u/Hannibal_D_Romantic

OG Black Flag is a favorite game of mine, so I had the old one installed and advanced to where you land in Havana, so I can free roam to compare.

Installed the new one and advanced to Havana as well. I was already doubtful because of the encounter with the assassin after the shipwreck, but I'm thinking to myself, "it's a new control scheme, maybe it gets better." Try to take down the Spanish on the beach, game glitches out multiple times by not assassinating at all when the prompt to do so is up. Vein on the side of my head is throbbing because this must be the advanced stealth systems I've heard for years about. Apparently they can look up now though.

I take the ship out of the gulf. Ship turns like a city car. It's fine, it's fine. It's only one turn in this version and they showed me a pretty whale, so my modern gamer brain is subtly stimulated and not overtaxed by having to plan a next turn. No friction allowed. Never.

So we buy our first sword and are now able to take in the glory of new free roam. So, let's see this new much more engaging version of the classic combat. X is now RB, B is now LB and we can lock-on to targets. Riveting. In the old unenjoyable oversimplified system, we had dull stupid enemies that would circle around you attacking one at a time until you pressed B at the correct time and then you could take down the enemy by pressing B again, then point the stick at another enemy and lamely press X to execute them with a pre-set takedown. In the new, revolutionary, much more engaging system, you have uberintelligent enemies that circle around you attacking one at a time until you press LB at the correct time and then press Y to epicly take them down and then point the stick at another enemy like a genius and face the monumental task of pressing Y like a chad instead of X like a little bitch to execute them with a preset takedown. I guess the radical difference of making battles slower and spongier is what makes for great combat.

And I'm sitting there, thinking I'm lame for not grasping the genius so many tubers are talking about. Maybe TikTok creators have me beat on this "understanding games" thing. I've only been playing for three decades. Let's see the movesets. I'm sure there's plenty more added. Don't have my hidden blade yet, so let's just switch to fists. Oh, that's gone now. Well, there's a musket right there. I'm so stupid. It has some of that 18th century thumbprint protection. The guns are coded to the Spanish soldiers, so this new historically accurate Edward just ignores them, galaxy brain that he is. "Edward, you can still stab them with it or hit them with the stock." "The budget for that went into me hero posing."

Good thing there's a skill wheel now, to really elevate that gameplay. Otherwise we wouldn't have to hit L3 every time we wanted to get above a trot. After all, when has parkour been a centerpiece of the franchise? But they added back ejects, which you have to remove the guardrails for in options, by the way.

I wish they could put the team that makes the store on the rest of the game, man. Store has it's stuff on lock. We all know that's the most important part of the franchise. No one remembers AC1 fondly because you could throw NPCs into market stalls. The sheer disrespect to commerce in a single player game. I still shudder.

Anyway, yet another return to form in search of a refund.

So, I'm playing Skyrim for the first time using GTS V104 and having a blast, but what drives me insane is that indoors I have awesome framerates and my GPU limits me at about 100-140fps, but most of the time outside, I am stuck between 40-85fps. I wouldn't have a problem if I was hardware limited, but none of my CPU cores are above 60%, VRAM usage isn't close to max, the GPU is stuck at 70% and the RAM is only used at about 55%. Even the storage doesn't show read speeds close to read max.

I have no clue why my PC won't utilize my GPU fully when outside. If someone has a clue, please help.

I'm using a Ryzen 7600x with 16GB @ 5600MT/s, a 9060XT 16GB, and a 7100MB/s SSD. Using CachyOS and running Proton 11.0.

I play a ton of other games, and this is the only one where I have this issue, and only when I'm outside.

EDIT: Again. The issue isn't that there's a bottleneck. The issue is that there seems to be none, and yet the game is stuck at a lower than normal fps. No component is utilized at 100%. Not one core.

EDIT 2, SOLUTION: Apparently, there is a Windows feature called Thread Hopping that distributes a single thread instruction set across multiple threads in a single second to distribute the heat load. As the monitoring software displays information in one second increments, it shows a 100% load for half a second on the two threads as 50% load on both for the whole second. That's why the graph looks like both threads working at 50%, even though it's one thread of instructions working at 100% load.

