another try.

 

Did you use Nvidia Inspector to change the Ambient Occlusion compatibility to 0x00000015 (COD:MW2) and the AO setting to Performance instead of High Quality?

I don't believe that I did. I'll check when I get home in a couple hours. I don't think I have AO enabled though.

 

If you use the beta drivers check Nvidia for the newest version if you aren't using 304.79.

I am using 304.79. I've also tried 304.48 and 301.42.

Edited July 13, 2012 by JudgmentJay

[JudgmentJay]

Yeah, AO was disabled, and closing down EVGA Precision did not help.

[wysiwyg]

I'm using AO, SFXX, detailed shadows and the whole kitchen sink of effects to get just the right look and don't have that much of an issue so maybe it actually is a system issue.

 

Actually, I was mistaken before. I actually have the Asus Maximus V Gene Micro-ATX socket 1155 and you have the Rampage IV LGA2011 so I'd expect you to have much better bandwidth to those cards than I do on my micro motherboard and case with the 690.

 

Are you using the intel chipset for raid 0? Latest drivers and Bios? Checked the firmware for your intel SSDs? If you've mesed with PCI 3.0 updates then you probably have already done this.

 

How about renaming your skyim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini in your games directory and starting a new game to test with the default values? If you haven't changed your uGrid settings then your existing saves might work anyway depending on what kind of tweaks you have made there. Since the zfighting tweak makes it worse then your rig might simply be running up against an engine issue or getting limited by the 2GB of memory per GPU and constantly swapping textures. I'd think it would have to be a pretty massive amount of swapping considering you have SSDs. Maybe run the windows resource monitor in the background and see if your disk queue length is extraordinarily high for some reason.

[wysiwyg]

I checked the performance on my SSD and did the whole riding through the forest between Helgen and Falkreath thing. For TESV I got 1,187,885 B/sec read and 205 B/sec write over a couple of minutes of constant riding. Active time on my SSD was .11%.

 

However, I do notice my paging file is getting just about as much activity as TESV and it's on my hard drive and not on the SSD. Maybe move your paging file to your large storage hard drive to see if that matters any? I wouldn't expect it would so much. I'm not sure why it's as busy as it is running the game since I also have 16GB of memory. It's a 32 bit app and I don't suppose it would constantly page/swap anything over 2 GB user space for the game, would it? That would be sad.

 

Edit: That must have been a fluke. I tried it again a couple of times and only saw < 30,000 B/sec and no swapping going on. Maybe my antivirus updated or something the first time. :-)

[JudgmentJay]

I checked the performance on my SSD and did the whole riding through the forest between Helgen and Falkreath thing. For TESV I got 1,187,885 B/sec read and 205 B/sec write over a couple of minutes of constant riding. Active time on my SSD was .11%.

 

However, I do notice my paging file is getting just about as much activity as TESV and it's on my hard drive and not on the SSD. Maybe move your paging file to your large storage hard drive to see if that matters any? I wouldn't expect it would so much. I'm not sure why it's as busy as it is running the game since I also have 16GB of memory. It's a 32 bit app and I don't suppose it would constantly page/swap anything over 2 GB user space for the game, would it? That would be sad.

 

Edit: That must have been a fluke. I tried it again a couple of times and only saw < 30,000 B/sec and no swapping going on. Maybe my antivirus updated or something the first time. :-)

 

On the ride down from Ivarstead I got 788kb/s read and 21kb/s write average. There are a number of spikes over 2mb. Also, one to ~7.5mb and one to 47.5mb.

 

That's for my raid as a whole, not TESV specifically.

 

EDIT: Just verified that those spikes are coming from TESV.

Edited July 14, 2012 by JudgmentJay

[wysiwyg]

Try disabling MSAA and leaving the supersampling at 2X and see if the performance improves without degrading what you see. Did you do anything like play with hardware FXAA in nvidia inspector? Which texture packs did you use? I know you said you manually picked which ones to install but perhaps load a complete set with different resolutions; i.e. a mod with the different size sets like high, medium, and low so you can use NMM to quickly swap them in and out. For example Serious HD Retexture with the 2048 and the 1024 versions and High Quality LODs with the high, medium, and low sets.