new vegas. fallout 3. TTW performance

[lazynick]

i have a problem for years now and no matter how much i search all over the internet i still haven't found a solution. fps in new vegas OR fallout 3 OR TTW is all over the place it fluctuates from 60 to 40, i have the GOG version of both games. it doesn't matter if i have mods or vanilla, i never get stable fps and the problem is worse when i am in combat. when i travel in exteriors i always get a stutter when the game loads the new grids.it doesn't even matter if i set the game to low or ultra. i use all the recommended settings in the faq i haven't messed with the ini's. stutter remover helps with the micro stuttering but no with the fps fluctuation.the game is not using more than 50% of my gpu and cpu.i dont have background apps or bloatware on my pc. i can run witcher 3 and many newer games on high at 60 fps rock solid.Some advice or some insight would be greatly appreciated.

windows 10 pro x64 (i had the same problems when i used windows 7)
gpu: gtx 970
cpu: i5 3570k
ram: 8gb ddr 3 1600mhz 1 stick.
hdd: toshiba 7200 rpm (the game is not installed on the same drive with windows)
mb: z77a g45

[FiftyTifty]

To remove the stutters and pausing when loading new cells, you need to do two things.

1: Make uncompressed versions of the .bsa archives by using the BSArch tool
2: Move the game to an SSD, preferably one that uses the NVMe interface

HDDs top out at ~230MB/s in optimal scenarios (reading a single, large file). A SATA SSD will fully saturate the 500MB/s of SATA 6gbps, and a decent NVMe SSD will hit 3GB/s.

And even then, an HDD's performance will fall drastically when there are multiple files to access. And that is always the case with games; to draw objects, you need to load both the texture and the mesh. To animate an object, you need to load the animations. To play a sound, you got to load the sound. This isn't so bad when everything has been loaded into memory, but older games, or even ones that are conservative with RAM usage, will instead stream files from the drive, which is utterly trash for HDDs.

You're also only using a single RAM stick. Get a second one, and you'll experience a noticeable boost in framerate, and a significant boost in framerate stability.

As for CPU usage, it's using Bethesda's branch of Gamebryo, which has little threading. Hell, even with Fallout 4 where there are loads of threads, Bethesda's so shit at programming that there's over 100,000 thread locks per frame, so performance sucks ass. So there's that, as well as New Vegas using Direct3D 9, the driver for which will only use a single core. Not only that, NVidia cards have a software scheduler, which increases CPU overhead for the driver as it's got more work to do.

Edit: If you want to get an idea of just how bad HDDs are for anything other than storage, compare the HDD IOPs list to the SSD IOPs list in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS

[lazynick]

i get what you are saying with the hdd and i dont mind that stutter so much. i dont have a single problem in more than 70 games i have installed on my pc tho . skyrim and fallout 4 use the same system for textures and loading stuff but i dont get stutters there. i dont buy a second ram stick because in a few months hopefully i will buy a new pc. as for the framerate you are telling me that there is nothing i can do ? the cpu usage if i bring task manager up the game clearly shows that it uses all 4 cores . in your game the framerate is stable ? most noticeably in combat you have 60 fps rock solid ?

[FiftyTifty]

You're not going to get a stable 60fps in a Bethesda game, even if it's pure vanilla.

When you look at the CPU usage in task manager, you're seeing the work of the game thread being distributed among multiple cores. This is not multithreading, nor is it parallelization. If you peg the game to two cores, you'll find performance doesn't decrease at all. If you peg it to one core, there is a noticeable, but not drastic, decrease in performance.

No matter how many cores you throw at a single thread, it will have the same performance as if it ran on a single core, due to the serial nature of programming logic.

[RoyBatty]

Its just the game engine, you'll always get some stutter or another.

[lazynick]

uExterior Cell Buffer=64
is this a bad idea ?

[RoyBatty]

Yes, it doesn't do what you think it does. Don't change the cell buffers or uGrids. All guides are wrong and posted by people that don't know what they are talking about.

[lazynick]

that's why i'm asking you Roy . thanks for the info