Tips for performance.

[Syl]

Greets!

Specially with the effects settings, apart from retro mode, is there any information about their impact on fps somewhere? Cause i got looong loadin time, and laggin fast travel, but apart from that it's prety ok, bein fully modded (about 50 mods)...

Cheers!

[pango]

Effects won't do anything for loading times, sounds more like slow I/O (using SSD?) or insufficient memory (with 50 mods, assuming they're graphic mods throwed in, 16GB is probably a minimum)

[Syl]

Yes my computer is getin a bit old: I'm on mx linux, with 8GB, and nvidia GeForce GTX 1060... Addin 8 GB would ease the flow then? Should think about it, but i don't have that much graphical mods: real grass, vanilla enhanced, dream texture, daggerfall expanded texture and world of daggerfall are my biggest ones. Maybe too much already... No risk of mismatch between the mods, laggin the game?

[pango]

My guess would be texture mods using more memory than what can fit comfortably in 8GB.
But you don't have to believe that, just check how much memory DFU takes after some time playing, record system activity (disk I/O, swapping, a "vmstat 5" in a terminal should do) while loading, or try running the game with texture mods disabled to check how much it helps.
I don't think software can help a lot. Make sure compressed textures is enabled in DFU launcher (should be the default). zswap can keep more anonymous data in memory, compressed, and avoid some physical swapping. mglru improves memory management, but is not in official kernels yet (planned in 6.1 from what I heard), so you'd have to use unofficial kernel builds like xanmod, Could help a bit, but probably won't do miracles if memory requirements are way higher than 8GB.
My bet is that doubling memory is the safest way to speedup scene loading keeping the same mods, that's what I did around 2018. DREAM was since then optimized, but you're running a lot more mods than I could at the time
There could be more than one bottleneck though; Disk I/O if you aren't using SSD, or even CPU if your computer is really old, but the latter seems less likely.

[Orbarth]

It could also be a mod that is buggy somehow, by example this mod that seems to have a memory leak and will progressively reduce noticably your framerate and inflate your saved game (also causing longer and longer loading time) :
viewtopic.php?t=4016

It could also be Unity , i often read critics about that engine and how it load its assets , leading to longer loading time than other engines.

[pango]

It could also be Unity , i often read critics about that engine and how it load its assets , leading to longer loading time than other engines.

Even if that was correct, that gives Syl no tip about how to improve DFU performance

[Syl]

It could also be a mod that is buggy somehow, by example this mod that seems to have a memory leak and will progressively reduce noticably your framerate and inflate your saved game (also causing longer and longer loading time) :
viewtopic.php?t=4016

Red about the issue of that mod, and i'm not usin it. Maybe other mods are conflictin though. Usin SSD, yes, the best is to give my computer some kind of rejuvenation with an 8GB memory stick.

Cheers all!

[Orbarth]

The difficulty is finding which mods can play well with other mods and which mods may introduce some performance issues, by example a mod making regular checks wouldn't be a problem on his own, but if a dozen of mods do regular checks at +/- the same intervals it could lead into some stutters.

Even if that was correct, that gives Syl no tip about how to improve DFU performance

Maybe not directly, but it also point what you can realistically expect if those reports are "correct" about the loading times, especially when running many more assets than the default ones with many daggerfall mods.

[Interkarma]

I think the easy starting point here is: how does the game perform in a clean setup with no mods?

This doesn't take much to test, just unzip a fresh download of DFU to a new folder and play it for a while without mods.

Even on a modest system, loading times in base DFU shouldn't take more than a few seconds, and memory usage rarely goes much past 1GB.

I'm happy to help provide support for a clean unmodded setup, then you add mods back one at a time and measure the performance impact of each in turn.

[Syl]

Made a fresh install on diferent folders, but the startin page is already configured in /home/Syl/.config/unity3d/, with configuration files found for unknow or uninstalled mods, asking me to remove them. I don't, but wouldn't that alter the test?