SureAI

Of course you got less FPS in a forest or if you look from the south west towards the north east. Because there is the (drawcall heavy) main landmass.



It's actually the opposite for me in terms of direction - if I'm looking just west of South (towards the sea) my frame rate drops to 40 FPS.

It climbs relative to my position opposite that, until it hits the max (100 FPS) when I'm 180 degrees from South south-west.

That's looking directly at the most populated area of the game.

I've been running through many different settings, optimizations, windowed, full screen, g sync on and off, hardware v sync, software v sync....it doesn't change.

Very, very strange.

In the interest of helping solve the issue, I have two screen shots to show.

I've figured out that it's not the direction I'm facing in general, it's just some areas or objects that cause a 60+/- FPS swing.

For example, if I'm facing this:

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I get 40-50 FPS.

If I stand in the same place and face this:

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I get 100 FPS. It doesn't matter where I'm standing, if I'm facing the castle in the first picture my FPS drops, whether it's to my south, west, north, or east.

I'm wondering if it's volumetric lighting, fog effects...? Never seen anything like this.

BTW I've tried this scenario using a single CPU core, 4+ cores, v sync on, off, g sync, windowed, full screen, draw distance way down, and many other things. Nothing changes.

Somehow I'm getting the same exact framerate dips with the same settings (ultra) in 1080p as in 4k (except I turn off AA in 4k). Vsync is on in nvidia inspector, not in the launcher (should I change that?, I usually don't use in game vsync). It's mostly 60fps but can dip into the high 30s and 40s. And it behaves the same despite what resolution I'm using. I have 2 980ti's in sli, so at least 1080p should have no issues. Enderal isn't that much more needy of resources than vanilla skyrim, is it?

I notice, however, my gpu usage for each card doesn't get anywhere near full. Does Enderal do something to the point that the Skyrim sli profile doesn't work right? I also see that despite choosing to use 4 cpus (I have 8, what setting is best?) my 1st cpu is getting disproportionately more load.

The Skyrim Engine can't use todays CPU/GPU Power and it's mostly limited by the 32bit engine it is based on.

I know that threaded optimisation is experimental, but are there any threaded optimisation options which cause issues with Enderal known already?

I'm also having serious performance issues when looking at certain areas and also just the sun. I already tried full threaded optimisation and utilizing all 8 cores, but that changes nothing. I'm attaching a screenshot to show an area where I'm getting horrible drops down to 30. Besides that my game is running stable at 60fps. What setting actually cuases these issues?

I'm a new player to Skyrim in general, I've never managed to become immersed with the questing or the world. However, with Enderal it’s quite the contrary. This masterpiece has finally managed to appeal to me in such a way which Bethesda has failed to do with their previous releases, and thus far I’m really enjoying the storyline, and the world created. To this I applaud tremendously.

That being said, such a beautiful game is not without its performance issues, and I’m no stranger to the engine limitations. I’m familiar with the various different methods of tweaking .ini files in a number of different game engines such as Unreal Engine, trying to get the best visual and performance benefits for glorious atheistically pleasing games and this here, is no different. Frankly not even attempting to improve visuals is doing this mod unjust, it’s that stunning.

Enthusiasm aside, high and ultra-default graphic parameters in Skyrim aren’t great as a lot of you are aware of, and are experiencing right now. Although the game is indeed playable, I find personally that 30-40 FPS is just not enjoyable in any game and I’ve created my own personal parameters that primarily adjust draw distance, shadows and lighting which are the most taxing I’ve found with this mod and Skyrim modding in general. I’m not a long time Elder Scrolls mod user, and I’m aware a decade’s worth of information and tools are readily available for this game/engine, however hopefully my testing is somewhat helpful specifically for this mod.

Testing/playing rig:
Acer XB271HU 27" 165Hz G-Sync
CPU: i7 4790K @ 4.4GHz
COOLING: Corsair H100i
MOBO: Asus Maximus VII Ranger
RAM: 16GB Corsair Memory Vengeance Black @1600 MHz
SSD: 250GB Samsung 840 EVO (Skyrim Installled here)
GPU: 6GB 2x SLI MSI GTX 980 Ti Twin Frozr 6G (SLI OFF)

Basic settings:
2560 x 1440
4x MSAA
16x AF
“Very High” textures
.INI was edited with Skyrim Configurator and manually and is mixed between high/ultra settings
No ENB’s

Immediately starting the game, I noticed like a lot of people the framerate tanked to 40 FPS during the introduction and rising to 60 elsewhere, too often would performance dip to unenjoyable levels. And so it appears that the sun lighting is a culprit for a lot of users. I’ve found this to be true, however, shadows also play a part in this too. Blocky shadows and performance, are big immersion breakers for me and that was what prompted me to begin tweaking.

After hours of tweaking and getting the game to look somewhat better with shadows and lighting performance, I’m able to run 2k-8k shadow resolution at a solid 60FPS, pretty much everywhere in the world, nonetheless there are still places where it is almost impossible for me to solve. I’ve compiled some images that demonstrate some of the issues I’ve come across in the early areas of the game, and most of the issues reported in this thread have been solved with my tweaks on my system at least. I’ve no comparisons to go by but what I can say is the game performs much better than the default settings. Will add comparisons if requested. The .ini settings won’t be included yet, still doing some tweaks and tests.
These images are from I believe to be the same location, and one location where I based all my tweaking on, it's working well for general play.

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This area hit my performance really hard before ini tweaking.

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I had better results than unmeaty in this location. Need to do more testing without my settings here, could be hardware related?

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However, as he speculated volumetric lighting or similar effect is lowering performance in some areas. Shadow and lighting tweaking had no effect on this issue.

