FPS Drops But low CPU *AND* GPU usage

[RS13]

So, I'm outside abernathy farm, with SS:Conquer installed (on low settings) and I'm getting about 47 FPS. But here's the thing, my GPU is only sitting in the high-70% usage and my CPU corese all seem to clock in at about high 60s, low 70s. I'm using about 8 GBs of ram, but have way more. It seems like I'm getting low frames without any bottleneck. What's going on here?

[Moldy]

Could be engine level. The engine budgets less than a quarter of a second per cycle for script calculations,and Abernathy Farm with Sim Settlements is a remarkably script-heavy environment. Fatally so,if you also build up Sanctuary Hills or Red Rocket. There are INI edits you can make to increase the time budget for scripting. If you've also built up Sanctuary Hills and/or Red Rocket,then I strongly suggest you pick one of those three settlements,and tear down the others,due to a phenomenon known as the Triangle of Death. Abridged version; Settlement building is script heavy to the extreme,and mods that build on this system,like Sim Settlements,only increases the script load. It'll eventually get to the point in the Abernathy/Red Rocket/Sanctuary triangle,due to their proximity,where the game engine will simply think itself to death and crash,because it cannot resolve assigned scripts within the allotted time limit and RAM allocation.

[RS13]

Could be engine level. The engine budgets less than a quarter of a second per cycle for script calculations,and Abernathy Farm with Sim Settlements is a remarkably script-heavy environment. Fatally so,if you also build up Sanctuary Hills or Red Rocket. There are INI edits you can make to increase the time budget for scripting. If you've also built up Sanctuary Hills and/or Red Rocket,then I strongly suggest you pick one of those three settlements,and tear down the others,due to a phenomenon known as the Triangle of Death. Abridged version; Settlement building is script heavy to the extreme,and mods that build on this system,like Sim Settlements,only increases the script load. It'll eventually get to the point in the Abernathy/Red Rocket/Sanctuary triangle,due to their proximity,where the game engine will simply think itself to death and crash,because it cannot resolve assigned scripts within the allotted time limit and RAM allocation.

 

OK, that's super-helpful. Do you know what those ini edits are? Second, how do I avoid this problem with SS: Conqueror? It builds all the plots on its own--that's kinda the point. How do I avoid triangles of death with that? (I assume that there are other such areas, right?)

[Moldy]

There are two known Triangles of Death; Abernathy Farm,Sanctuary Hills,and the Red Rocket Truck Stop forms the primary Triangle of Death,due to how attractive Sanctuary and Red Rocket are for player headquarters and large settlements,and the fact that you're rapidly pointed at Abernathy Farm for questing,and the fact that it's right there outside the Vault. The secondary Triangle of Death is made up of Spectacle Island,Warwick Homestead,and the Castle,for almost identical reasons. Triangles of Death are the result of proximity; Take a look at your Pip Boy map. See that grid? That grid neatly divides the game world into what the engine defines as cells. And the game keeps nine cells loaded into memory at all times; The one you currently occupy,and the eight surrounding it. If you're familiar with how Minecraft handles world loading,it's a nearly identical concept.

 

Triangles of Death cannot be removed,cannot be avoided,and cannot be stopped. All you can do is deal with their existence as best you can. They are engine-level,due to how the game handles world loading and scripting. There is no fix for it,outside of completely rebuilding the game,and thus violating copyright and earning yourself the wrath of Zenimax Media's army of lawyers. No,the best you can do is the INI edits I'm about to throw your way,and pick a single settlement from each of those Triangles,and tear down the rest. Another good thing to do is take a peek at the list of mods I'm going to throw your way,as they're confirmed to either not play nicely with Sim Settlements,or produce visible issues with the game when combined with Sim Settlements. In general,if the mods break precombined meshes,it's a significant problem,as precombined meshes exist to minimize asset use.

 

INI Edits

If you do not have Notepad or Notepad ++,I very strongly suggest getting the latter right now; It's free,and a very useful text editing tool,especially for code and pseudocode purposes,such as this one. For all following instructions,ignore all quotation marks for searching your documents or text input,unless otherwise noted

 

1) Navigate to your FalloutCustom.ini file. It's in the same neighbourhood as your saves. By default,it's in "My Documents/My Games/Fallout 4".

2) Open FalloutCustom.ini. Look for a line of text reading "[Papyrus]". If you do not have this line,then add it to the very bottom,following the same spacing format as exhibited by the rest of the document.

3) At the bottom of the "[Papyrus]" section,add the following lines.

fUpdateBudgetMS=2.4
fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=2.4
iMinMemoryPageSize=256
iMaxMemoryPageSize=1024
iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=307200

If similar lines already exist,modify them to suit. This effectively gives the game just under a quarter second per clock cycle to calculate scripts,and assigns it more RAM to use in that span,as well.

 

The following link leads to the Sim Settlements wiki's list of problematic mods. Furthermore,do research into the mods you have installed,to make sure that they don't break precombined meshes. Off the top of my head,More Uniques,last I checked,did this,unfortunately. Any others,I can only guess,so do some digging.

https://simsettlements.com/web/wiki/index.php?title=Problematic_Mods