"Abnormal" Skyrim ENB Performance Issue

[TheOkami]

EDIT: I've come across a topic similar to mine today and it seems that the AMD HD 6xxx series simply doesn't perform well with ENB at all (for whatever reason), at least that is what I've gathered from it. If anyone has any tips to improve my performance, advice would still be appreciated. Thank you.

First, I want to say that I was unable to find help from other topics on this board regarding my issue, but I apologize if this has been resolved before.

Anyway, to get an idea of my current setup, I am running the Opethfeldt 7 Beta ENB preset, I have all game settings set to Ultra, set 1920x1200 resolution, AA + FXAA are turned off (I only use Edge Detect AA provided through the ENB, hardware AA is set to use application settings), and Anisotropic filtering is turned off through the game, but forced on in the ENB at 16x. No mods or texture packs are installed, not even Bethesda's high-res pack. All of the ENB and Skyprefs settings are set according to the Opethfeldt instructions, except that I have enabled V-Sync (I found no performance change with it "true" or "false" in my testing, but I do get lots of screen tearing with it off) and set auto video memory detect function to "true" (again, setting VRAM in ENB to actual physical VRAM of 2048, less than 2048, or much higher had no immediate FPS impact in my testing). The ENB itself loads up properly, but startup and in-game load times are much slower than vanilla, no errors displayed and GUI works fine. My graphics drivers are up-to-date. Here are my relevant PC specs:

OS: Windows 8.1 64 bit
CPU: Intel i-7 2600K @ 3.40 ghz (yes, it is stock speed, I wanted to overclock, but found performance gains minimal while instability rose quickly)
RAM: 8gb Corsair Dominator, low latency
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6970 with 2gb of physical VRAM
NOTE: I have everything installed on a standard 1TB HDD as my SD drive died on me a couple years ago.

Now, I know my PC is not the greatest thing in the world right now, and if it simply can't handle an ENB well, then I will accept that; however, my issue seems to be abnormal from what I see other people getting for performance with similar specs to mine. With this PC I can run vanilla Skyrim with all settings enabled at maximum, including AA , with resolution set to 1920x1200 at a solid 60 fps or higher in most areas and in some demanding areas like lots of fog or complex lighting it drops to a minimum of 55fps. Initially, I expected a 10-15fps drop with ENB enabled, but instead I lose 50% or more of my frames most of the time. I read on STEP and other places that this could occur for people with mid-range or low-end PCs, but is this type of performance typical for my specs?

The real issue relates to what I would consider "abnormal" frame rate problems when I run the latest version of ENB Series (I have tried older versions with the same performance issue). Whenever I simply have ENB enabled, my frame rate drops by 50% outdoors, usually drops by 20%-30% indoors, and only drops by 10%-15% in dungeons, and sometimes inexplicably plummets to 80% frame rate loss in rooms or areas that shouldn't (at least not obviously) be any more demanding than adjoined or similar areas, i.e. the Companions Hall, the entryway of Dragonsreach Hall, and random places like a hallway in the Helgen dungeon with one or two torches and no objects. This all occurs with just the ENB enabled, with no effects turned on. When I turn all settings on, even SSAO and DOF at highest quality, there is anywhere from a 5-10fps loss depending on the area. If I enable high texture mods and various other graphical mods (not lighting or weather related), I lose an additional 5 fps. When I use other ENB presets, I also have the same issues, even "performance" presets have little to no impact when changing from "full" to "lite" versions. I guess I expected to lose lots of fps from key parts of ENB effects like SSAO, DOF, or skylighting; instead, those cause very little fps loss on their own, but simply turning the ENB on immediately cuts my fps in half. I've gone through and adjusted each main effect setting in-game as I was playing it and I couldn't find a single significant source of fps loss. Turning SSAO off by itself would lead to 5 fps gain, but turning all individual effects off (not Global) including SSAO would lead to the same small 5fps gain, sometimes 7fps depending on the environment. The only thing I have found to give me a noticeable frame rate gain is to reduce my resolution greatly, to something like 1440x900, which results in an average of a 5-10 fps gain, but still the sudden and inexplicable huge fps drop in random areas. Is this normal? Could something be configured improperly on my end? Is my system simply too weak to run even a lite ENB at a solid 30 fps without fluctuating to something like 19 fps inexplicably?

