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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PC Performance discussion

moop1167

Member
Is it bad that I am manually installing and placing mods? I see that there is a mod organizer and stuff, but does that mean I have to delete everything and reinstall? I am worried about messing stuff up.

Also, if I do go with a mod organizer, do I unzip and unpack all of the mods I have downloaded or does the organizer do it on its own? Sorry, I can't look at most sites at work so I can't check it out myself.
 

coopolon

Member
For those of you using the Skyrim4GB LAA method from the Nexus, it looks like this suffers from a small problem that I had also noticed with the author's earlier FONV LAA mod: once you're finished playing the game, the mod's skyrim4gb.exe process does not terminate on its own. Last night I noticed that I had 66 instances of it running on my system thanks to me restarting the game a bunch of times to mess with various graphics settings. It's already been pointed out in the mod's comments, but the FONV one never got fixed, so I'm not holding my breath.

To work around it, I wrote a short AutoHotkey script that starts the game and then just forcibly closes the skyrim4gb.exe process once Skyrim itself exits. I'd be happy to share if anyone's interested.

Yah, I was a little confused when I opened up my task manager for a completely unrelated reason and saw 15 instances of skyrim4gb running.
 
I realize I need to use Transparency Supersampling too, I'm using Vurts Flora Overhaul and the games 8xAA setting, and the foliage look pretty crappy when viewed especially with the sky as backdrop..

I have a Imgur album with some shots, i'd be happy if anyone wanted to take a look :)
http://imgur.com/a/psJe2

your images look great.


whats your secret....i need your mods/settings nao
 
Can someone post instructions for the 4gbSkyrim thing, I haven't been keeping up with the thread and haven't played Skyrim since the update. Cheers.
 
Hopefully this is not a dumb question, but when I open MO to choose which game I am modding, I click Skyrim and then open. and it clears and doesn't do anything, it just goes back asking me which game I want to mod but I can never open it. What am I doing wrong?
 
Is there any way to improve my framerate in the big city battles? There must be somthing, I mean my CPU is crap but surely there's something I can do. It's single digits.
 

Oppo

Member
Is there any consensus on what are the basic, best/safest mods?

I want to tweak my game a bit, just running stock, but even though the OP says it's for casual folks, it is kind of overwhelming to me. Like I don't even know what panel to open or what the deal is with mods on Steam games, or what.

Someone help a poor n00b? Not afraid to move files but I typically work in OS X, and am Boot Camping Skyrim. Performance is excellent but again where to start...

Just say "download this and this and this" and I'll do it :)
 

Enco

Member
Can someone post instructions for the 4gbSkyrim thing, I haven't been keeping up with the thread and haven't played Skyrim since the update. Cheers.
Copy the files from the download into your Skyrim directory. Launch the game from the 4GBSkyrim exe. It'll still go through Steam.
 

MrBig

Member
Is there any consensus on what are the basic, best/safest mods?

I want to tweak my game a bit, just running stock, but even though the OP says it's for casual folks, it is kind of overwhelming to me. Like I don't even know what panel to open or what the deal is with mods on Steam games, or what.

Someone help a poor n00b? Not afraid to move files but I typically work in OS X, and am Boot Camping Skyrim. Performance is excellent but again where to start...

Just say "download this and this and this" and I'll do it :)

I'd say that Isoku's watermod and Vurt's Flora overhaul are the only mod that are currently requit.

Everything else is unfinished, unpolished, or just bad.

No major overhauls have been released yet and won't be until next year, a short while after the CK is released in January.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
I agree that there's only a handful of good mods. I mean it's all peanuts until the CK hits. Not that none of us don't appreciate what modders have done in this short span of time but the best is yet to come for Skyrim PC.
 

Enco

Member
Vurt's flora overhaul
Isoku's water mod
Xenius character enhancement
HQ food
HLP sky/enhanced night sky
More terrain noise
Realistic smoke and embers
Glowing ore veins

All brilliant mods that add a lot to the game.
 

Sethos

Banned
Vurt's flora overhaul
Isoku's water mod
Xenius character enhancement
HQ food
HLP sky/enhanced night sky
More terrain noise
Realistic smoke and embers
Glowing ore veins

All brilliant mods that add a lot to the game.

Can agree with most of those except the HQ food, pretty rubbish.
 

MrBig

Member
I agree that there's only a handful of good mods. I mean it's all peanuts until the CK hits. Not that none of us don't appreciate what modders have done in this short span of time but the best is yet to come for Skyrim PC.

