Siege of Whiterun - 1.2 FPS. Texture reductions do nothing

[darkdill]

This is so annoying. I'm trying to do the Siege of Whiterun (Stormcloak variant), but my FPS is basically gutted no matter what I do. I set textures to low, no effect. I optimize them, no effect. I try deactivating some scripts like Auto-Loot, no effect.

 

Probably too much smoke and too many fires, which can't be optimized. That or some weird mod conflict...

 

Strange thing is that this has never happened before for me. Either I just ran into CTDs or freezes, but not this.

Edited April 18, 2013 by darkdill

[MShoap13]

Smoke and fires can be optimized. They're particle effects. See the following line in SkyrimPrefs.ini (located at \My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\):

 

[Particles]
iMaxDesired=750

I personally run this around 250 and there's almost no noticeable difference in most cases.

 

However, I doubt this is you're issue. Give it a shot and if your FPS is still terribad post back with some details (PC specs, game version, and preferably a BOSS log).

[darkdill]

Smoke and fires can be optimized. They're particle effects. See the following line in SkyrimPrefs.ini (located at \My Documents\My Games\Skyrim\):

 

[Particles]
iMaxDesired=750

I personally run this around 250 and there's almost no noticeable difference in most cases.

 

However, I doubt this is you're issue. Give it a shot and if your FPS is still terribad post back with some details (PC specs, game version, and preferably a BOSS log).

Tried that. Didn't work. Still had 1.2 FPS.

 

Here's my specs, though I'm not sure how much you need.

 

PC specs

Intel® Core i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz (4 gigs of RAM) (4 cores)

AMD Radeon HD 7750

 

Currently running the most recent version of Skyrim, with Dawnguard and Dragonborn.

And here's my current BOSSlog. Note that I didn't clean my master files because it was leading to some crashes (strange, but it's true).

 

 

I have heard that this glitch can be caused by badly configured INI files, but I tried reverting to a vanilla SkyrimPrefs.ini (couldn't do the same for Skyrim.ini because I made a ugrid change) and it had no effect.

Edited April 18, 2013 by darkdill

[MShoap13]

To revert your uGrids setting, go to a small interior (a player home for example), alt+tab out of the game and edit Skyrim.ini to have uGridsToLoad=5, save and close Skyrim.ini, in-game open the console and type "refini", save your game. You should do a test load (from the menu, not from within your game) to make sure the change took.

From there you should be able to revert your Skyrim.ini. It's worth a shot.

 

Edit: Make backups! Especially your save, but I'd backup the unaltered Skyrim.ini as well.

Edited April 18, 2013 by MShoap13

[darkdill]

Wow, so it WAS due to my tweaked INI files. That's a load of crap if I ever heard it.

 

Oh well, at least my framerate is back to normal. Don't suppose it was because of that ugrid change I made, do you?

[MShoap13]

How high did you have uGrids?

 

Even at 7 the game engine is considerably less stable than the default of 5. It may very well be the culprit but other settings (relating to Papyrus, cell buffers, sound, or archives) could also potentially be at fault for the particular issue we're discussing.

Edited April 18, 2013 by MShoap13

[darkdill]

MShoap13, on 18 Apr 2013 - 18:04, said:

How high did you have uGrids?

 

Even at 7 the game engine is considerably less stable than the default of 5. It may very well be the culprit but other settings (relating to Papyrus, sound, or archives) could also potentially be at fault for the particular issue we're discussing.

I had it at 5.

 

I did, however, have Papyrus changes because my game is script-heavy and I suffer from Papyrus lags. Maybe those were to blame. I'm testing right now to see which changes were the cause of damage.

 

EDIT: Seems like if you make ANY change to the INI, it causes this lag. That is just... wow.

 

EDIT2: Confirmed, it was the changes I made to Papyrus in the INI. I had made a few changes so that the game would allocate more resources to Papyrus, but perhaps I overdid it in some area.

Edited April 18, 2013 by darkdill

[MShoap13]

The Papyrus settings could very well be the cause, especially if you set them to extremely high numbers. These settings are often misrepresented on forums and even in guides/online .ini tweakers.

 

Here's some documentation on these settings

 

iMinMemoryPageSize (default 128) should be set between 128 and 512. Higher isn't necessarily better. 128, 256, 384 and 512 are viable values as most DDR RAM is broken down into 128 bit chunks.

 

iMaxMemoryPageSize (default 512) should be set between 512 and 1024. Again, higher isn't necessarily better.

 

iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes (default 76800 [75KB]) should not exceed a few MBs. Anything higher is just wasting your System RAM. Probably what was causing your issue especially if you had all three of these set very high. If Papyrus is senselessly storing tiny variables in 10MB chunks up to a maximum of 2GB of RAM, it was probably causing lots of overflow forcing other game systems onto the page file on the Hard Drive.

[darkdill]

Found the culprits. I was using the following settings and it seems they were way too high.

 

fUpdateBudgetMS=800.0

fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=800.0

 

Saw those values in the Frostfall Troubleshooting section, and I'm guessing the guy is crazy to have suggested them.

 

I've reduced them back down to 1.2, but I'm gonna see if I can slightly increase them.

 

Thanks for the help.

[MShoap13]

Found the culprits. I was using the following settings and it seems they were way too high.

 

fUpdateBudgetMS=800.0

fExtraTaskletBudgetMS=800.0

 

Saw those values in the Frostfall Troubleshooting section, and I'm guessing the guy is crazy to have suggested them.

 

I've reduced them back down to 1.2, but I'm gonna see if I can slightly increase them.

 

Thanks for the help.

Increasing these improves potential stability while decreasing performance. If you aren't having problems, leave them alone. If you're crashing sporadically (in very Papyrus intensive situations) you could try bumping them up by very small amounts. I've never experienced nor heard of anyone improving the game's stability through these though theoretically they are a potential source of crashing if the Papyrus system can't do every thing it needs to do in the time allotted.

 

Edit: and hell, now that I think about it, tweaking these upwards (to something between 1.4 and 2) may actually prevent the SkyTEST/WarZones crashes. When you get up to 3 or so, these delays could start becoming a performance issue.

Edited April 18, 2013 by MShoap13