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Correct Enblocal Settings


prizner

Question

So I was installing SkyRealism using the enb guide and I noticed the site https://www.iparadigm.org/pages/pnenb/ENBoost.html used for getting parameters for the memory section of enblocal no longer works. After some digging I found there were some formulas to come up with the needed information but as I am still unsure if I fully understand them I was wondering if anyone here could help? I have gtx 680 4GB and 12GB of ram with a i7 980x. Thanks!

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@keith

 

Can you update update your mod list and the inis on Modwat.ch please?

 

ps: you have a 2x fFlickeringLightDistance=8912p misplaced at [display]

ps2: ini=prefs

 

thanks

i'm trying to fix my script lag

Thanks - the Modwat.ch uploader is not working for me ATM (getting an error, as mentioned on the comments thread for the mod), and that double entry for fFlickeringLightDistance was a snapshot between .ini edits - I am doing an experiment to double check which heading it goes under. I hope to figure out what is causing the Modwat.ch uploader error soon...

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Yeah yet another testing done.... no difference at all with those settings on my system and mod list. The game is just the same for me. The only thing that really does matter is if you use ini settings to force full LOD for all objects, and altering drawing distances. This will have an effect on performance and stability in return. But that should pretty much go without saying. 

And again thanks to keith for being on top of the technical stuff! Much appreciated! 

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I used to use all the multi-core / multi-thread .ini settings when I was using my iMac with a quad i7, but then after some discussions with the author of Queue, the author of SSME, and some deep forum scouring, I found that all the settings with HWThread should only be used if you've got a processor with 6 or 8 physical cores. The last update of Skyrim was definitely quad / duo core aware, and multi-threaded, so no other tweaks are needed.

Keithinhanoi, assuming I have a processor that has 6 or 8 physical cores, what HWThread settings should I use in my INI? (Not that I actually have a 6 or 8 core processor, just asking for the sake of interest)

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Sorry to bother with so much "old news", Keith. I'm 100% new to this particular game, and have some time off before going back to work soon, so I thought I'd share a new perspective and maybe learn some new things about the new engine. My days of scouring the internet, sifting through crap to find a diamond have passed. STEP seems to know their stuff, or at least how to go about finding it, so rather than going round taking everything for granted, I came here to get your insight and confirm.

This is why I ask questions, and want to know detailed information from people who have tested these things themselves. I feel like you're reading my posts with a voice in your head that makes me sound like a hyper-active 12-year old who's just learned that ~ brings the console up in practically every game since somewhere in the 90's... {mind blown}

I was a QA tester at EA for 7 years, so I can assure you it's not uncommon to get stuck in the mindset that "everything that's been tested is true and will always be true", then some punk figures out that an entire block of code works differently than even the programmer thought. lol. Unintended functionality they call it. So I apologize if challenging the accepted norm comes off annoying and redundant. I'm one of those people who likes to see things for myself before believing anything, especially on the internet, and especially when it comes to the functionality of games.

One case in particular that I can share where old news is just that, and challenging it can produce new findings, was in the STEP guide itself under 3.B.1 Optimize Field of View. Changing the FOV in the INI does persist. Looking further into it, one can easily find out how with Google as well. 

In addition to the following lines in Skyrim.INI

[Display]

fDefaultWorldFOV = 120

fDefault1stPersonFOV = 120

You'll easily find that adding this to SkyrimPrefs.INI

[General]
fDefaultFOV=120

Allows the change to persist. 

However... personally... I found that you don't need to add that line to SkyrimPrefs specifically. You can add it under General in Skyrim.INI and it works exactly the same. And if you start a new game you never need to enter an FOV in the console either.

Extremely small finding, I admit. Most of which can be found through Google in fact. But I hope it goes to show that not everything which is set in stone is infallible, and that rehashing old notions can be a good thing if you're goal truly is to be thorough and discover optimal configurations.

Currently, I'm testing certain background loading settings in the INI files. One of them causes the horse carts in the beginning of the game to speed up and jump over large rocks in Helgen, turning around, flipping upside down, then eventually pushing the carts from the back. In one instance, Hadvar ended up inside my character's cart, never got off his horse, and asked me who I was while mounted on a horse inside the cart... Strange things. Seemingly unrelated, yet producing absolutely bonkers results. Same settings out in the world?... never noticed an issue anywhere at all. I'm about to pinpoint exactly which of the lines caused it, so I'll share that later today. It's pretty fun to watch actually.

