Hard Drive Load and Followers

[BoredErica]

When I have a follower following me, I get massive hard drive lag when I do a 180 and look at my follower's direction. My hard drive is loading hardcore when this happens, and the lagging stops when the hard drive stops. I only have 2 gb of ram, but I think 1.5gb is fine for my mod, seeing as I'm not running any sort of high texture mod. Current mod list is small:

 

ESM:

Leveler's Tower

Update

Dawnguard

Spike - For immersive armors

 

ESP:

Unofficial Skyrim/Dawnguard patch

Weapon/Armor fixes

Static Mesh Improvement

Chesko Loading Screens

Dynamic Loot

Immerisve Armors

Tifa Clothing

VickysArmor

Better Dynamic Snow

Dynamic Merchants

MidasSkyrim

Improved Skyrim Shouts

Dance of Death

Amanda/Lyla/Michelle/Misha <- Adds those followers

AllREspawn

EpicBossFight

DeadlyDragons

Knee Sockes

Tundra Defense

 

The followers are not wearing any armor mod's armor. I had UFO running, so I disabled that, made a clean save, still lagging. I've tried it with just followers, no other mods, still lagging. I've has a similar issue with Fallout:New Vegas. I currently have only one follower, and I'm still lagging. Why is it that when I have 10 NPCs walking around, I get no lag, but any follower, I get massive lag?

 

Thanks.

[acidzebra]

Try it with vanilla followers like Lydia. If the problem doesn't happen there, your custom followers have large texture sets/meshes which probably don't fit in your machine graphic card's vram along with everything else, so it has to load them from HD. In other words, your vram (not machine RAM, graphic card ram) may not be up to snuff or your custom followers have excessively-large custom textures/meshes attached, at least as far as your video card is concerned.

 

If it also happens with vanilla followers, I have no clue.

 

This is just a guess, but something for you to test.

Edited December 2, 2012 by acidzebra

[fms1]

Most likely Skyrim is having to use a lot of page file just to run. Having only 2gb of ram, your OS is probably using 1gb- 1.5gb of ram alone leaving very little to work with. And just guessing I would think a few of those mods aren't helping that at all.

[bben46]

With just 2G of Ram, if you have any background programs at all it will cause problems. And even too many Windows services can take up ram. That hard drive thrashing is trying to make up for low available ram

 

Lots of info here on things you can do to help http://s1.zetaboards.com/bbenlibrary/topic/4751769/1/#new

 

Here is a link to a program that may help by killing some unneeded background applications and services - to free up more ram for the game - some people swear by it, and some swear at it - so use it at your own risk (It works fine for me) - http://www.majorgeeks.com/Razer_Game_Booster_d8023.html

NOTE: This is not the same Razor as the pirate site. :rolleyes:

[BoredErica]

Thanks to everyone. My gpu is more of a bottleneck than I keep thinking, especially with only 512mb of Vram. I don't have any windows open when I'm on Skyrim and I turn Aero off. I also do my best to get rid of useless services. Upgrading to 3gb of DDr2 800 ram will be ridiculously expensive, however. I have tested, with valina followers this doesn't happen.

[fms1]

If your not already using it Game Booster can help tremendously, I know there's (or was) a free version and a paid for premium version (used to be about $20). Both versions will stop most nonessential services and background stuff from running with just a click of a button. Idk if the free version has this or if it was just the premium, but I believe it would also allow you to use a thumb drive to boost your available ram for playing games. I used it a few years back on an older single core PC and it helped. Sorry I don't have a link, just google it or IObit.

 

EDIT: 512mb of vram may not be spectacular but I think that's what the Xbox360 has to work with, so it should be just good enough.

Edited December 3, 2012 by fms1