After 1.4 came out and performance seemed decent enough I decided to start playing with ugrids.

ugrids 7 worked well enough so I bumped in on up to ugrids 9.

To my surprise it was very playable! Played last nite for several hours with no hiccups. Created 10 or so saves along the way.

Today I tried loading up the last save and it sat at the loading screen forever. Killed it with task manager and had to load an early save from yesterdays session(still a ugrid 9 save). This save that loaded ok happened to be in a dungeon- not outside. After the game had loaded I tried the latest save again and this time it loaded aok!

Repeated this several times ...I can only load some saves AFTER I have loaded up a successful save. Not positive if it holds true always, but the saves that load from scratch so far are all inside.

I will probably bump ugrids back down to 7 and see how things go, but I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior.

I am also wondering if there are settings other than uGridsToLoad=9 and uExterior Cell Buffer=100 I should be playing with.

Oh the other thing I should mention....I have seen somewhere that the instructions for reverting saves to a lower ugrids value have changed since 1.4

What I read is this:

saveini no longer does what it use to. Do the following instead....

Load save
alt-tab to skyrim.ini
alter the ugrids
save skyrim.ini
alt tab back to game
refreshini in the console
save

Can anyone confirm the standard instructions for reverting no longer work?

This isn't entirely correct. The saveini command populates your Skyrim.ini file with every possible game setting. This has two negative effects: it makes it difficult to find the settings you care about and it alters how the load screens are rendered, making them appear red. Some have also reported that the ini file created by saveini is placed in the \data folder. None of that matters though because it is not a necessary step unless for some reason you can't play the game in a window. If Skyrim is in windowed mode, then you can just alt-tab to your text editing program, make the changes, save them then use the 'refreshini' command in-game. It does the same thing but without altering your skyrim.ini in a way that is outside of your knowledge and/or control.

FWIW, the "proper" way to do this in the past was simply to make a backup of your Skyrim.ini file. After using the steps that included the 'saveini' command and properly attaching a new uGrids setting to a savegame, you could simply replace the bloated Skyrim.ini file with your backup, with the uGrids value corrected. I suppose this is still an option if someone is unable to run the game in windowed mode for some reason.

Works for me!

I don't run in windowed mode, but have never had problems alt tabbing out of skyrim.

Just did exactly that and changed my ugrids settings to 7 from 9 on the bugged save(s)....refreshed ini in the console..and voila, the save now loads at ugrids =7.

I am still curious why it would load AFTER I had loaded a successful save, but not directly from a new start load screen. Glad it did tho!

Do these variables help when running higher ugrids? Everyone says different and it seems no one has certain info.

iPreloadSizeLimit=262144000

[Papyrus]

iMinMemoryPageSize=100000
iMaxMemoryPageSize=5000000
iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=1800000000

iPreloadSizeLimit=262144000 adjusting this setting has a noticeable impact for at least me when using high UGridsToLoad settings. Haven't touched the others.

@ Wader2k those instructions worked with v1.3 as well which is why I've been recommending that method over others.

Same here. Load times are much quicker too.

Just a warning: increasing uGridsToLoad can hurt your game without you noticing a problem right away. When the CPU gets overburdened the game deprioritises various scripts and tasks to maintain performance. So the game runs smoothly, but stuff that should be happening in the background isn't happening. On the other hand if you have a very good CPU you may get the opposite problem: with grids loading earlier than the designers intended them to, events can be triggered earlier than they should causing the things to happen in the background when they shouldn't. So either way there's a problem.

It's up to you of course, if graphics > gameplay for you then boost away, but for "stable" Bugthesda gameplay I say uGridsToLoad should be left alone.

Thanks folks!
Added iPreloadSizeLimit=262144000 to my ini and have been running at ugrids 7 for a bit now. Seems rock solid.

system: i7 860 CPU 8G Mem 5850 GPU running at 1920x1200 w/ 4X MSAA and 16 AF and everything but shadows on Ultra(shadows high) - sliders all maxed.
With a load of texture mods pushing my vram to around 960M in most exteriors.

To the post a few up...yep, I have already seen some people asking ..."Why is everyone fighting before i get there"...or .."Why is everyone already dead??"... I have seen this asked before, and always thought ugrids.....

Mine has always been at default. 5

I can attest to this behavior. I bumped uGrids to 7 and noticed certain events taking place outside my normal range such as a dragon attacking and I had to run quite a ways to be able to intervene. I think 7 is about as high as I'll go for this reason. My main reason for using 7 instead of the default of 5 is because of waterfall LOD, which look quite awful at uGrids at 5 and can't be controlled by any other variable in the ini.

The only real reason to use uGrids above 7 is for screenshots, or if you spend more time looking at the distant world than actually playing the game. It introduces far too many problems later on to be worth it.

yeah the visual benifits of ugrids higher than 7 drop considerably.. mostly only trees and rock/terrain increase..... plans like foilage however will not exceed the ugrids 7 draw distance.... i've tried everything to force it.. and it don't work....

to the op, I've benn playing with uGrids 9 for a while and I'm experiencing the same exact behaviour: can't load an exterior save unless I load an interior save first! By exterior I mean anything ouside a building or a cave.
As for potential bugs I'm well aware, although it's really hard to give up the visual benefits of having uGrids at 9.
The outside world just looks sooo much better. And so far performance hit has been hardly noticeable for me.

Thanks for confirming that Lurk!

I have dropped back to ugrids 7 for now and am watching for erratic AI etc. All seems ok for now.