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It never ceases to amaze me that the myth of iPreloadSizeLimit and iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes continues to this day.

 

These are the modern equivalent of snake oil for Skyrim.

I agree with you that myths about ini settings abound but the problem as I see it is:

Gamers that are unsure of these settings, of which I am one, will find it hard to know who to believe unless they have been around the traps a while and seen the refutations about said settings.

 

I am currently doing my own search about all the settings for all the MO supported games and trying to compile them into a document that shows accurate and helpful information. Besides the dearth of anything helpful for 90% of settings, the remaining 10% are so widely discussed that a Google for them results in pages and pages of useless stuff that may contain a glimmer of truth.

 

It's only when I come across posts from users that I trust that I can now be sure of what is and isn't true, or at least the best established practice.

Until there is a definitive guide for these settings there will always be discussions like this and the cache of pages scoured by Google will increase whilst never actually providing anything useful.

This is partly the reason why I steer a way from ini tweaking unless a mod specifically asks to use it.

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Keithinhanoi, assuming I have a processor that has 6 or 8 physical cores, what HWThread settings should I use in my INI? (Not that I actually have a 6 or 8 core processor, just asking for the sake of interest)

From all the reading I've done on those .ini settings, these are all you need to edit:

[General]
iNumHWThreads=
 
iHWThread6=
iHWThread5=
iHWThread4=
iHWThread3=
iHWThread2=
iHWThread1=
 
iAIThread2HWThread=
iAIThread1HWThread=
iRenderingThread2HWThread=
iRenderingThread1HWThread=

All the settings with the word threaded or background are either not actually read by the game, the game does nothing with the setting, or have strange / unpredictable consequences - as kyd462 seems to have discovered with the bouncy horse cart ride at the start of the game.

 

 

@kyd462

 

No worries and no reason to apologize! It's important that people know those two settings don't actually work any miracles. Honestly though, when I first read about them, I thought I had made a discovery that would get rid of my CTDs. The problem is that the myth has been propagated so long and widely that nearly all links in a Google, etc. search will seem to confirm they should do something helpful. But when you start reading them, it's a lot of "I heard that X setting in Skyrim.ini does blah blah!"

 

As for the FOV being set in the .ini, I also used to have it in my .ini, but then found out that it's not guaranteed to stay at that FOV in your game if you only set it in the .ini. The best way to make sure the FOV setting stays set the way you want, do it using the console, and on your next save, it's "baked" into that playthrough. Alternatively, it can be set by any mods that let you change it through an MCM menu, such as Customizable Camera.

 

I think we're all for exploration around here, though - so please keep letting us know about anything interesting you find!  ::):

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Keith, thank you for all your insight. It's been very helpful. I've got a few interesting things to share, but best of all...

NO MORE STUTTER!!! Found some settings that got rid of it almost entirely!

giphy.gif

First on the list: iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes... Another case of "woops, forgot to set everything back to default before testing a new line out." I blame the new gray hairs, but my wife tells me I've always been forgetful. I don't remember that ever being the case, so maybe she's right. But I digress... If you want some good fun, set this ridiculously high and start a new game. I had mine at 12884901888, and it was like bumper cars in Helgen! That much is repeatable every time, but sometimes you get some bonuses. Especially in combination with all the "thread" settings Keith warns about. A Thalmor floating up into the air while Ralof's head tracks him during his dialogue. A horse cart glitching so bad it topples over and never gets to its destination before the rest of the scripts start running. Then rights itself during General Tulius' speech and plows through everyone. lol... really great stuff. Well worth breaking the game to see.

The Elusive Stutter Fix: This was so obvious, I would've faceplamed if I weren't so excited to see that it worked. When I say "worked", I mean that stutter is practically gone! I can finally ride a horse from Whiterun through Labyrinthian and back without even a little skip. But it comes at a small price, and leads me to believe there's a better solution that would take a lot more time testing.