I was not trying to say that some of the current standouts are bad, just that they are very, very few that can be used without issue or are polished enough to be used by a casual user. The two I listed were the first to come to mind.
 
was this posted?

how to get your weapon models into Skyrim.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVPicWtxTWk&feature=player_embedded

Holy freaking crap THANK YOU GOD.

Finally can get some actual custom stuff going now. My brother's already talking about converting some of his Oblivion greatswords (real greatswords, not tiny little claymores and such) to Skyrim.

Because I love the Nightingale Armor so much, I'm doing a hi-res version of it (not an upscale/sharpen job, doing it from scratch). Not done yet, but when it is I'll let you guys know. Here's a preview of it, just for reference.

J3D93.jpg
 
Haha fair enough :p


Ermm there are two files, right? I think so any way. Make sure you don't have a modified exe and make sure the files are in your root skyrim directory. Not the data folder. It has to be next to your proper skyrim exe.

Oh, I thought it was a new EXE and deleted the old one. :(

I'm verifying the files and downloading the regular exe again.
 

Haunted

Member
I agree that there's only a handful of good mods. I mean it's all peanuts until the CK hits. Not that none of us don't appreciate what modders have done in this short span of time but the best is yet to come for Skyrim PC.
What, the 72359 nude female mods not good enough for ya?

Seriously though, I agree. Some of the stuff out there is already great, especially considering the short time the game has been out and it's only going to get better from here.
 

grkazan12

Member
Hey guys I was wondering if anyone could help me with nexus mod manager, I was trying to install the water mod and

"A problem occurred during install
Access to path C:/Users/My Name/AppData/Local/Skyrim/plugins.txt is denied.
The mod was not installed."

I checked that file and it looks like I have full control over it except for special permissions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 

moop1167

Member
Is it bad that I am manually installing and placing mods? I see that there is a mod organizer and stuff, but does that mean I have to delete everything and reinstall? I am worried about messing stuff up.

Also, if I do go with a mod organizer, do I unzip and unpack all of the mods I have downloaded or does the organizer do it on its own? Sorry, I can't look at most sites at work so I can't check it out myself.

Quoting for new page, maybe someone can help.
 

Enco

Member
Oh, I thought it was a new EXE and deleted the old one. :(

I'm verifying the files and downloading the regular exe again.
Haha yea you need them both.

That's a pretty good one too.

Hey guys I was wondering if anyone could help me with nexus mod manager, I was trying to install the water mod and

"A problem occurred during install
Access to path C:/Users/My Name/AppData/Local/Skyrim/plugins.txt is denied.
The mod was not installed."

I checked that file and it looks like I have full control over it except for special permissions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Try running NMM as admin? You can also try using MO if you don't mind losing the update functionality.

Quoting for new page, maybe someone can help.
It's not bad but it'll be a HUGE pain when more mods come out. Disabling and removing each mod will be near impossible.

Here's a post a made a few pages back:

Updated the pics to remove the arrows as I felt they were distracting. Also changed some of the wording.

Small Version


Big Version
 

Oppo

Member
So I downloaded/registered the Nexus Mod Manager, and settled on these mods for now:

4GB (of course)
Vurt's Flora
Realistic Water Textures
Detailed Faces v2
Enhanced Distant Terrain
Serious HD Retextured Landscapes
Enhanced Night Sky

That seems like a nice starting point. I don't really want to mess with it too much especially with the official CK coming.

Question - do I need to manually back up TESV.exe or will the Mod Manager do that for me?
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Not sure if this has been brought up (it's a huge thread, haven't kept up with every post), but this mod that modifies the tree LOD textures with coloring for shadows is a nice little visual quality improvement, especially when dealing with the fall colored trees that just stand out so badly.

Before: http://h6.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0517-24-36k7jz.png
After: http://h6.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0517-23-2bw7s3.png

That looks good enough but I achived basically the same results with adjusting LOD and terrain settings in the ini. Speaking of which, the one that's bothering me now is the lighting that appears only at a certain radius. I need to figure this one out as it's not something I noticed early on but it's started to happen the last 10 hours or so of game.

PartTwo
I would recommend you get Mod Organizer in the OP. With Vurts flora mod, NMM basically tosses in all the meshes in and doesn't let you choose which pattern you want. MO lets you look at the file tree before adding the mod and pick the right bark and stuff. That's a huge deal with mods like this that have multiple choices for certain textures.
 

