Just a bit of a strange issue I'm having, which I originally put down to Dragonborn, but turns out it's the recent-ish texture pack upgrade.

Basically, the previous pack ran fine. No issues, everything was fine. However with the recent pack, I get a hell of a lot of stuttering after a little while. If I'm wandering around Riverwood on a brand new character, I'll get solid 40fps (which is what I'm capped at) until a few minutes has passed. Then I'll stay on 40fps, but then every second or so dip to 30ish. This happens even if I'm completely stationary, staring at exactly the same scene I was earlier. If I restart the game, my FPS is back at 40, but then the process repeats itself.

VRAM is always 100-200MB under my limit, and it'll stay constant even when the stuttering starts. The weird thing is is that this even happens when all the textures are compressed down to 2048. It also happens if I load them through the dummy plugin files or through the INI file.

Short of seeing if I have a copy of the old BSAs, I'm not sure what else I can do. Disabling the current DLC fixes the issue. I'm not too sure why it would cause any issues. Anyone have an idea?

To the best of my knowledge, the new HiRes DLC is almost the same as the old one, especially with regard to the vanilla game. For the vanilla game, four textures were modified and one was added, if I remember correctly:
- Log glow fix
- Chopping block fix
- Parthurnax texture fix
- LOD normal maps changed to uncompressed format at half resolution
- LOD textures included as a new HiRes texture at 2048, uncompressed
Other "fixes" involved relocating misplaced textures in their correct folders, without any actual texture modification.

What has changed more radically is the allocation of files between the bsa's. All actor textures were moved from bsa1 to bsa3, and the new DLC textures were spread between bsa2(*) and bsa3, some in their own dlc-specific folders, some included in the vanilla folder structure.

So, could the spreading of vanilla textures over three bsa's have an impact? No idea.

One possibility could of course be the new LOD texture, tamriel.objects.dds. It is big at over 21 MB, but that is still small relative to VRAM.

So, if the stuttering is due to the new HiRes DLC, there are not many obvious choices to look at.

(*) Actually, there is one also in bsa1 under 'effects', but it is a duplicate of the same texture in bsa2.

That's what I thought. Just as an experiment, I unpacked all three archives and shoved them as loose files. I get no stuttering at all.

I'll try to re-archive them later, as obviously loose files aren't ideal for load order purposes. But it's weird as it seems the actual archives themselves are the issue for me, and not the textures within.

That is my intention also. I have been planning to recreate the original bsa allocation, and keep all the dlc stuff separately. I have been noticing very brief momentary stalls, as if something were loading, not often, but more than what I would expect.