One Hell of a problem.(Fustration level Over 9000)HELP

I live in India.I like playing games. However in March 2014 i came to realize i dont have much time left to play games.I live away from home for studying.I decided to build myself a Pc capable of gaming.I am sensitive to first person motion sickness so i dont play fps and online shooting multiplayers.I dont like games with too many guns.I like to play heavy stealth and sword type games.
Tomb Raider,Hitman Absolution.I used to have a Xbox360 slim and a ps3 old fat model but they both died in somekind of hardware failure.

I didnot wanted to spend much.Pc parts prices were high and in India we have to pay rediculous prices sometimes for certain components because of ethical fallouts of both our government and foreign companies.So I builded a system.The games are also not cheap here.So i decided to get whatever i can and shrink it in a budget.Also since this was supposed to be used for a very small period of time(6 monts or a year at max) spending too much on it didnt made any sense.
So i went for

CPU :FX4300CPU Motherboard : MSI 760GM-P23(FX)
RAM : Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1600C11 4gb
HDD : WD INT HDD 1 TB WD SATA Cavier Green
Power Supply : Cm Thunder450w
Graphics Card : AMD Sapphire Radeon 7770
Network Adapter : Netgear G54/N150 (USB Adapter) WNA 1000M
Bluetooth Adapter : Kinivo BTD 400 4.0
PS3 controller
Dell Byte Corsceca Bluetooth Headphones
Windows 7 Ultimate

I installed some games.Gaming was ok.Then i installed skyrim.Skyrim shuttered at specific points in my game.The graphics automatically set itself on ultra.I came by the knowledge than skyrim engine is buggy and glitched and it heavily relies on cpu specially two cores and single threaded performance.FX 8350 very notroiously suffers from this is skyrim.So i set the graphics to high but i got no difference in fps in the areas of games that were causing shuttering.I turned everything to
the lowest setting at lowest resolution and yet the shuttering was there but they were harder to notice.Now for the next month i thought the problem is with skyrim so i went to the learning curve where everybody learns to mod skyrim.I learned how to use mod managers,mods,memory patch and other patches.I followed the STEP Guide and Skyrim looked beautiful,it was stable,but the shuttering never went away.Applied multiple solutions next month.The problem wasnt solved.Since the modding process is a complex one i thought i was making a mistake and so i went to the process over and over multiple times.10 times and then nealy hundered times(I am serious).Day,Night i even forgot sleeping well because of this modding
addiction.All other games were running well without shutters AC4 Black Flag,Dragon Age inquition,Middle Earth Shadow of mordor but i found there were some microshuttering in Arkham Origins and Battlefield 4 single player,very minor ones.

So i asked on some random forum for help.Oviously blundered by the usual common occuring problem with pc games in 2014 everyone abused my system specs and told me to get a powerful gpu,more ram and better Power Supply.

Well i had saved some money.I got myself a
SAPPHIRE DUAL-X R9 280X 3GB GDDR5 OC.In india it costed me 19500 INR which is about 321 USD for the price i could get a gtx 970 in us but here 970 was 27000 INR and i decided to get a better psu.
Seasonic S12II Series 520-Watt Power Supply
2gb of this cheap EVM DDR3 2 GB PC RAM

Now i get solid 60 fps in Shaow Of Modor and MGSV ground Zeros with vsync on on veryhigh-ultra settings.With drop of 48-60 only during approx 20% of times.AC Rouge 60 fps allout max settings with very occational dips from 55-60.
In Farcry 4 in 200 FOV and Ultra Settings i get 38-60 fps.Sometimes 32 fps but in the town i get 25 fps.(regarless of fov .FOV increase costs 5-6 fps on 200 fov on average fps)As i am sound blind to first person, increasing FOV makes helps with my First person nausea. This fps drop always happens when i am looking at distance.My CPU in not an intel i5 so i expect a bottleneck so its fine but i am giving this information just because it establishes clarity about certain dimensions about the problem i am facing.