SkyrimPrefs.INI

[TerrainManager]

fTreeLoadDistance =57500.0000

fBlockMaximumDistance =200000.0000

fBlockLevel1Distance =50000.0000       ;Primary Solution

fBlockLevel0Distance =25000.0000       ;Primary Solution

fSplitDistanceMult =1.3

 

The settings above are averaged between Ultra and High defaults. The result in-game is actually very close to Ultra, hardly noticeable, but without any stutter. The two that mattered most were the "fBlockLevel" lines. I only altered the others to keep consistency with the new load distances of the others. Now, this particular solution assumed that decreasing would solve the issue, but I'm still testing to see if the inverse is true as well, but have yet to find a sweet spot that doesn't drop my FPS as well. I believe the major cause of the "bottleneck" that leads to stutter is in the engine's handling of LOD. These settings seem to affect mid-level LOD switching the most.

For me, it is a little bit of a trade off. I always try to push the LOD settings to get a better view. I do notice that actors and scenery load just a tad closer than I'd like (I actually felt that Ultra's distances were just right, not perfect, but not bad either). Still, I use Dynavision, so at least most of the LOD switching is blurred in the distance anyway. STEP also has a few good LOD mods in the list that make certain things a little better as well.

Finding this almost makes me want to dig even deeper now. I'm certain there's a combination of settings that could fine tune the whole LOD system to be a bit more graceful, and not have to sacrifice any distance to get rid of that stutter. Essentially, the goal would be to load as much terrain info as possible within a reasonable distance, and adjust the fade-in distances for low, medium, high to be more gradual and less abrupt. Of course, I'm pretty sure most of the control over LOD lies within the nif files themselves though. sigh...


INI Categories and Such: Well, I did a ton of tests with this today, and discovered some useful stuff in the process.

  1. Categories DO matter. That's a fact, Jack. Juxtaposing settings from one category to another forces the engine to use whatever the default for that setting usually is, and the misplaced setting is just ignored. If anyone has any plans to compile an INI guide, then I'd say it's in everyone's best interest to determine exactly what goes exactly where.
     
  2. Order within a category DOES NOT matter at all. If someone says to specifically place fDefaultFOV at the bottom of the [General] section, feel free to disregard this and place it between iHWThread3 and iHWThread4 if you like it there. As long as the setting is in the correct category, it doesn't matter where it appears in that list.
     
  3. (Most) Settings only work when placed in the correct INI. Earlier I'd mentioned that fDefaultFOV didn't need to be in SkyrimPrefs.INI to work correctly with the FOV solution, that it could go into Skyrim.INI and work just the same. This is true. However, the reverse is not true. fDefaultWorldFOV and fDefault1stPersonFOV will have no effect if placed under [Display] in the SkyrimPrefs.INI instead of Skyrim.INI... So, one setting is interchangeable, but two others are not. Strange but true. So, again... it may be helpful to determine exactly what goes exactly where, however...
     
  4. Gobbledygook is completely ignored in these files. If you want to add "bICanHasCheesburger=1" to your Skyrim.INI, go for it. If you want add "iNumDamnsGiven=0" to your SkyrimPrefs.INI, you can do that too. It will do absolutely nothing, but it won't break anything either. So what, right? Here's why that's cool for everyone...
     

It's not always clear whether a setting is supposed to go into Skyrim.ini or SkyrimPrefs.ini or both, just like every previous Bethesda game before it. But the good news, after hours of testing today, I think it's safe to say that a solution of the past holds true today as well. If you really want to go crazy experimenting with INI stuff, you can essentially combine all the settings into one master file, then copy the contents into both INI files.

Yes, one will overwrite the other when it comes to certain settings. Yes, the game will mess with these files itself from time to time, same as when you start the launcher and change something. But it doesn't break anything that I've seen, and I've double checked the important lines to make sure they are still active and behaving the way they should over quite an extended play-throughs.

This isn't magic, and it's not anything that's going to improve performance for you in any way. All it means is that if you really want to see if something works, but aren't sure which file it goes in, put it in both. If it works at all, then it will work.

