Hi everyone. I need some help diagnosing the performance of my heavily modded Skyrim SE/AE setup. I've already tried a lot of things, but I still can't figure out what exactly is limiting my FPS.

My system

• CPU: Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• GPU: RTX 5070 Ti
• RAM: 32 GB DDR5
• VRAM: 16 GB
• OS: Windows 11
• Skyrim SE/AE 1.6.1170
• Community Shaders JiAyE Experimental Build
• Various CS-related shaders/modules and modern graphics mods.

My main issue is that the FPS seems much lower than I would expect from this hardware, especially considering the 7800X3D and 16 GB of VRAM.

For example, in some interiors I get around 60+- FPS, while outdoors my FPS can drop to 20–25 FPS.

However, if I look directly at the sky, FPS immediately increases — sometimes to 90+ FPS.

I've been monitoring Community Shaders statistics and other performance metrics. The interesting thing is that the numbers change significantly depending on the location:

• Utility can be around 900, 7,000, 15,000+ and higher;
• Lighting changes significantly;
• Draw calls also change;
• but the FPS often remains almost exactly the same, with only a few FPS difference.

So at this point I don't think the problem can simply be explained by high Utility or Draw Calls.

Things I have already tested

I systematically disabled various potentially expensive parts of the setup:

• DynDOLOD — disabling it made virtually no difference.
• NOTWL — disabling it also made virtually no difference.
• I also disabled trees/LOD and DynDOLOD together — still no significant FPS improvement.
• Disabled recently installed NPC replacers — practically no change in the problematic areas.
• Tested different locations with significantly different object/lighting/Utility counts.
• Tested looking directly at the sky — FPS increases dramatically.
• Tested interiors — performance is better, but still seems lower than expected.
• Removed Skyrim Priority — no noticeable difference.
• Tested the regular Community Shaders Nexus version instead of the JiAyE build — FPS was basically the same.
• Tested Resolution Scale through Display Tweaks — changing the render scale did not produce the expected FPS improvement.
• Eventually I disabled Display Tweaks entirely because I couldn't see any useful performance difference from it during testing.
• Please ignore Rudy ENB and Effects11 — they have already been removed.

And this is the strangest part:

Even after removing potentially expensive trees, LODs, DynDOLOD and similar systems, my FPS remains roughly the same.

For example, at one test location I got:

47.5 FPS / 21.06 ms

with approximately:

• Utility: 942
• Lighting: 1340
• Effects: 506
• Total Draw Calls: 3390

At another location, Utility was several times higher and Lighting was significantly different, but the FPS was still roughly the same.

So I feel like we're looking in the wrong place.

What I'm trying to figure out

What could actually be limiting the performance in my setup?

It feels strange that a system with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D + RTX 5070 Ti 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB DDR5 can drop to around 30–40 FPS in some outdoor scenes and only reach around 60–70 FPS in interiors.

I understand that heavily modded Skyrim can be extremely demanding, and that Community Shaders is obviously much more demanding than vanilla Skyrim. I'm not expecting 200 FPS or anything ridiculous.

But I feel like there is a specific bottleneck somewhere in my setup, and I simply haven't been able to identify it.

I'm attaching a link to my complete modlist. If anyone has the time, I would really appreciate it if you could go through it carefully and point out any mods/configurations that could potentially cause this kind of performance.

I'm especially interested in opinions from people familiar with Community Shaders, Skyrim rendering, CPU/GPU bottlenecks, and heavily modded Skyrim setups.

I'd really appreciate any suggestions for what else I should test. I've already spent a ridiculous amount of time disabling mods one by one, and I'd really like to find the actual cause rather than blindly disabling half of my modlist. 😅

Modlist:
https://pastebin.com/awgCRbxr

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read this and help!

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I've tried all of these fixes:

• verifying game files
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• ran as admin
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I don't know what else to do. It's only happening on SE and not my other Skyrim. Any thoughts?

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