Cant Explain FPS Drop on High-End Rig

[dayglo98]

I dont see any updated screenshot..I will try to take a screenshot from the same place when I get home tonight.

 

you should still share your full list of mods (even non graphical ones)

[Tingle1337]

Meh, too many to list. Anything from game play re balancing and improvement to things like immersive patrols/warzone and realistic force to combined texture improvements normally using the max res the developer had like 2k or 4k. Btw is it possible to change the ENB shadow settings...? ENB makes them sorta blurry abit and setting the blur distance doesn't change a thing and setting detailed shadows to false doesn't either. Its like the configs don't work for the shadows. Edited December 3, 2012 by Tingle1337

[Xescream]

I love Crysis 2 Maldo HD mod! The RTF and particle shadows look awesome :D

 

Anyways, yeah just due to engine limitations, ugridstoload is a huge performance killer. This http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12866 excellent mod effectively makes draw distance ugridstoload=7 without having the LOD be procedurally drawn. I have been using it with no crashes or issues.

 

To sharpen plants and trees drastically enable transparency antialiasing in nvidia control panel or inspector. I use x4 TMSAA along with x8 MSAA and it looks wonderful. You still are getting kind of poor performance, I am on ultra with high AA and a super high quality ENB at 45-55 FPS. I am not as big on FPS as some, as long as it stays above 45 I am happy.

[Tingle1337]

So I just tested out Warzone in Mt. Pain - My FPS droped down to about 35-45ish turing heavy fighting. I noticed a spike in cpu load but only up to about 60-80% and my GPU load never went over 68%. I've turned off AA and only use 4x transparency AA with FXAA on skyrim and RCRN with Shadows on High. SO Any suggestions how to get my fps up?

 

I would really like to have my fps on a stable 60 actually :P. I find it sad not to achieve it with my 2x660ti's and my processor :/ Am I really maxing out my hardware? I cant believe that :(, especially not with my CPU or GPU load hitting 100%

Edited December 4, 2012 by Tingle1337

[Tingle1337]

-snip- Edited December 4, 2012 by Tingle1337

[Tingle1337]

Ok, so I did some GPU tests. Looking at the same scene, when I use 1 GPU I get 56fps with a 95% load, using 2 GPU in SLI i get 56fps with 50-60ish load on both. Wtf...? Its splitting up the task on both but not utilizing more power...? And cpu load is max 73% on 2/8 cores. Edited December 4, 2012 by Tingle1337

[Tingle1337]

So.. It seems that shadows are rendered on the CPU, Hence calls are going from CPU to GPU which is bottlenecking everything making the GPU wait. Is there any tool like ENB or the sort that renders its own shadows so I can just disable them and have the mod render them on the GPU. Or a way to tell the game to render using the GPU and not CPU?

[dayglo98]

So.. It seems that shadows are rendered on the CPU, Hence calls are going from CPU to GPU which is bottlenecking everything making the GPU wait. Is there any tool like ENB or the sort that renders its own shadows so I can just disable them and have the mod render them on the GPU. Or a way to tell the game to render using the GPU and not CPU?

 

 

OH ! well, didnt you know ? I think in 95% of games shadows are calculated on the cpu..While trying to help you out I noticed that since yesterday my framerate is capped at 42.7fps no matter what settings I use. It used to be capped at 55-57..strange. Can't you overclock that processor ? My i5-2500k is at 4.2Ghz and coming from 3.3Ghz stock it does make a difference in fps in Skyrim. Skyrim is CPU bound anyways until you use ENB's with Bokeh DOF/SSAO/Indirect Lighting. Disable shadows on grass if it is enabled maybe.

Also maybe lower all the separate draw distances in the skyrim launcher (object/npc/item/specular) you can lower them from the max and you will not see any difference and your fps should go up a bit.

[Xescream]

I would definitely OC my cpu if I was you. You shouldn't be maxing out your hardware as I am getting better performance with my single 680. Dayglo98 is correct about the shadows, they are cpu based. There has gotta be something capping your gpu usage, as it should be 100%. I would make sure your power settings for skyrim are set for "maximum performance" also if you are using any form of fps capper, try turning it off. I once had my fps capped to 60, but for some reason it capped to 15. For the cpu issue try: setting affinity in task manager, look for some .ini guides involving multicore threading, and make sure that it has higher priority in task manager and nothing else is being given too much priority. I don't think enb replaces shadows, it simply enhances them.

 

Try adding the following lines to Skyrim.ini in My Games ----> Skyrim under [General]

iNumHWThreads=4

iHWThread8=3

iHWThread7=2

iHWThread6=1

iHWThread5=0

iHWThread4=3

iHWThread3=2

iHWThread2=1

iHWThread1=0

iAIThread2HWThread=3

iAIThread1HWThread=1

iRenderingThread2HWThread=2

iRenderingThread1HWThread=0

bMultiThreadMovement=1

bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1

bUseThreadedBlood=1

bUseThreadedMorpher=1

bUseThreadedTempEffects=1

bUseThreadedTextures=1

bUseThreadedMeshes=1

bUseThreadedLOD=1

bUseThreadedAI=1

bUseHardDriveCache=0

 

This may or may not help, so keep them seperate from other lines if you have to remove them. Adjust the threads as necessary to your cpu. (I changed to 0-7 as I have 8 threads on my i7) I found that while this increased stutters on entering exterior/interior it reduced LOD and mid-gameplay stutters as well as reducing load times by up to 10 seconds for me. It's worth a try. I've only had 2 crashes in about 15 hours of gameplay over a few days and I don't think it's from these settings (using like 90 .esp's right now, only a few are little mods.)