PC VERY Annoying Game Stuttering / Choppy FPS as Distant Objects are Loaded

[njkilleen]

Yes... this is my first post – but that's mainly because I normally find the answer to my questions by perusing through other people's problems first, thanks to the magic of the internet. This problem, however, evades solution:

I recently purchased Skyrim from the Steam store, and while it is a fantastic game, I quickly began to notice a particular issue that I was, from that point on, unable to ignore. As I moved around in the “outside” / “outdoor” section of skyrim, there is a particularly annoying stuttering issue (at least, that's the best word I can use to describe it). It does not constantly occur, the stuttering happening almost exclusively as I am attempting to travel a for a period of time in any direction.

I generally receive 40-60 fps, as conveyed by Fraps, but at the moment that these “stutters” occur, Fraps shows an almost instantaneous drop to <15 fps, and then a very quick rise back up to what the fps was before. However, that is not what appears to be occuring on the screen. What the stuttering / fps drop looks like is a sudden pause of everything in the game world, not including audio, and then a sudden resuming of the game world – just like the lagging that sometimes occurs in online games. These stutters rarely ever last longer than 1 second, and will usually occur in a quick succesion, 2-3 at a time.

I did, however, do my own thinking before I posted here. When these stutters occur, you can see objects appearing in the distance, as if the game is taking a moment to load a new block or “cell” that you are beginning to move into. I can totally understand why the game would do this, but not why it would have such a noticeable impact on gameplay. These stutters occur pretty much everywhere in the outside part of skyrim, and almost never in the indoor portions. They can also happen (sometimes) if I am standing still in and decide to turn around, but as far as I can tell, happen concurrently with terrain / other objects being that the game is loading in the distance.

Regardless of any graphical settings, this issue still persists. I can lower all settings to absolute minimum and have this still happen just as often. I recently updated my graphics card, so I'm rather annoyed that something like this is happening, while not occurring in any other program or game on my computer. I've looked up all the different bugs related to this, and none of the answer have helped me. FPS Limiters did nothing – just limited my fps. Disabling vsync with iPresentInterval=0 didn't fix it. Increasing uGridsToLoad value didn't fix it (but it did make the game look exceptionally better). Disabling shadows completely... no. The stuttering does not appear to be tied to the GPU in any way. I'm almost certain that it has something to do with the game loading object / textures from the Hard drive.

So, sorry for the wall of text, but long story short – I would like the opinion of someone who has an idea of whats going on. What do you think is going on and / or what do you think I should do? My Setup is:

Sandy Bridge i5 2400 – not overclocked
MSI P67A-C43
500 GB 7200 rpm HDD (HDS722525VLSA80)
ASUS ENGTX570 DCII/2DIS/1280MD5 - not overclocked
8gb (4x2gb) Patriot Memory 1333 MHz

 

[Skullrattla]

You're supposed to decrease uGridsToLoad! Default is 5, the minimum recommended.

Skyrim apparently uses the CPU, no the GPU, for quite a bit of the graphics work....

Otherwise try a lower resolution, fixes most problems

 

[Buzzfire]

Maybe its your system. I am on an xbox 360. No problems. You need a new system it sounds like. This game is so advanced, you need a very up to date computer. Good luck

 

[Skullrattla]

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1387

Now that we can utilize more than 2gb of RAM, we have to adjust the maximum amount of memory available to the game. This can be done by including iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes in Skyrim.ini under [Papyrus]:

iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=3000000000


The value is in bytes (Gigabytes x 1024 x 1024 x 1024). After alot of feedback it appears being more conservative with this amount provides better results. Because Skyrim is a 32-bit application it cannot address more than 4GB, so there is no benefit going higher than 4294967295.




fMasterFilePreLoadMB and iPreloadSizeLimit control the amount of RAM available for preloading. Going by past Bethesda games (Fallout 3, Oblivion) I will assume this determines a size limitation for the Cell Buffer (described later in "Draw Distance"). The value is in bytes (Megabytes x 1024 x 1024) and 268435456 (256mb) offers good stability for anyone with 4GB RAM or more.. 536870912 (512mb) works on my PC with 6GB RAM but I have not observed any performance benefit. Copy the following values into Skyrim.ini under [General]:


fMasterFilePreLoadMB=128.0000
iPreloadSizeLimit=268435456

I'm using 536870912 for iPreload , i have 4Gb RAM.