It always happens when i am looking at draw distance usually after i turn around and look back.Lowering settings only improves fps by 2-6 fps per settings .Even on lowest settings in the places i am getting low fps i dont get 60fps.
Now Pc games have problems of thier own with optimizations so the identification of my problem becomes complex one.On AC Unity which runs like crap on AMD cards with vsync on i get 30 fps and on rooftops sometims 40 and 50 fps.But in heavy npc areas like Notre Dame its 24 fps with vsync on and 26-27 without vsync .Amd CCC center downright sucks and Radeon Pro cant help in this game.
So far it sound normal.Dont underestimate this cpu i have seen a youtube videos of i5 vs fx 6300 and fx6300 was getting 3-5 fps low on average games and in few games it got better fps than i5.Now its not better than i5 obviously.I am sure Intel gives more consisten fps so i am not inviting amd vs intel war here.What i want to state is that an fx 4300 performes no less than an fx 6300 in games and its only a 95w cpu .
In india we dont have steam we get game on disk and buy-resell used games so i havent brought many of these games anew because i would have rather upgraded my system just in case you think i am florishing with money and spending heavily on games
rather that my system. And i brought skyrim for 70$(Believe it)(And i want to PLAY it)

NOW THE REAL PROBLEM HERE :
The skyrim status has not changed.Even with HRDLC it gives to me on lowest resolution and lowest setting looking down from dragonreach an fps of 30.Settings change make no difference.
The only thing is i can now get 250 mods because of 3gb of vram and it runs fine the frames are all over the place between 30-60.The fps dips are fine my problem is shutter becomes very heavy with modding and it leads to occational freezing for a second and then it moves on.The shuttering feels terrible after modding at this specific spots.Now after nearly a year doing the same thing over and over again i decided to put an end to this skyrim madness of mine.

I brought myself Darksouls PTD edition Modded it with ultra texture pack and flora overhaul and using the downsampling tool i am running it at 1440p with enb 60fps without vsync with 45-55 frames during looking at draw distance.
Looking at the first dragon sends my fps to 35-38 something.After playing for sometime i arrive at this place yeah you know the spot he goddam spot where i got that 1 second annoying freeze and i can reproduce it now.
I tried to play further but guess what there is a boss fight some distance ahead and its freezing like hell there.The newly discovered problematic point is at the boss fight.Do i need to add more to the description now.

I am not overclocking anything,everything is at stock clock and so far i havent found anything overheating.CPU fan makes noise during load but its a stock one so well its supposed to make noise.
My valley benchmark

FPS: 42.0
Score: 1757
Min FPS: 19.9
Max FPS: 82.4
System
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1) 64bit
CPU model: AMD FX(tm)-4300 Quad-Core Processor (3800MHz) x2
GPU model: AMD Radeon R9 200 Series 14.501.1003.0 (3072MB) x1
Settings
Render: Direct3D11
Mode: 1920x1080 8xAA fullscreen
Preset Extreme HD

It looks normal.So for elaboration of my problem i have included some screenshots that explain my problem far clearly.You will clearly understand it.
Basically there is some sort of problem with either cpu or harddrive or my ram module that i brought before since the psu and gpu are changed and there is no diffrence in problem.
I have installed Win8 too and it didnt helped so i switched back to 7 and i have disabled AMD cool and quiet technology and unparked my cores too so everything is as efficient as it can be.No Addons.no Toolbar nothing running in background,
I am the cautious type.

I can at the maximum peril get an i5 OR an ssd and so i need to solve this most annoying and fustrating peice of puzzle in my recent life.Its become a real mess in life.Its becomes quite an obsession of mine now.
I dont want to go the route where just buying something more pricy MAYBE solves the problem.Thats not a real solution.

Trivial to me is that both of these game run on dx9 and can be modded and during these freezes i get spike in [ms] somekind of memory latency i am no expert(see screenshots) but it makes me think that maybe hdd is a problem as cavier green is a intelli HDD and hence its rpm is
undiscolsed and its somewhat between 5200-7200 rpm according to the sources on internet.

The first three screenshot are from darksouls progressively explaining problem.Then we have some screenshot from skyrim.I coudnt snapshot shutters there but fps are all over the place.I am running Skyrim Revisied profile guide.(250 mods,154 plugins)
All snapshots taken with Fraps while msi Afterburner is running in with OSD.