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could possibly enlighten me on what might be causing this issue or even if it is completely normal (I would be sad, but sometimes the truth hurts).

Here are my enblocal settings:

[GLOBAL]
UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false
UseDefferedRendering=true
ForceFakeVideocard=false
UseEffect=true
IgnoreCreationKit=true

[PERFORMANCE]
SpeedHack=true
EnableOcclusionCulling=true

[MULTIHEAD]
ForceVideoAdapterIndex=false
VideoAdapterIndex=0

[MEMORY]
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=true
DisableDriverMemoryManager=true
ReservedMemorySizeMb=512
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false
DisablePreloadToVRAM=false
VideoMemorySizeMb=0
EnableCompression=true
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=true

[WINDOW]
ForceBorderless=false
ForceBorderlessFullscreen=false

[ENGINE]
ForceAnisotropicFiltering=true
MaxAnisotropy=16
EnableVSync=true
AddDisplaySuperSamplingResolutions=false
ForceLodBias=false
LodBias=0.0
VSyncSkipNumFrames=0

[LIMITER]
WaitBusyRenderer=false
EnableFPSLimit=false
FPSLimit=60.0

[ANTIALIASING]
EnableEdgeAA=true
EnableSubPixelAA=true
EnableTemporalAA=false
EnableTransparencyAA=false

I didn't touch the default fixes. Please let me know if you need more information. Thanks!

[ENBSeries]

I think it's all about drivers, if you didn't any wrong changes in skyrimprefs.ini. Anyway, try these:
EnableOcclusionCulling=false
ReduceSystemMemoryUsage=false
DisableDriverMemoryManager=false
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=false

[TheOkami]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply and advice. Unfortunately, none of it improved performance for me. If it is a driver issue, then I'm out of luck and will have to hold off on ENB completely until I can buy an Nvidia card with hopefully more stable drivers. I have double checked my Skyrimprefs.ini and even replaced the whole file with your own Skyrimpref.ini settings that were posted on a different, but related thread and that didn't help either. Through recent testing, I've found that SSAO is the only significant source of performance loss relating to obvious ENB effects. If I switch off SSAO, I get somewhere between 5 and 10 extra fps, but never more and it isn't consistent. Switching everything else off has maybe a 2 or 3 fps impact. No matter what settings I change, my frame rate is extremely unstable, always dipping or raising by 10 or 15 fps just while running in an empty (besides standard vanilla clutter) dungeon. With SSAO disabled, it actually makes my fps worse in a way because it makes those dips and raises much larger in comparison, e.g. 40 - 17 fps from walking down the hallway that leads to the Helgen dungeon area in the beginning of the game. I could deal with constant 30-35 fps with ENB on, and it would be fine if I could limit the fps and keep it smooth, but I still get frequent and seemingly "directional" fps drops, as in facing a fire or an entry way kills fps, but being in the same room facing a different direction has no performance issues. Anyway, like I said before, setting resolution much lower improves performance greatly, regardless of game settings or mods installed. Using 1280x720 gets me somewhere between 45-50fps outdoors, but still drops to 15 in those "strange" spots. Also, I literally see no fps increase from playing in 1280 x 720 with low settings vs. ultra settings. However, 1280 x 720 is not 16:10 and looks like complete garbage on my 24 inch monitor with a native 1920x1200 resolution. 1280x800 looks a little better, but is still stretched horizontally. Something strange I've experienced is the 16:10 1440x900 and 1680x1050 resolutions offer almost no fps improvement, but the 16:9 1440x810 and 1680x945 do offer a 20 and 15 fps boost respectively; however they both create huge ugly artifacts around the letterbox and all objects in the game. If I turn the ENB off, the 16:9 resolutions work fine, albeit still not very good looking on my monitor. Alas, I guess ENB was not meant to be for me. Thanks anyway!

[ENBSeries]

Low performance while looking at fire or particles is prehistoric issue which can't happen with your videocard. If you sure it is, then may be some shaders not compiled by driver and then performance is very low, at least nvidia act like that on errors (but again, this is driver or some third party software bug then). In general performance drops while moving means you don't have enough vram, decrease quality of textures and remove texture packs, disable ENBoost at all.

