The issues with water/texture/background flickering and odd physics glitches have been discussed many times, but I'd like to throw in a few notes and a definite question.

I have a relatively powerful rig consisting of an i7-2700k processor (currently with turbo bumped up to 4.6Ghz), 2x4Gb RipJaws 1600-7-8-7-24, Vertex 3 SSD 120 maxiops, Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 and Asus GTX 680 GPU using Nvidia drivers 301.10. I used to have Palit GTX 580 (with latest 296.10 drivers) and had the exactly same problems. Monitor is an Acer HN274H running 1920x1080 at 120Hz 2ms. Skyrim 1.5.24.0.5 freshly installed with only HD DLC and no mods. Settings at ultra high with no tweaks at the moment except the basic mouse acceleration removal and added tree+land shadows. Vsync untouched and no tweaking with Nvidia drivers or nvidiainspector currently.

With this setup I can hit 120 FPS in many places and even outside it runs at very high FPS very very smoothly. But with more powerful rig and high FPS new problems arise. Water textures randomly flickers bound with sound distortion, distant animal textures randomly flicker heavily (with displacement) and they even jump around wildly or up to the sky. I've tried to tune most of the related options and found out that putting more and more computational weight forcing FPS to go down settles the problem a bit. So I throwed in an fps-limiter, set it to 60 fps and all glitches were gone. But, now the movement is not perfectly smooth anymore, but micro-stuttering slightly. I can go higher to e.g 85 FPS but at some point the flickering returns even with the fps-limiter (I haven't tested the exact FPS cut-off for this yet) and I can still see micro-stutter on 120hz monitor. The same experience practically applies if I adjust my monitor to 60Hz and leave the fps-limiter away. Apparently this is a problem with the engine and the well known 64hz-issue.

The question is, do we have any official answer/recommendation from Bethesda to this? Should I run at 120hz and put the limit to 64 FPS to exactly match the physics clock and just live with the micro-stutter or downscale monitor to 60hz (and implied 60 FPS) still not maching the engine or something in between? Has anyone experimented how to get 120hz working correctly without fps-limiter? I haven't experimented much with pre-rendered frames or triple-buffers, but the little I have it does not seem to help here.

The FPS cut-off point seems to be around FPSlimit 87 +/-2 with actual FPS aroung 95 +/-2 according to FRAPS. Beyond that flickering appears and physics starts to fail and below that the world looks stable. Though I'm not sure if anything beyond 64 actually starts to fail physics? The scene I've been experimenting with is close to stables outside Whiterun watching toward the mountains and Pelagia Farm. There's a bull, some chickens on the ground and a few wolves up the mountain cliff, all of them flickering with placement distortion when failing. Without FPSlimiter I have a constan 120 FPS here. Anything less than that seems to give micro-stutter with 120hz. Any ideas?

Is there anyone out there with a 120hz monitor and a decent rig? It is so sad that everything would work so smoothly with 120fps but water, animals and sometimes NPCs flicker heavily and get wild displacement and distortion effects completely ruining the scene and game. Going below 85-90 fps stops flicker, but then turning around is not smooth anymore but notably stutters. I didn't have this a month+ ago, but since then there has been a few Skyrim updates and my rig has become more powerful so that I actually get that 120fps..

Is there any way to officially ask Bethesda whether FPS should always be limited to that 64 (or something else) to not break physics behavior? And if that should be enforced with a 120hz monitor as well?

Does anybody have the game running on 120hz and >85fps without graphical or physics glitches?

Not me. I am at 120Hz and I have also tried at 100Hz. Anything above 60Hz causes me (on horse) to start walking on air above the ground and causes creatures to shake/vibrate violently as if possessed. Sometimes the creatures will even shoot up very high into the sky while I am moving on horseback and then if I stop they will fall to the ground and die. This game does not work well at above 60Hz, which is unfortunate in this day and age...

I'm still on a CRT, and the game runs fine when I use vsync at 85Hz. This issue has made me more reluctant to get an LCD monitor. Although I would of course use it for other games than Skyrim. I hope this issue is dealt with. Sorry for not being able to help you out.