Since Proton translates the instruction set to Vulkan, my Linux PC inherits the issue.

Thank you everybody for your help, and getting me to look in the right place. The answer is CPU load, so now I know what to optimize for.

EDIT 3, OPTIMIZATIONS:

1. Linux Specific (about a 10% bump):

Since the game runs through a translation layer into Vulkan, penguin enjoyers get to cheat a bit by setting a couple of launch parameters in Steam. The idea is to force things off the single CPU thread Toddrik graced us with. Since on Win proprietary DX11 drivers are used, no dice there.

1.a. "RADV_PERFTEST=gpl" - Vulkan driver forced to use the GPL allowing us to offload shader background compilation off the threads used for game logic.

1.b. "mesa_glthread=true" - this transfers the translation layer calls away from the graphics stack onto different cores, not forcing them to wait on engine bottlenecks.

1.c. "DXVK_ASYNC=1" - allows the translation to skip rendering incompletely compiled shaders in a frame, preventing stuttering.

2. Hardware settings:

Obviously "gamemode" as a Linux launch parameter to have the CPU scheduler prioritize the game process. On Win, enable Game Mode in Windows Settings and enable the highest performance power plan.

3. Game settings:

3.a. In EngineFixes.toml (in SKSE/Plugins/) make sure MaxStdio = 8192 if you're running a bunch of mods, so that you are sure you won't run out of file handles for all your sweet extensions (it's already enabled for GTS by default since the collection is huge).

3.b. In Skyrim.ini, you can set the density of the grass in game to eliminate shorter grass blade physics calculations. Under [Grass] set to iMinGrassSize=60 or 70 or add, so that the game engine doesn't hammer itself to nothing fulfilling draw instructions.

3.c. In SkyrimPrefs.ini set fShadowDistance lower. You don't need to be rendering shadows at 8000+ that are far off and mostly obscured from your line of sight. Also, under [Particles] set iMaxDesired to something reasonable. It's already 725 in GTS, but some collections will have it way up, spending CPU effort on physically rendering thousands upon thousands of particle effects.

3.d. Now that we have messed with all this, we want to avoid our GPU rendering like crazy because of unlocked framerate when the CPU frees up, so set your max framerate in SSEDisplayTweaks.ini to your monitor's refresh rate (I was experiencing spikes of up to 330+fps for a second or less, and this would cause a lot of stutter). The setting is under FramerateLimit.

3.e. Finally, we have to force the game to recompile shaders with our new pipeline. We can force this by deleting the old ones. Go to your Steam folder>steamapps>shadercache>489830 (for Skyrim SE. I don't know if the Anniversary Edition's shaders are listed under a different appID, but a folder with that ID would be in shadercache as well) and delete the content of the folder.

As you load up the game again, you may notice faster load times because you are now using more cores. As with any game, you'll feel some stuttering as shaders are being compiled, but that will clear up over time.

All of this, managed to take my CPU to about 60% utliziation, with individual cores at between 30-90%, while the GPU now routinely hovers around 80%. The low is now at about 70-80fps and about 110 when there's no new shaders loading at all.

Again, thank you everybody for showing me where to look. It almost doubled my performance.

Hello, everyone. I'm playing the game for the first time and loving it, but I have a question that I was unable to find an answer to despite obsessive googling.

I want everyone to have two districts, apart from their home ones of course, but I want to give Burke Tickfaw Harbor and Barclay Mills and give Vito Downtown in the first round, and then give Cassandra Frisco Fields and Southdowns and Vito the French Ward.

This would make them end up with earn as follows, even though they'll still have two districts a piece:

Cassandra 380k

Vito 360k

Burke 340k

This would theoretically get an additional perk from Cassandra, which is why I'm doing this, while also leaving the three with 2 districts each.

Does this mess up the peaceful ending where all the three stay (We're in this together)? Will Cassandra betray me if she's excluded from the first round? Will she take over after I leave?