Here are a few more images, and includes one world object/geometry I cannot optimise through tweaking. (minimal spoilers) http://imgur.com/a/1JZVE

This video has the tweaked .ini and shows a significant performance increase over the default perameters and is stutter free. 8K shadows did dip during one instance admittedly but doesn't occur at 2k-4k. (Loving the soundtrack )



Edit: In summary, play around with SHADOWS, LIGHTING and DRAW DISTANCE (I've tested this again with lower draw distance and I hit 40-50PS outside of Riverville, not a fan of object pop-in though will continue to tweak this.) this wil 95% improve your performance at the moment. It is possible for this mod to run great and look awesome at the same time, but it would be unrealistic to expect it to be a solid performer all the time, nonetheless if we can alleviate the issues highlighted in this thread, I've no doubt it will become a much more enjoyable experience for everybody with a range of different setups.

Deathstr0ke_DC,

I have a similar setup as you. Can I get your actual settings?

And you recommend not doing SLI with this game?

I've been blaming enderal, not knowing how messed up skyrim's engine is. I never ran it on a rig like this. I just expected my new computer to sleigh it in 4k at constant 60fps. Obviously, I did not know Skyrim's inherent limitations.

Sure, I've adjusted and tested it for 4K DSR but not extensively. Same performance from my initial post and if you have a similar or better CPU than me, I expect you to have better results. You may have to change the resolution in SkyrimPrefs.ini if it doesn't match your native resolution

I do not recommend SLI with this game unless you use high resolution textures e.g. 4k/8k. GPU and CPU usage does not scale very well at all—because of the 32bit engine limitation. Furthemore, I've noticed water being bugged with SLI so I haven't bothered using it, and it is unlikely you'd see performance gains at any resolution similar to say, the Witcher 3.

To some degree, Enderal strains the CPU more so than vanilla because of the mods it uses and hand crafted world design I'd assume. Which is why we have a slightly higher system requirements.

Let me know how it runs.

Thanks. So after dropping these in my folder, never use the launcher settings again or will mess it up? I'm bummed that it seems like you can't get this running perfectly even with the beefiest hardware because of how the game was made.

Are there any settings in the launcher that aren't in these files? If so, do you have suggestions for them?

The worst case it will just overwrite the settings and you'll have to install my tweaks again. I'm not entirely sure but once you've used the new settings once, you should be fine. Leave Shadow details and Blur quality in the launcher, that will indeed revert the changes. Yeah, it's a shame but atleast we get the Skyrim remaster soon, hopefully ione day this mod makes it to the 64bit client.

Edit: Just tried it, overwrites the changes. When I have time II'll pick out the individual changes.

Does cpu usage do anything? I heard the engine can't use more than 2 cores, so why is there an option?

I have memory usage to 10 and I wonder if it's doing a thing with that either.

I think that setting in the .ini is inumhwthreads=# and it shouldn't have a performance gain in Skyrim. Maybe in Fallout 4 though. If you check your CPU utilisation you'll get a rough idea about if it has an effect or not.

Slightly off topic, but I'm actually having trouble with another game, a sports game of all things. Sometimes I think my rig wasn't even worth it because so few games will even take advantage of half its power, it feels like.

I have a Gtx 770 2gb and a AMD FX 8350 8 core

From the beginning i noticed some frame drops while looking north east but it was playable until i arrived to Riverville. There the framerate goes from a solid 60 to 30 or less ruining the experience, it's almost unplayable for me now.
I tried everything, lowering the settings and all that but nothing changes, i don't know why but even at very low the framerate goes down to 30 or 25 sometimes.
I know my graphic card is not the top but i think i should be able to play this game fine one way or another. I don't want to sound harsh but i wonder if you actually test the game.

I hope you or someone can fix this, i was really looking forward to play this, i told some of my friends about it and spread the voice on various sites and now i'm a bit sad that it doesn't work well.

I hope you don't feel offended by these last lines. I wouldn't have written this if i didn't care about it.

Actually i got major fps drop (25-35 fps) in this specific place (20 % of my gpu!gtx 970)
if i look in another direction everthings fine

when i say this specific place, i mean when i'm outside and if i look in direction of the screenshot below, i got this fps drop too

I found out that the problem is due to an excessive number of draw calls, too much objects, shadows, ecc... to render across the map.
It doesn't matter what graphic settings you use or how powerful your CPU is since the Skyrim engine is a bit old and limited, there will always be a poor performance looking north east if you are in the south west corner of the map and near towns like Riverville.

In few words the mod itself is unstable and not well optimized.
We can't do nothing about it.

That's in Old Three River Watch, right? I see a similar drop there too. Just looking towards the watchhouse, even from a distance--like even from Jespar's camp--causes steep FPS drops on my system (i5-3570K + R9 280X + 16GB RAM). I've been able to get a lesser drop, to 40-45FPS instead of 30FPS or even lower, by turning overall draw distance and object draw distance to 8, light draw distance to 30, AA to 2x, and AF to 4x. (If that information helps anyone seeing performance issues.) But I have a feeling I'd see a drop there no matter what; something's screwy with that location in particular.

Everyone that's posted in this page should download Deathstr0ke DC's ini's on the page 4. They work great. I had the same issues but I'm now getting 60fps near riverwatch.

This is my first post on this forum. I signed up for an account just so I could say that Deathstr0ke_DC ini edit files worked really well for me. Now I can run this game at 4k resolution on ultra settings and for the most part stay at 60 FPS. Which is a better result than i was getting before installing those ini edits...even when I factor in that I was playing at only 1080 resolution then. So If you have a nice rig, I suggest you back up your Skyrim and SkyrimPref ini files, and then try out Deathstr0ke_DC ini edits. Thank you for working on them Deathstr0ke_DC.