Draw Distance ================================



This has the biggest impact on both graphics and performance and is recommended for computers with 4GB of memory or more. uGridsToLoad controls how much of the game world is loaded, increasing this will make the distant areas in the game look much better. The game accepts odd values (5, 7, 9, 11, 13) with 5 being the default and 13 the highest value I have achieved during testing.

NOTE: Once you increase the value of uGridsToLoad any new saves will fail to load if you revert back to a lower value. CURRENT SAVES WILL NOT BREAK. THERE IS A SOLUTION TO FIX BROKEN SAVES. See FAQ for a solution to this problem. Copy the following values into Skyrim.ini under [General]:


uGridsToLoad=9
uInterior Cell Buffer=50
uExterior Cell Buffer=100


uInterior Cell Buffer and uExterior Cell Buffer control how much of the game world is buffered into memory, this needs to increase proportionally with uGridsToLoad. Stuttering can occur if the game attempts to fetch information from the hard disk and increasing these values will solve that problem by preloading a larger area of the world into RAM. uExterior Cell Buffer should be ATLEAST (uGridsToLoad + 1) ^ 2 but you can be more generous, some people have had better results by increasing this amount. uInterior Cell Buffer should be half uExterior Cell Buffer.

Example:
uGridsToLoad=7
7+1=8
8x8=64
uExterior Cell Buffer=64
uInterior Cell Buffer=32

Experiment with different values to see what performance you get. If the game crashes or keeps loading forever then try increasing the uExterior Cell Buffer or lowering uGridsToLoad, most people report 7 as the most stable value. Erasing all changes will revert the game back to defaults.

uGridsToLoad In Depth:
Beyond the loaded grids is just a sort of "skybox" area, containing no actors or objects, it is just a simple textured height map with some basic trees and fog, you cannot interact with it, nothing can be moved from the world into the skybox and vice versa. As you increase the value of uGridsToLoad you not only increase the Level Of Detail, you increase the entire game world itself including active NPC routines, infact increasing many of the LOD distances in SkyrimPrefs.ini will have no effect unless you increase uGridsToLoad first, remember you cannot push detail out of the world and into the skybox. Alot of people have been having trouble with this and I really need to emphasize the impact uGridsToLoad can have on performance. The reason for this is a CPU bottleneck in Skyrim caused by poor optimization and little support for multi-threading, you can prove this by making drastic changes to the resolution and MSAA and observing almost no difference in FPS. I have recently discovered that Skyrim actually uses the CPU for shadows instead of the GPU, so this is responsible for most of the performance issues people are having. Hopefully this is fixed in a patch, but until then you can read about improving shadow performance in the Shadows section of this guide, in terms of image quality scaling back shadows to gain an increase in uGridsToLoad is definitely a worthwhile trade off.

So, try also decreasing shadow quality and distance.

 

[njkilleen]

Thanks for the response! I won't be home for a few days, so I'm not realty in a position to see if these solutions work. However, the memory limit and buffer tweaks look very promising. I'll let you know how they go. In the meantime, if anyone else sees this thread and has any other potential solutions, don't hesitate to give them! It's greatly appreciated.

 

[Finalchrono]

You could also try giving TESV Acceleration Layer mod a try. It tends to improve FPS by about 8-10, sometimes a lot more. Here's the link for it.

 

[ShadowMage]

You could also try giving TESV Acceleration Layer mod a try. It tends to improve FPS by about 8-10, sometimes a lot more. Here's the link for it.

Unless you just named it, there s a +4 Giga-byte mod. That might help.

 

[ShadowMage]

Unless you just named it, there s a +4 Giga-byte mod. That might help.

It adds 4 giga bytes on skyrim (RAM, i think)

 

[Finalchrono]

You don't need a mod to do that. You can download the explorer suite to open the registry values for the game and tweak it to allow using >2 GB of memory. I'm not sure if the mod works with the new update anywho.

 

[ShadowMage]

You never know

 

[SaveVsBedWet]

You don't need a mod to do that. You can download the explorer suite to open the registry values for the game and tweak it to allow using >2 GB of memory. I'm not sure if the mod works with the new update anywho.

It doesn't, actually. I attempt to run the patch and am told there's nothing to patch despite the fact that it finds TESV.exe in the same directory and loads it up. The latest official update already unlocks 4GB capability.

There is quite the extensive Skyrim tweaking guide (20+ pages) on the NVidia website that explains in detail nearly every relevant setting that makes a difference to visual quality and performance, including this grid thing. It also tells what to optimize with NVControlPanel vs. in-game settings and gives a lot of screenshot examples with befores and afters and whatnot so you can see the effect of various changes. Also what settings changes are useless and which ones stop making a difference at which increment.

