Talk:The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

-- Disagree ... this wiki is primarily about finding and fixing bugs. If anything is out of place on that page it is the general information about the game (not that I'm against it). Edited to remove this page from the Skyrim page and putting bugs there. Suggest deleting the Skyrim(Bugs) page. -ratpad

---We should let quest issues should be handled by specific wikis for this game. These game specific wikis are there for a reason. PCGW is about fixing the game itself, so it can actually run on their machines, not to help someone complete or pick up a quest. We should these wikis do their job and PCGW should focus on fxing broken games and the technical stuff. Unless a quest crashes the game, it doesn't have a place here. Also, it's a Bethesda game, it's going to be buggy as crap and adding all these quest specific bugs will only bog down the article.Ceberus

-You know, if quest bugs is gonna be on this wiki it really should be on it's own page. Considering that this IS a Bethesda bugs are going to occur and there are A LOT. I suggest we either make a separate article or ban them from the site and link out to one of the dedicated Skyrim wikis like http://elderscrolls.wikia.com when people are looking for quest fixes. --Ceberus 22:12, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

---I Added a dedicated Skyrim(Bugs) article.--Ceberus 22:36, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

I double checked and main problem with this games high frame rates is that there isn't any frame rate limiters in place. So why is wiki page now saying that disabling frame limiter causes problems when there aren't frame limiter there in the first place. If I remove my Nvidia profile where I put frame limiter in place and put game settings to lowest possible I get steady 144 FPS because of Vsync and horses start flying around.

Was my mention about limiting frame rate removed by accident?

Indeed, ratchet should better understand the difference between a frame limiter and v-sync..

But can you confirm iPresentInterval is only the later then?

I can't completely confirm that only being for vsync, but it definitely seems like it. What I can confirm is that with over 60Hz displays it does allow frame rate going as high as monitors refresh rate, meaning external locking is pretty much mandatory if someone with over 60Hz monitor and beefier machine even wants to even start the game.

I haven't gotten good footage of it as recording lowers frame rate so much game goes back to normal, so here's some footage taken with phone with totally vanilla game and minimum settings so you can judge for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV5AGmZ3EEs

Wtf? Did I read 1144 FPS?

No, 144 FPS, I have bought Dxtory and it's overlay says "video" on left side of counter but I guess with low quality video it does look like 1. I own 144Hz monitor so it vsyncs correctly.

I'd be curious to know whether this also applies to Oblivion and fallout 3 and NV.

I mean, I'm aware they had this stupid setting too. But I don't remember any story about screwed physics. Just micro-stuttering at most. Ok.. just tested FO3 with iPresentInterval=0 (which since really appears to lock game to actual resfresh rates I'm quite sure is just vertical-sync)

But I couldn't achieve more than 100 fps.. and I could not undeniably confirm if havok become messed up (like it seems in your case)

Said this, iFPSClamp seems also to play a big role. Certainly, if you touch this setting you must run the game at the chosen framerate (otherwise everything will be slower or faster).

This not to mention stuttering issues (greatly documented in the other thread anyway). Let's see what are your finding with that fast computer

Don't have Fallout, but I do have Oblivion in my library. Last time I tried it was with my 60Hz monitor though.

It seems like same thing applies to Oblivion, game vsyncs to 144 FPS with default iPresentInterval=1 and with 0 it goes way beyond. However there doesn't seem to be any problems in the gameplay. Vsync is option on launcher and disabling allows unlimited frame rate I'm guessing there's no problems with that game running that at high frame rates.

So basically they simply took out vsync option from launcher to fix massive frame rate problems introduced in Skyrim and were done with the issue but didn't take high frame rate displays into account? Actually with Skyrim iPresentInterval=0 still keeps vsync on at least for me and there's no setting called iFPSClamp and adding the value under [General] has no effect to anything at all. It does look more and more like they "fixed" frame rate related issues with vsync instead of cap.

EDIT: I can force vsync off with nvidia panel, so I get ~200 FPS and with that same Skyrim intro I'm flying trough sky like santa claus.