I have ASUS 120Hz monitor and I have been playing Skyrim at 120Hz from the get-go. My PC is Core-i7 920 @ 3.7GHz and GTX 580.

Up until last week when I updated my video driver to the new beta driver, 301.24, which introduced FXAA and that new VSync method, I never had any of the issues the OP was describing. I did not get 120FPS outside, though, I think typically I was in the 85-95 range.

Now with the new driver I am getting almost solid 120FPS outdoors and I am definitely seeing these glitches. When I am walking close to water, the sounds starts stuttering and the water starts to flash. Usually it only lasts for second or so and comes back in couple of seconds.

Animals in the wild are also sometimes animated incorrectly, jumping up and down about 1 feet for example.

At Markarth, outside the city walls at the stables there is a carriage stuck on top of the leftmost horse in its stable and it is jumping up and down on top of the poor horse.

I am pretty sure the only thing that has changed was the new driver but I cannot be sure if the driver itself is bugged or if the fact that with it I can now get 120 FPS is the factor that introduced these artifacts.

I will start keeping my eye on the FPS (I have Fraps running always) and will try to get a better idea if this problem only happens when I am at 120FPS range.

The problems are annoying, but they are not game breaking for me.

I must say I am quite skeptical of the physics problems being driver-related, as I have AMD gfx and I have similar glitches. how about a Mammoth Elephant jumping then hovering a hundred feet in the air? Most of the time the animals are jumping just a half-dozen or so feet, when they are doing that. However for me this is just a percent or so of the animals that are behaving this way, and the Afterburner 2.2 server thing did not fix it for me at all. I also have the stuttering, about a tenth of a second freeze about twice per second; it is not noticeable until I walk fast. What's more, sometimes in my SkyUI interface an odd bunch of slightly different colored translucent triangles (predominantly yellow) within a rectangle area near the cursor flashes for a split-second, sometimes constantly until I move the cursor. But that part is probably just a SkyUI bug.

EDIT: Yeah, I just tried it, and most of my microstutter goes away when I set everything to "ultra." I have not tested it for animal physics glitches yet. I do still see a little microstutter when I sneak, but not bad. It is odd that the stutter would diminish the faster I go, and no it is not just a perception thing.

EDIT: (see my next post below)

I am having the same problem, though my rig is not that powerful, i use a GTX 460, all of a sudden i started getting these spikes all the way upto 400 FPS and down to 30,40 as i move the camera, tried every tweak in pref, ini and no dice, worse, i downloaded FPS limiter and not even sure if its working, i set rendered to 1 and FPSlimit to 40 in the config and see no improvement, fraps still shows my FPS are out of control, i just finished playing witcher 2 and ME3 without any problems, but Skyrim is unplayable for me atm. i wonder if this has anything to with FXAA mod coz everything else is optimized on my end.

UPDATE: It does not fix the stuttering issue, but I haven't seen an animal jumping in the air since then. I still get the stutter, it's just better in some places.

Now I wonder how bad it will be when gfx card get twice as fast as they get now?

I was going to go from my hd 6990, and get a gtx 690 when it comes out next month. Now you guys are seriously making me question that.

Because one of the major reasons I wanted to jump ship was that the AMD cards always microstuttered in skyrim (duel gpu more) whereas consistent reports of people playing on gtx 580's and 680's was that it was smooth as silk.It seems it's not. Nomatter what path I take there will be microstutter in skyrim.Jesus. We need to take this higher up the ranks and make a stink about it. A single post on the beth forums won't achieve anything.

The question is - is there enough of us who actually care about the high fps glitches or microstutter 64hz. For it to count for anything.

Finally this issue is becoming more evident even for others and getting some momentum. So far I have had to settle to limiting FPS to 80 and living with the microstutter and occasional small (but much less evident) physical glitches. And this with GTX 680. If there'd be a way to make Bethesda aware of this...an hopefully do something if possible.

Let me know if they fix it up via drivers in the near future if you can.