I found it while loading the 290.53 Beta drivers that NVidia is claiming increases Skyrim performance by 25% and which include the Skyrim specific 3D settings profile. The drivers are here --> http://www.geforce.com/News/articles/optimize-your-skyrim-experience

...as are the tweaking guides, so even if you are running an ATI you can still see the benefits of tuning skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini in detail.

Hope this helps!

 

[Finalchrono]

Yes the latest official patch is SUPPOSED to unlock 4GB capability, but when I checked the value for it, it doesn't say that it does. So, I dunno about that. It might be a precursor to setting up for it. It's kind of weird that this issue is being tackled as the program is made for 32-bit platforms and i'm not sure if the legacy code is compatible with using a larger address stack.

 

[njkilleen]

Thanks for all the responses! I'm finally able to reply with my results.

Essentially... not as good as I had hoped. Regardless of what I did to the uGridstoLoad, uExterior Cell Buffer, uInterior Cell Buffer, iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes, or any of the other settings mentioned by Skullrattla, there is no noticeable change in the frequency of the "stutters." I scaled all of the values as they were specified, both higher and lower than the default - no change (sometimes I even tried going way higher than the default... just to see if it would change anything). And yes, I am editing the Skyrim.ini / SkyrimPrefs.ini in the "Documents/My Games/Skyrim" directory. Regardless, thanks for the link to the Grahpics Guide, it will surely be helpful in the future.

The TESV acceleration layer does make some noticable performance benefits (in terms of fps), but it does not remove the stutters, or affect their occurance.

In terms of the 2gb limit thing... I found confirmation that the latest Skyrim update (1.3.10) does add official support for up to 4 gigabytes of RAM. (http://www.manuals.ws/news/view/id/66815/ ) I do have a 64bit version of Windows 7, so its not like the operating system is taking up part of the 4 gigabytes available to Skyrim. I also read about the CPU bottleneck that Skyrim seems to have (specifically with the shadows). There are a lot of people angry about the apparently "horrible" PC optimization that Bethesda has put into this game.

I'm quite positive this has something to do with objects being loaded in the distance... but none of the ini tweaks seem to be capable of smoothing out that process... the game just stutters as it happens... Its quite the immersion killer.

Are there any other suggestions out there?

 

[Skullrattla]

Dropping resolution is often the solution, or reduce your AntiAliasing.... is your graphics card good?

 

[njkilleen]

Like I said in the first post, regardless of the graphical settings, the stuttering happens. This includes AA, AF, and resolution. And yes, my graphics card is considered high end... so in theory, it shouldn't be the cause of this.

 

[Rayven]

I know you said you fiddled with all the settings but the ones I've had to tweak are the two with <item> distance which I didn't see you specifically reference in your posts. Please understand though that I actually run the game on a subpar system so I am not sure if this is useful to the folks with the bigger rigs. I can't turn without the entire world stuttering if I have the thing set on max distances. It is a range, however. I wonder if backing them down one notch or so might help you out.

 

[kmanx]

does your monitor support ur current resolution? if it does, are the drivers installed ok?, try a different one
if regardless of the resolution u have stuttering sounds to me that its a problem with the monitor, i had similar problems when my display drivers were not installed, also, do you have v-sync forced in? tripple buffering?

 

[njkilleen]

Sorry its been so long since I posted, but I finally found the solution, and its elegantly straightforward.

In fact, kmanx was the closest to correct. Something was wrong with the drivers.

I did a full, clean, driver sweeper removal of the video card drivers, and then re installed them. This COMPLETELY solved the issue - in fact it gave me a boost in performance over all. However, after I restarted the computer the stuttering came back... much to my dismay. I began to suspect that something was just plane messed up about my Windows 7 installation in general, and so, since I was a little overdue for a reformat/reinstallation of windows anyways, I went ahead and did just that.

After that was all said and done, the issue was permenantly gone. Distant objects/terrain load without a hitch, and overall framrate is noticably higher. Happy Ending!

To ANYONE experience a stuttering problem that they suspect is linked to distant loading objects, try a full and clean reinstallation of your video card drivers. I used driver sweeper to assist in this: http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/

If that only temporarily works, like it did for me, then its time to back up files and re-install windows. I'm not completely sure what caused this phenomenon, all I know is that the windows OS does tend to get slower as time goes on.

Thanks for everyone's assistance!