[TheOkami]

Yeah, I know what you mean. It isn't all fire and torches from what I can tell, but it does happen in specific areas. Before, I would get low performance from looking at fire if I had super high-res HD Fire mod installed, but I don't use that mod and this ENB preset doesn't add any custom fire textures. Maybe it is a lighting issue? But then again, disabling all effects doesn't prevent it, only disabling global settings entirely works. To give you an example, I enter the Hall of the Companions with ENB on, and the big fire pit in the middle brings my fps down from a base of 25 to 12 when my camera is facing it. If I set my resolution lower with the same graphics settings with ENB on, it goes from a base of 40 to 12 instead. With ENB off, solid 60 fps (locked to refresh rate) no matter if I'm facing fire or not. Facing away with ENB on, however, has less of an impact on my frame rate and other places with big fire pits like the Jarl's Hall in Dragonsreach have no impact at all on fps...but the entry way of the Jarl's Hall with no lighting except the top skylight causes my fps to drop whenever I face it. Of course, I have the occasional 5 fps drop when spinning around quickly or just after I exit a building into a big city, but the frame rate loss when looking at certain areas or entering areas that don't seem like performance killers is really confusing to me. I will try decreasing all settings and disabling ENBoost (which I haven't tried yet). If that doesn't work, then I guess it really isn't ENB's fault. I've spent all week after work and during the past weekend trying to figure this out, haha, I think tweaking Skyrim is an addiction, I should spend more time actually playing the game! Thanks again for the help, I really appreciate it!

[ENBSeries]

New ideas i got are:
1) particle lighting enabled in enbseries.ini and fire source have a lot of quads.
2) soft particles enabled and result is kind the same as in previous case.
In both cases i saw maximal performance drop from 45 to 38 fps at one interior location with gf9600gt and 1280*960, my current videocard is "immune" to this. Resolution is not just amount of pixels drawed, internal computations also cost extra video memory, so better to measure how much free vram do you have with high resolution (native to display). Enabling antialiasing or especially when it's forced in drivers (or tools like radeon pro) will lead to extremely high costs of vram.

[hager13]

Hmm i think the performance drop is not abnormal. I also play with opethfeldt but in 1080p. I have a 7850 running at 1100mhz so performance should be higher than your card and i get 30-40 frames. Highly Performance friendly grass mod lowers my frames into the 20 in some areas.

You can try to lower your settings. I use ewi's inis which brought me 5 more frames per second. Or you can make a costum resolution and let the monitor don't interpolate to fullscreen, so you can play with black borders and a smaller screen.

[TheOkami]

Haha, yes, that is why I put "abnormal" in quotations because I wasn't sure if it was truly abnormal or not. However, the sudden drop in frame rate in certain contained areas when looking in a specific direction does seem strange to me. Yesterday evening I spent a lot of time testing my VRAM usage and overall GPU load to see how it coincided with these sudden drops in performance, if at all. What I found seems silly now, it seems that shadows are the main culprit. I did lots of testing with many configurations and the only thing that would stop the sudden drops was turning off shadows or setting them on low. What is even stranger in my mind though is that shadows only affect my performance greatly in those specific small areas when the ENB is enabled. I turned off v-sync the other day to see my true frame rate. My minimal frame rate with ENB off and all vanilla settings maxed out (except for AA) at 1920x1200 was 77 fps out in a forest with grass and tree shadows turned on. My maximum frame rate was 180 fps indoors facing a corner, but on average my frames were about 80-90 fps outside or in cities, and 100-140 fps indoors, even when standing in front of the same "problem spots" that would kill my frame rate with the ENB on. Looking at GPU performance with maximum vanilla settings, including ultra shadows, the report indicates regular intervals of 75%-85% usage for 4 or 5 seconds in between longer stretches of 100% usage. In no instance does physical or dedicated VRAM usage ever exceed 1068mb or about half of my available VRAM, never mind shared memory. With ENB enabled, the GPU performance remains the same, or at least gives very similar results. The main difference with all vanilla settings unchanged with ENB enabled and all ENB effects turned off, my frame rate averages at 37-43 fps in in walled cities, 27-33 fps in nature environments, 43-56 fps indoors, and maximal frame rates of 60 fps if facing a corner or in a relatively empty dungeon. If I turn all the effects on, I see a 2-7 fps drop, but it isn't consistent across all areas. However, there is a big difference in sudden drops to below 20 fps when I turn shadows down to low. Actually, It seems to completely eliminate all fps drop and there is no performance difference. What I can't understand though is why does the performance issue only happen with ENB on? I turn it off and there is no performance drop with ultra shadows relative to the baseline, it's as if there is no effect really. With ENB on and shadows high or ultra, there is a very big hit on fps in those specific areas facing a certain direction. It doesn't matter if I turn off all ENB effects, the performance drop still happens. I even checked to see if VRAM was maxing out, but it wasn't at all, in fact is stayed the same as vanilla skyrim, only reached a maximal level of 1080mb and it was even lower when the performance drops occurred. The only thing that stood out to me was GPU usage dropped to 75%-80% when the performance drop occurs. One might think 100% GPU usage would be where the drop occurs, but it doesn't. Any ideas on what might be happening here? So it seems I honestly see half of my vanilla performance on average, more in natural environments and less inside. Disabling all performance options like ENBoost doesn't seem to have any affect on my performance either, but I have noticed slightly shorter load times. Thanks for all the feedback!

