I’m running a modded Skyrim SE on a laptop that’s maybe three years old, and after the last couple of updates the game just chugs anytime I get near Riften or any forest area with grass and trees. I’ve been digging through performance mod lists but a lot of them just say “use the best mods for improving game performance” and then recommend the same five things I already tried with no real setup help.
So first I installed BethINI and tweaked the INI preset to medium with the recommended optimizations — that helped a bit but I still got stutter in the Rift. Then I swapped out my texture mods for Cathedral Landscapes and Skyland AIO thinking 2K resolution was the bottleneck on my 4GB VRAM card, and that smoothed out some distant mountain pop-in but the forest areas still drop to like 20 FPS when I sprint through. I even tried the eFPS mod and removed all my city overhaul mods to cut down on draw calls, though I’m not sure if the problem is more about draw calls or just my GPU hitting its thermal limit after twenty minutes. I also messed with the grass density setting in the INI manually — set iMinGrassSize to 80 — and that gave me a few frames but the grass looked awful, kind of patchy and wrong. Could be user error on my part with the order of installation or some mod conflict I missed.
For anyone who’s dealt with this on a lower-end laptop, did you find that tweaking shadow resolution or LOD settings made a bigger difference than actually replacing texture packs? And was there a point where you just gave up on running grass mods altogether and went back to vanilla grass with a simple retexture? Because I’m starting to think that might be the only way to hit a steady 40 FPS without the game looking like a potato field.
So first I installed BethINI and tweaked the INI preset to medium with the recommended optimizations — that helped a bit but I still got stutter in the Rift. Then I swapped out my texture mods for Cathedral Landscapes and Skyland AIO thinking 2K resolution was the bottleneck on my 4GB VRAM card, and that smoothed out some distant mountain pop-in but the forest areas still drop to like 20 FPS when I sprint through. I even tried the eFPS mod and removed all my city overhaul mods to cut down on draw calls, though I’m not sure if the problem is more about draw calls or just my GPU hitting its thermal limit after twenty minutes. I also messed with the grass density setting in the INI manually — set iMinGrassSize to 80 — and that gave me a few frames but the grass looked awful, kind of patchy and wrong. Could be user error on my part with the order of installation or some mod conflict I missed.
For anyone who’s dealt with this on a lower-end laptop, did you find that tweaking shadow resolution or LOD settings made a bigger difference than actually replacing texture packs? And was there a point where you just gave up on running grass mods altogether and went back to vanilla grass with a simple retexture? Because I’m starting to think that might be the only way to hit a steady 40 FPS without the game looking like a potato field.