Same is true for categories. Not sure if a setting belongs in [General] or [Display]?... put it in both. One isn't going override the other, because one just flat-out won't do anything if it's not in the right category. Just keep to the syntax and basic rules though. You still can't type sentences without the comment designation ";", and it's still not good to put comments on their own lines, etc... 

So, that's all I've got. Maybe it's useful. I know it's a massive digression, and I do apologize for that. It just all stemmed from the same topic, so I just went with it. But I think it ended on a high note with a solution to the original problem, a follow up on some sub-topics, maybe some useful info, I don't know. 

Thanks a bunch for the hospitality and all the help. I'll come back if I find anything else that might useful while I still have the time off to do so. Been waiting to play this game for a long time though, so we'll see. Maybe it'll turn into a "weekend warrior" type thing.

Cheers! Happy Holidays! All the best!  ::):

Edited by kyd462
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In general for .ini files the sections do matter. In just about all programs I ever worked with anyways. The program will only ever check its own internal list vs. the .ini and then overwrite or write as required. 

 

Part of the major annoyance with Bethesda game is that even after this long they have not made it so all values are automatically written to the file, or at least provide an option to just allow it. This leads to a lot of guess work, where it is essentially only people with indepth experience in the engine who really knows what is there. 

 

 

As for your solution then it does not seem like magic. In general reducing LOD and drawing distances will reduce all types of stuttering. The trick is getting the highest LOD with the least amount of issues. This might well be what you are on your way to finding here! That in itself is very interesting I would say. 

 

In general it is what I have come to expect of the game... large open world, on an old engine that is not overly optimized for the task. I always find it funny that people think it weird that skyrim cannot compete with other titles when it comes to displaying large open worlds... in fact it is quite a feat that it can even display what it does to begin with considering the age of the engine.

 

All that said then thanks for the effort here and happy gaming n holidays! 

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Weird stuff

ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true causes my game to freeze outside of Ivarstead on the end of the bridge that leads to the 7000 Steps. Setting it to false solves the problem. After hours of troubleshooting I could finally narrow it down to that setting.

 

I can assure it's not caused by:

- mods, since the freeze even occurs on a new game with no mods at all (except Alternate Start)

- skyrim.ini/skyrimprefs.ini. freezes with default and modded inis

- Mod Organizer. Started Skyrim directly via TESV.exe with the same result.

- skse. Tried it with and without skse

It doesn't matter whether I use a full ENB setup (in my case Vividian ENB) or just a basic ENBoost setup. Changing any of the other setting also didn't seem to help. I'm using enb version 264.

 

What I also tried: I set ExpandSystemMemoryX64 to false and saved my game in the area where it would normally freeze. Quit the game, set it to true again and tried to load the savegame. Result: game freezes as soon as the save is loaded. I just see a black screen and hear the waterfall sound.

 

My system: i5 3570k@3,8 Ghz, 8GB RAM, Radeon 270x 2GB VRAM, Western Digital Black HDD, Windows 7 Pofessional 64bit

 

So now I wonder why is it happening and why at this specific location?

(btw I don't have to go over the bridge to reproduce it. I also tried to get to the steps by crossing the river in the village. In that case the game would freeze shortly after passing the ruined house.)

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Dragon Lord, I agree. It's been a very long time. Bethesda has always been a good sport about modding though, I wonder if they would share information about the settings if someone asked nicely? 

And yes, the LOD solution would be no surprise were the hardware running the game as old as the game. But the frustration isn't that Skyrim can't compete with other titles when it comes to displaying large open worlds, it's that Skyrim can't compete with other Bethesda titles, and it's the newest iteration of an engine they've been using for years. It should be more optimized than the previous games, they did say it would be (specifically in regard to realistic distance rendering). I actually doubt if the Creation Engine isn't still 90% Gamebryo.

But it is what it is. Perhaps I will find a nice balance within all of the LOD settings at some point.

Edited by kyd462
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@kyd462 -

 

That's a great report there, and thanks for taking the time to share your findings.

 

I'm wondering about what you said with comments in the .ini: "it's still not good to put comments on their own lines".

 

I've not read that anywhere, and since my .ini files are full of lines that are comment only (starting with a semi-colon of course), I'm wondering where you got that information.

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