Well, Vsync is an option in fallout launcher as well.. Though, for no good reason it just change iPresentInterval in FalloutPrefs.ini (which does nothing), whilst the game actually check for the variable stored in fallout.ini

Anyway wtf? iPresentInterval=0 does nothing for you? Are you sure you aren't be looking at the wrong file (similarly to my FO3 experience)?

And could you try to lower as much as possible details in oblivion (to achieve maximum possible framerate and pinpoint even smaller anomalies)?

OK thanks for that. I was editing SkyrimPrefs.ini which already had most of the values and was rewritten every time game started and games article only stated folder. Adding iPresentInterval=0 to Skyrim.ini did the trick and disabled vsync. With iFPSClamp=60 everything sets back to normal - but runs over double the speed expect audio, animations and controls work at regular speed.

With Oblivion it does seem like everything is sped up similar fashion what happened with Skyrim and iFPSClamp, it was much easier to pinpoint with ~700 FPS though as I was focusing if something started to stretch or go crazy earlier.

So that means both games have to be limited externally to be played without problems on high frame rate displays and that there aren't actual caps in place after all, right?

Wait.

What if you use iFPSClamp=144 with iPresentInterval=1 ?

Well you can pretty much guess at this point: iFPSClamp is by default 0 and is then synchronized to frame rate. With iPresentInterval being 1 makes frame rate to stay at 144 so iFPSClamp=144 and iFPSClamp=0 give almost identical results. And I can confirm this is indeed the case, just forgot to write it down with last response.

Uh...

Because I had this impression that if you had set iFPSClamp to your actual framerate physics rate would have adjusted too.

As you said if you leave it to 0, you somewhat get synchronization (physics may get screwed but not so exponentially). If I set it to, say, 90 (which is my usual framerate), everything might even seem similar.
But as soon as I manage to do 10 more frames per second game time is a hell faster (and viceversa)

I've just noticed that the Skyrim tweak guide seems to have disappeared. The link above the Table of Contents just redirects to Nvidia's news page. A search through Google and Nvidia's website didn't find the guide either. Does anyone know what happened to it and, if possible, where it is now so I can update the link on the main page?

Hi there. Yes, I can confirm the same from here. It's strange because other Koroush Ghazi's tweak guides published on geforce.com are still available, so I really doubt the removal had to do with an eventual request from the author, for example. I guess it has to do with something related with the Nvidia's hosting site. Maybe there is someone who had saved or archived this tweak guide specifically and can share the text.

After looking into this a bit more, I found that Nvidia appears to have changed the URLs for all of their previous guides. For example, Koroush's Battlefield 3 tweak guide changed

from this URL: www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/battlefield-3-tweak-guide

... to this: www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/battlefield-3-tweak-guide/#1

In this example, the first URL redirects to the second. So it's possible that the Skyrim tweak guide still exists on the Nvidia website but the redirect wasn't set up correctly. If I'm correct, one option is to figure out where the new location is.

Edit: Also, I'm pretty sure that part of Koroush's arrangement with Nvidia at the time was that he sold his rights to the guides that they published. So he can't request their removal even if he wanted to.

No. It's definitely gone. I checked thoroughly. Looks like they wiped all the older guides.

Good news everyone. I've managed to archive the contents of the Skyrim Tweak Guide on my website. I've corrected the 2 dead links in the article to point to my copy.

From the BlurBusters forums, an interesting info, Skyrim seems to run best at 64Hz: http://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=870&sid=7a6fc93b26d8fa146eb56f15cb8bfd8d&p=10503#p10503

Can someone check it so we can be sure and update it in the wiki? Thanks

I have seen "64Hz bug" mentioned in several places, but figuring out what's actually best and true is hard when people are throwing in their own experiences with the game. Some say even something like ~100 FPS is still fine where other says anything beyond 60 FPS causes major problems, some even say to limit game to 40-50...