Fitz

Member
Not sure if this has been brought up (it's a huge thread, haven't kept up with every post), but this mod that modifies the tree LOD textures with coloring for shadows is a nice little visual quality improvement, especially when dealing with the fall colored trees that just stand out so badly.

Before: http://h6.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0517-24-36k7jz.png
After: http://h6.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0517-23-2bw7s3.png

Damn that looks really sexy, going to try it out later. The default LOD for trees looks so terrible.
 

Oppo

Member
LiquidMeta said:
PartTwo
I would recommend you get Mod Organizer in the OP. With Vurts flora mod, NMM basically tosses in all the meshes in and doesn't let you choose which pattern you want. MO lets you look at the file tree before adding the mod and pick the right bark and stuff. That's a huge deal with mods like this that have multiple choices for certain textures.

They seem to have updated it - it presented a dialog box with selections of which textures I wanted to install. Is that what you are referring to?
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
They seem to have updated it - it presented a dialog box with selections of which textures I wanted to install. Is that what you are referring to?

Yes, excellent. Stick to it unless you get crashes. It's not far off from MO. I may change the recommended once NMM gets better. Who don't even know if we will need these anymore once Steam launches its mod support.
 
So what would be the one mod that people are looking forward to the most.

This may sound weird, but it would be fantastic if someone could create a huge library out in the world, and you had to collect every book to populate the library. A list would be checked off once the book was added to the library :)
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
So what would be the one mod that people are looking forward to the most.

This may sound weird, but it would be fantastic if someone could create a huge library out in the world, and you had to collect every book to populate the library. A list would be checked off once the book was added to the library :)

That's one for the CK for sure. A library somewhere to store all the books in the game and toss duplicates in a bin or auto sell them. Great thought and I know someone will do that, I hope.
 

Oppo

Member
Actually I would really like (and fully expect from the modders) a custom bookshelf manager.

My mage is a collector and 11 books/shelf is a HIGH TRAVESTY.

LiquidMetal14 said:
Yes, excellent. Stick to it unless you get crashes. It's not far off from MO. I may change the recommended once NMM gets better. Who don't even know if we will need these anymore once Steam launches its mod support.

Indeed. No crashes, looks like all is well.

Really appreciate the help, LiquidMetal14 and Enco.

(and an addendum - seriously, the 2011 iMac (27" 6850m) just crushes this game. Really pleased.)
 
That looks good enough but I achived basically the same results with adjusting LOD and terrain settings in the ini. Speaking of which, the one that's bothering me now is the lighting that appears only at a certain radius. I need to figure this one out as it's not something I noticed early on but it's started to happen the last 10 hours or so of game.

What are your settings? I'd like to get the same effect by increasing the tree render distance instead of this "quick fix", but none of the tree-sounding variables I've tried to change did anything.
 
What to do if I am trying to clean my game back to vanilla but when I do my save files say that i'm missing files / mods now?

Is there a way to safely remove mods and keep my save file?

I'm playing around with a few things so hopefully I'll be able to get it going alright, but if anyone has any suggestions / knows what to do. That would be helpful :)
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
What are your settings? I'd like to get the same effect by increasing the tree render distance instead of this "quick fix", but none of the tree-sounding variables I've tried to change did anything.
Try these

[TerrainManager]
fTreeLoadDistance=125000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=300000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=90000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance=40000.0000
fBlockLoadDistanceLow=50000.0000
fBlockLoadDistance=125000.0000
fHighBlockLoadDistanceLow=50000.0000

[LOD]
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=50.0000
fLODFadeOutMultItems=50.0000
fLODFadeOutMultActors=50.0000

Colonial, you may have to set ugrids in the ini if it's at 9 like you said you changed it yesterday. Unless you stuck with 7. You're saying you want to play but go back to vanilla settings right? And I haven't tried to do lots with my saves outside of backing up but I'm not sure if mods hook into game saves like that but you should uninstall of delete everything from data/textures to be safe.

Back up your good ini you have now and remove both from Skyrim in my documents and have the game re ping your HW so it makes a new ini
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
This is worth a new post.

If you are getting tired of seeing lighting pop in during dungeons and also want to see light sources in more distant areas. No performance hit for me and like LOD and terrain management, it's small subtle things. Lighting pop in is pretty noticeable especially in dungeons when LOD settings are left at default. My LOD and terrain management settings are essential if you want to not notice glaring pop ins and more distant LOD. Gonna update my ini to reflect the following changes. Try these settings in SkyrimPrefs.

