I have a giant list-o-mods, but even so this happens without any of them installed.

Anyways, whenever there are 5 or more actors in my viewable area, whether they're behind a wall or not, framerate goes in the 10s. Any more than 5 it just gets worse, bottoming out at around 8, but that's the lowest it goes even if I add more actors. If I turn the camera away from the actors, framerate goes back to normal.

I'm running with 4x Wide Tent SuperSample AA, 16 AF, yet disabling those settings doesn't improve framerate at all.

CPU: Phenom Quad @ 2.94ghz
GPU: Radeon HD 5770 @ 960/1370
4GB DDR2 RAM @ 840 mhz

Edit: Running in Win XP 32bit (as opposed to Win 7 64bit) reduces the stuttering, but not by much. XP can handle about 8 actors before dropping to 10-16fps.
Edit2: It's probably also worth mentioning that dead actors do not cause the issue to happen, only living, active actors.

I think it's down to the animation of the characters. High poly models with complex animations consume a lot of resources.

It's not the "AI" or "scripting" as some will jump to tell you... because as you've seen the slow down only occurs when the npcs are in your field of view. Pan the view away and your fps jumps right back up again.

And it's not the character models per se. When the NPCs are dead there's no issue. But the detail (number of polygons) of the models does matter when the NPCs are being animated as you can see if you replace a low poly model with a high poly one.


- There really doesn't seem to be any solution for this, other than not exacerbating the issue by going overboard with replacers for tthe character models (bodies, armor etc).

Do you have a dedicated sound card or onboard sound?

Many people that are running XP (myself included) found that having onboard sound or a soundcard without its own processor can and will bog down the game. In those cases, turning off the music in the .ini (not simply the ingame setting) can help considerably. You might want to try that and see if it helps in your case.