Limiting to 60Hz/FPS seems most plausible as avarage user has 60Hz monitor and vsync then limits frame rate to 60 FPS in that scenario. If someone actually knows better feel free to correct that one.

Also one tiny thing. This happened exactly when frame rate got over 100 FPS: http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/File:Skyrim_-_Audio.jpg

As always people confuse refresh rate and frame rate.
I mean if you're not picky you could use "Hertz" to measure everything that happens in a given time, sure..
But besides what I wrote in the previous link (technically wise)... let's just allow the little physicist inside me to speak....

Hertzes (cycles per second) measure something periodical, something that has always a constantly steady behavior (like display buffer update time, CPU clock, properphysics engine timestep and so on).
On the other hand frame rate -in games- is all but consistent, not only because you move around and different things to render mean different performance, but even within a single second, you could have the first half with 50 frames and the second half with 30. It's still 80FPS but you can't say it's running at 80Hz

---

Back to the actual Skyrim question it must be said that game devs have been pretty lazy at coding, especially considering similar issues have been around and have been reported since Oblivion times (this, FO3 and FNV deserve a check)
But what is really happening? What are the actual problems? After 2 days I'm feeling somewhat like mr. Vorontsov (aka ENB series). I mean.. it's a bit queer when you read that 57.6 fps cap is the solution..

Anyway, I hope the followings are the actual facts (bold, given I don't even own the game)

We can distinguish TWO different issues groups linked to the infamous iPresentInterval[info on its values] (where X is whatever actual refresh time game engine run at):

1. Those which happen when framerate < X
   • Stuttering and input lag (which is the normality when you have low fps coupled with non-triple-buffered v-sync)
     • Disable built-in v-sync and use 3rd party tools if you really need it. Nvidia CP setting reported working, requires confirm
     • Many suggest to run the game in borderless fullscreen mode. I can't be sure, but that might probably tamper with v-sync, same as before
   • Stuttering due to unsynchronized graphics and physics engines. This seems too moronic to be true. Really. It needs to be verified has I explain at the end
   • Hiccups caused by race conditions on slow systems
     • Only possible thing is trying to mess around with threading settings
2. Those which happen when framerate > X
   
   • Dull physics.
   • Calendar out of sync
     • This is subtle. It may even ruin your savegame. Fix here
   • Flickering water
   • Mouse speed messed up
     • It should be possible to utterly adjust both X and Y axis speeds separately
   • Others I'm damn sure I'll have missed

In the end capping framerate at X is the least common solution for every one of these issues

Now, there's one big still open question: what the heck is this X??
Common sense would suggest 30 or 60 FPS, that since the arrival of progressive scan are the 2 de facto used rates (the former especially on console ports)

But this is Gamebryo Creation engine! Indeed, more convincing explanations seemed to suggest appropriate engine refresh time should be assumed to be 64 updates per second.
I'm not taking this for granted, since I'd like something.. more reliable to convince me, though this odd value could perfectly explain why there was so much confusion in this regard

Some testing would be required. If the unsynchronized graphics and physics engines thread is right, monitoring micro-stuttering would be the easiest thing to check this claim
But we can't rely just on framerates.. We'll need frames time. FCAT, MSI afterburner, fraps, whatever should be fine.

Finally, I'd like to talk about 2 other... things.
One is using hacked d3d9.dll (or tools) to force the amount of rendered ahead frames (maybe not?) and to limit fps, so no external tool would be needed (it's a pity the stutter removers were never ported to TES:V)
The other involves overclocking the display refresh rate, and tweaking iFPSClamp variable. If X=64Hz is proven, this would be the only way to have both fixed gameplay and vsync

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Another thing worth notice is setting processor affinity.
For as much this -together with any other < 2013 info- may have been deflected by driver issues [both AMD (fixed in 13.2) and nvidia]
EDIT2: driver issues.. or workarounds (aka "in an ideal world this shouldn't be up to the driver") in the first place. Take everything with a pinch of salt

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2016-January/106021.html

Screenshots would help a bit. Or is this not a visual thing?