[Display]
fSpecularLODStartFade=8000.0000
fShadowLODStartFade=2000.0000
fLightLODStartFade=7000.0000

PIC
tesv2011-12-0521-31-2g6zzm.png


You may not notice this but the little lights that are down there are not as visible or prominent without editing the ini to let the engine produce lighting. It's far more noticeable in dungeons but outdoors, there is lighting LOD loss in distant areas without proper ini tweaks. Again, no performance hit for me. At least nothing subtle.
 
Try these

[TerrainManager]
fTreeLoadDistance=125000.0000
fBlockMaximumDistance=300000.0000
fBlockLevel1Distance=90000.0000
fBlockLevel0Distance=40000.0000
fBlockLoadDistanceLow=50000.0000
fBlockLoadDistance=125000.0000
fHighBlockLoadDistanceLow=50000.0000

[LOD]
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=50.0000
fLODFadeOutMultItems=50.0000
fLODFadeOutMultActors=50.0000

Those didn't do it for me (I had fTreeLoadDistance at 300000 already so I left that):
No mod, old ini: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-12-54o2ik.png
No mod, with above settings: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-10-3b450z.png

There ARE differences, most notably icicles on the stone structures in the upper left portion of the image, but it didn't do anything to the LODed trees. Can you grab an SS when you get a chance of that area just so I can see how it should be looking? It's looking NW from Stendarr's Beacon, in the very SE of the map near Riften.
 

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
Give me a few minutes as I'm currently looking at a setting that I accidentally changed for that to be noticeable.
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
Those didn't do it for me (I had fTreeLoadDistance at 300000 already so I left that):
No mod, old ini: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-12-54o2ik.png
No mod, with above settings: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-10-3b450z.png

There ARE differences, most notably icicles on the stone structures in the upper left portion of the image, but it didn't do anything to the LODed trees. Can you grab an SS when you get a chance of that area just so I can see how it should be looking? It's looking NW from Stendarr's Beacon, in the very SE of the map near Riften.

this wont help the lod, but it will help with making the distant trees blend in some: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=194

it basically just recolors them to be more dim/look like they have shadows.

194-1-1321708021.jpg
 

grkazan12

Member
Hey guys I was wondering if anyone could help me with nexus mod manager, I was trying to install the water mod and

"A problem occurred during install
Access to path C:/Users/My Name/AppData/Local/Skyrim/plugins.txt is denied.
The mod was not installed."

I checked that file and it looks like I have full control over it except for special permissions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't get it I've tried everything from unchecking it to not be read only and, turning of UAC, and enabling all the permissions in security. plugins.txt access is still denied for some reason.
 
Pretty sure the trees' lod is tied to the ugrids. Increase uGridstoLoad setting is about all you can do.

Mmm, well, I'm at 7, 9 is a bit too much, drops under 30 a lot, so guess I'll stick with using the mod... speaking of which...

this wont help the lod, but it will help with making the distant trees blend in some: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=194

it basically just recolors them to be more dim/look like they have shadows.

Yeah, I posted about it earlier on this page =P
 
Actually I would really like (and fully expect from the modders) a custom bookshelf manager.

My mage is a collector and 11 books/shelf is a HIGH TRAVESTY.



Indeed. No crashes, looks like all is well.

Really appreciate the help, LiquidMetal14 and Enco.

(and an addendum - seriously, the 2011 iMac (27" 6850m) just crushes this game. Really pleased.)

What iMac is that, there isn't a model with a 6850m?
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
Mmm, well, I'm at 7, 9 is a bit too much, drops under 30 a lot, so guess I'll stick with using the mod... speaking of which...



Yeah, I posted about it earlier on this page =P

sorry this threat is getting so long i tend to just read the last few post :)
 

Jubbly

Member
Those didn't do it for me (I had fTreeLoadDistance at 300000 already so I left that):
No mod, old ini: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-12-54o2ik.png
No mod, with above settings: http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-12-0521-10-3b450z.png

There ARE differences, most notably icicles on the stone structures in the upper left portion of the image, but it didn't do anything to the LODed trees. Can you grab an SS when you get a chance of that area just so I can see how it should be looking? It's looking NW from Stendarr's Beacon, in the very SE of the map near Riften.

Pretty sure the trees' lod is tied to the ugrids. Increase uGridstoLoad setting is about all you can do.

Yup, that is tied to uGrids: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=32757839&postcount=3273
 
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