P.S.I don't have friends who have pc .More like 'no helpful friends with suitable pc parts'.So I cant test by changing parts or something.Its either buy or suffer so don't send me that way.Its dead end


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Just to clarify, the issue that you are describing is when you look at a certain point in the distance then turn 180° and look the other way? Or when you're changing your viewpoint quickly (i.e. when you mouse-look around)? This is when you're noticing the stuttering on your screen?

Because it sounds like you're describing visual artifacts from screen-tearing.

when I turn I get fps drop if there is no wall in front of me(literally) but when draw distance is far like looking from mountains looking ahead in open space I get fps hit but shuttering only occurs in specific spot(Third snapshot).There is no screen tearing because vsync is on.

I don't believe it's your hardware so spending money to upgrade something before finding a solution would be a waste.

Can you run Skyrim in windowed mode and see if the issue you're describing still occurs in this mode?

1 Like

I am Already running in windowed mode.Though the whole point of running in windowed mode is getting dual vsync from areo in windows 7.But I have disabled Aero.Still I am running in windowed mode.I get shutter outside whiterun just near the gate where water is flowing(If you get what I mean).It just makes me wanna kill myself.Oh i forgot....Thanx for replying,I thought nobody is going to read my long post.

You're likely getting fps drops because as you're looking around outdoors, the engine is loading those new assets in the distance in. As you already posted, there are many other people that have experienced this with Skyrim.

Have you searched the topic of Skyrim micro stutters?

Some fixes work for some people and not for others. I'm not sure if there is a one-stop solution for everyone's setup. But most of the "solutions" center around lowering shadows, limiting how many assets are loaded by the engine, and trying to maintain at least ~60 fps to minimize the issue. I say minimize because nothing is 100%.

Well I just had an interesting development in Dark Souls. I turned texture filtering override in dsfix off and so all texture mods are disabled and I get no freeze I enabled them on there are freezes again. The post you pointed is the only post that helped me actually months before. I also lowered the number of trees in distant detail and ifsclamp and skyrim was butter smooth. However after modding I cant do it.I cant put any ifsclamp limit because I cant get 60fps after modding in most areas without modding I get 60 frames everywhere except in cpu intensive areas there I always get 38 fps and from dragonsreach top 30fps no matter what settings.

The thing is ifps clamp makes things go in slow motion if you drop below defined fps so you don't experience shutters but shutters are there,there is always a drop in fps.After modding its hard to get 60fps so you cant set ifpsclamp at 60 and if you set it say at something like 40,in interiors things will run crazy fast because you will get 60 frames there.That guy was using a ramdisk not an ssd though ramdisk should work better technically but he might be using slow HDD.He said it is 7200rpm but he didnt mention model number(or maybe the hdd had an issue)
He was really helpful so much of ego clash there,that guy was really polite and because of him I came to this theory that me getting framedrops in certain areas is cpu related but me getting shutter is harddrive related.I think he had skyrim on ramdisk but mods on HDD.His HDD was transferring files to vram slowly and hence the shutter also 670 has 2gb vram(which is irrelevant here though).This development I just had with darksouls is quite important too.It means shutters were there but I did not feel it until gpu was calling for texture mods.It might be that hdd has an issue here.

The fact that the linked thread helped you somewhat means that you are on the right track.

However your HDD is not the issue. Your HDD may impact your initial load times but it's not going to impact your in-game performance. And if you read through that thread then you will see that the OP mentioned this. Neither is it your CPU.

As I mentioned, the issue you are describing appears to be when the amount of textures, new assets, etc. that the game engine attempts to load at one time is more than the amount of VRAM you have available on your graphics card. But your R9 200 series is still a great card. As the thread suggests, you may increase performance by removing some of the mods, texture packs, etc. that you have installed in Skyrim to see if this helps.

Or you can tweak the Skyrim .ini files to limit the amount of assets the engine loads (e.g. textures, shadows, etc.). For instance, the OP lowered the amount of tree detail until he had a consistent +60 fps and removed most of the stutter. I'm sure there is a list of names of these variables found in the .ini file online you can search for.