[aRadiatedN00dle]

I also get a performance drop when "UseEffect" under [Global] is set to true, regardless of the
fact that I've to my knowledge disabled all the effects.

When wandering around the marshy area behind the Solitude docks, as long
as "UseEffect" is disabled, performance stays at 60fps.
When "UseEffect" is enabled, despite all the effects being manually disabled, the frame rate drops down to about 45fps.

I really like to use sun rays, adaptation, cloud shadows, and other little tweaks with ENB. They're brilliant! But It seems like there's
something else outside the realm of those effects that's causing a performance decrease...


*Update

The whole "Global effects enabled but manually disabling all effects still shows performance decrease" thing still applies here, but I found that grass shadows seem
to be the main culprit in this scenario. Still isn't a fix really, but it helps to disable them.


System Specifications:

Motherboard: GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev 1.1
OS: Windows 7 home Premium 64-bit
CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7850
RAM: 4Gb DDR3 1333Mhz
SPU: Creative SB Audigy 4 & Onboard Realtek HD

[grantchester]

Hey, I'm having a same problem.

Of all sudden, I didn't add any new mods, I started to play Skyrim again on Feb 11th, and I got infinite loading screen. My last save was made on Feb 9th, and it all ran fine. And after many tries, I finally manage to load a game but whenever I turn around my view, I get 0~2fps freeze/stutter. It's almost like slide show, it stops for 4~8 seconds, and it moves, and then it freezes again, and it moves again...

I checked my GPU Usage, and whenever it's stuttering, its usage goes to 0~1%. My average framerate whenever I don't turn around and stay still is about 45~55fps and GPU usage is around 70~90%. Plus, before this stuttering happned my Vram usage was usually 3.8~3.9gb, but now it's around 2.0~3.5gb. (I'm using GTX980)

When I make EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=true on enblocal.ini, it runs so smooth without any suttering or lags, but I frequently get CTD and low frame rates time to time. I tried turning off VSync, borderless fullscreen, reseting skyrimpref.ini skyrim.ini, complete fresh reinstall of skyrim and mod organizer and enb, etc etc. It runs fine with vanilla game without enb. To test if it's because of installed mods, I tried game with only enb installed on vanilla game and the same stuttering was happening.

So I'm also assuming it's some other software (or crapware) that's causing this, but I'm still not sure. During 8th to 11th, I have installed Flash Player 20.0.0.306 Update of PPAPI-NPAPI-ActiveX, Java 8 Update 73, .NET Framework 4.6.1, Firefox 44.0.2, Mozilla Maintenance Service, and Nexus Mod Manager 0.61.13 update.

My PC is

Windows 7 64bit
i7-4790k
GTX980 Strix
32gb Memory (8gb *4)
850Pro SSD (My fresh new install is made on HDD)

And the enb preset I was using is RealvisionENB.