Hey!
Sorry for the long post but I want to write as many details as possible. For some reason TTW is not working too good on my PC. I'm having some really annoying FPS drops around Capital Wasteland that aren't happening in FO3 on original engine. FPS drops happen in both interiors and exteriors. I tested this already a lot and I know for sure that this problem only occurs when I play in Capital Wasteland on New Vegas engine (TTW). I don't use ENB, for graphics I have only NMC Performance texture pack (though I tested this without graphic mods with only TTW installed on new character and it was the same).
My rig is i5-4440 / 8GB of RAM (2x4GB) Kingston HyperX / Gigabyte GTX 970. My mobo is MSI B85M-P33. Using Windows 7 now but the same was happening on Windows 10. I use Mod Organizer and I have Fallout 3 GOTY / Fallout NV Ultimate Edition on Steam.
This is my current load order, though the problem is not related to additional mods since I tested the game on a new character with only TTW installed and it was exactly the same. Here are my Fallout.ini and FalloutPrefs.ini.
What is exactly happening?
Well, depending on where I look I get FPS drops from 60 to 38-45 in Capital Wasteland. The original Fallout 3 works flawlessly on max settings without any FPS drops - I have 60 FPS everywhere, no matter where I look. I tested this in SuperDuper Mart Area and in Springvale but the same drops are in many other places.
When I'm outside of the SuperDuper Mart I generally get around 56-60 FPS, however when I look from there into the direction of Springvale (more or less) I'm getting instant FPS drop to ~45. Obviously there are other places where I get similiar drops - like Springvale School area, especially the "ruins" outside of it where the raider camp is. I'm getting FPS drops in interiors too - also SuperDuper Mart was the place where I tested it. When I get into the Pharmacy Room, stand in the corner and look into the "main hall" of the market, I get instantly dropped to 44-46 FPS. Most likely because of all the small items that are scattered around that place.
As I said, I made some tests and compared clean Fallout 3 with clean TTW. Same places, new save games, no addtional mods. FO3 - 60FPS everywhere, TTW - a lot of FPS drops like the ones mentioned above. I noticed in RivaTuner (I'm not overclocking anything, I only installed it to get the graphs with CPU/GPU usage) that when the FPS drop occurs, my GPU usage goes down a bit (a few percentages) and my CPU usage goes up. It literally seems like a bottleneck :/
What have I tried already?
I'm running New Vegas Stutter Remover but it doesn't seem to affect FPS drops in any way - I tried original INI files and INI provided in "TTW Performance Guide" for i5. It sure helps with stutters by basically eliminating them entirely but it doesn't help with FPS drops. I tried ENBoost - nothing, it's the same. Obviously I have 4GB FNV Updated LAA Enabler, NVSE tweak and Anti-Crash NVSE plugin. There is only one thing that helps in exteriors - turning off water effects in the INI files by editing these lines:
[Water]
bUseWaterShader=0
bUseWaterReflections=0
bUseWaterRefractions=0
bUseWaterDepth=0
bUseWaterHiRes=0
bUseWaterDisplacements=0
bUseWaterLOD=0
I can put everything on Ultra except for the water and it's 60 FPS. But this basically makes the water look absolutely hideous. So yeah, for the compromise I can leave some options enabled to make the water look fairly decent and still get 51-53 FPS outside. Not perfect but always something.
Interiors, however, don't seem to be affected by water settings. The only thing that helps is Object Fade option. When I set the Object Fade slider (during the game, in the options) to the far left, I get 60 FPS back. But once I put it even slightly more to the right, the FPS drop is back again in the interiors. Well, I know that Super Duper Mart has A LOT of junk lying everywhere on the shelves so it's probably heavy for the CPU but this problem doesn't exist in Fallout 3 engine and the place looks identical.
So... do you have any idea what can I do to avoid these FPS drops, except for turning off all the water effects and setting Object Fade to 0? I mean, I can play with the Water settings to get something decent without losing too much FPS (but it's still annoying and weird since the game on original engine works flawlessly). But for the interiors I can't find anything like that. Playing with Object Fade to 0 is impossible - things are appearing right before my nose. Has anyone got similiar problems with TTW? As I said, this happens even on fresh character with only TTW installed so it's not "too many mods" issue.
