If I play Skyrim on Ultra with INI tweaks and no texture mods, then it plays 45-60FPS and has very little to no stuttering when I enter a new area.

However, if I introduce some high resolution texture mods, such as Skyrim HD, when I first enter a new area, I get tons of stuttering and an effective FPS around 20. Depending on the intensity of the area, this can last for up to 30 seconds. However, after this initial lag, my hardware still plays at 45-60 FPS.

What is causing this initial lag? Is it my hard drive trying to read all of the large textures into memory? Should I get an SSD and put Skyrim on that?

I am using LAA, and I never get crashes. I have also defragmented and moved the game files near to the beginning of the disk using MyDefrag.

The only other thing I can think of is the fact that the SLI configuration on my motherboard requires that the two graphics card PCI-e slots operate in x8 instead of x16. However, according to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-480-x16-x8-x4,2696-17.html Tom's Hardware Guide, there really is not much difference between x8 and x16.

My Specs (For those who have signatures disabled):
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3
CPU: Intel i7-2600k
GPU: 2x MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II, in SLI
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM 750GB
MEM: 2x 4GB G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series
Sound: Asus Xonar DG Sound Card

Skyrim defaults on Ultra, with INI tweaks
2560x1440 resolution

May I take a look at your specs? You would be surprised how much resources texture packs like Oblivion GE and MGE takes up.

Caused by your hard disk subsystem, typically. Putting it on an SSD might decrease file seek times, but might also drop throughput. Best thing you can do right now, is get a decent defragmenter and defrag the drive. I like to order files by folder so that all the BSAs are next to each other on the outer sectors of the drive (the fastest sectors).

People love SSD drives for their super low seek times. But often they fail to realize that a drives ability to sustain data transfer rates for a large chunk of data is just as important. Benchmark your drives if you are curious. I personally gave up on SSDs over a year ago due to other problems they have (like short lifespans). Right now I run Skyrim off a RAID 0 stripe of fast SATA drives with large stripe and cluster sizes, to maximize throughput. My Skyrim load screens are less than a second on average.

put this in your skyrim ini under the papyrus section

[Papyrus]
iMinMemoryPageSize=100000
iMaxMemoryPageSize=5000000
iMaxAllocatedMemoryBytes=1800000000

see if that helps b4 wasting money on one game .

You should describe what that does so the OP knows what he is doing to his .ini file.

I had my specs in my signature, but I have added them to my original post. It appears some people have signatures disabled.

This will give Skyrim more "breathing room" for retaining loaded resources. It will do nothing whatsoever for actually loading those from disk.

Having said that, if Skyrim has to go to disk less often because more resources are already in memory, you'll see less loading stutter. The kicker is - Skyrim is still not going to use all the memory you give it, especially is you haven't increased the outdoor and indoor cell buffer settings in the ini. You can tweak the game's ini files all you want, but the underlying reason for loading stutter is hard disk subsystems and whether or not the data is optimized on that to begin with.

HDD is the weakest link that's for sure, unless you have an SSD which is able to load data much, much faster. I'd never go back to a HDD.

Games don't constantly read from the drive, big caches and memory really help here. Raid is fine if you can set it up right and have the hardware to support it. I simply wouldn't buy a mechanic drive any more, unless I actually used 500Gb worth of space which I don't, I just put heavy games on my SSD.

WTF...lol
First let me say I use a Generated INI file "saveini" in console. When you have issues see my sig The monster INI works Flawlessly.

In my ini i have these lines...

iMaxMemoryPageSize=4096 (default was 512)
iMinMemoryPageSize=2048 (default was 128)

bUseHardDriveCache=1 (default was 0 = off)

Things run smooth for me...and yes i am on a HDD not an SSD

The page file looks to be in MB so the max number posted in the Quote would give you a page file of ...4882.8125 GB thats gigs...Careful what you change....

it was taken from this topic http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2227329

i use it and i get no stuttering at all , i think this game is just down to the persons computer not the hard drive

Yeh I keep seeing those large values copy/pasted all over the place but few know what theyre even doing, and the ones who do are skeptical about using them at all lol.

Ive seen it so much I cant even tell who they originally came from.

This post is inaccurate in just about every possible way and should be ignored. Basically the exact opposite of what this guy claims is true.

And .5 second load screens? Because he's using a conventional hard drive? Where's the video?

Did you have a look through that thread...alot of MISS information in there...Do you really think setting that to 5 gigs is right??

To the OP.....why are you using 2 x16 cards in SLI with that board??


Just curious...http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3892#sp this is your Board right?...This is hamstinging your Card...try with one and see if its faster...

Edit: I see you mention that in the OP....I was going off your SIG...lol. Still the SLI could be slowing you way down.

Simply not true, the majority of z68 boards default to 8x8 when enabling x-fire or sli because it will only effect performance on multi-display setups with ingodly resolutions.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/23/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x8x8/1

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/mainstream-chipsets/z68-express-chipset.html As you can see from these 2 block diagrams the P67 and Z68 chipset are designed for only X16 total bus bandwidth. So if you place a second video card into the board it will drop both PCI-e x16 slots down to x8.
That is because the data rates of PCI-E 2.0 X8 are higher than PCI-E 1.0 X16.
You can get boards with the NF200 bridge chip but it doesnt really change anything. You STILL only have 16 lanes, and you won't be able to saturate that during gameplay with two cards, MAYBE with dual 590's or 6990's.

To put it simply LGA1155 CPUs only have 16 PCIe lanes from the CPU (and another 8 from the PCH though those are stuck behind the CPU-PCH interface)

The only way to get more lanes on LGA1155 is to use a bridge chip (such as the NF200) but bridge chips that can take 2.0 x16 in and provide 2x 2.0 x16 out are pretty pricey and power hungry, and you STILL only have 16 lanes from the CPU to the bridge and you have added extra latency. So you end up paying for an expensive chip that gives little advantage over just using an x8/x8 configuration.

EDIT: I figured i should edit this and state the above is true with CURRENT Sandy Bridge 1155 cpu's, of course Ivy Bridge is on the way and those who know what it is , know the reason for me adding this.

The symptoms you describe sound to me more like you've exceeded your GPUs memory capacity; the stuttering is your GPU juggling textures between video ram & main memory.

Agree with TehJumpingJawa.

It's certainly not the PCIE speed. 2x16x or 2x8x hardly matters.
I find it unlikely that your HDD is causing such stuttering for 30 seconds. A HDD might be a bit slower than a SSD, but not that it gives 30 seconds of stuttering.

Your GTX560tis have 1 GB of VRAM.
That's is enough for Skyrim, but not a lot. My GTX260 has 896MB of VRAM. At 1920x1200 and 4xAA, I easily go over 800MB used in many places.
You use a high resolution, which makes the cards use larger framebuffers. That uses some extra VRAM.
You say you see the problem happening when you use custom textures. Custom textures can cause the game to use a *lot* more VRAM. You should be very careful here.
Who knows, maybe because SLI itself makes the cards use more VRAM too. There needs to be extra communication between the CPU and the two cards, so that might use extra VRAM.
So I see enough reason to believe your machine might run out of VRAM. And then it starts swapping textures between regular RAM and VRAM. When that happens a lot, it's called "thrashing". And thrashing has a real bad impact on performance.

Download GPU-Z. Recent versions allows you to see at your VRAM usage. Run GPU-Z, start the game, load a savefile. Alt-tab and look at GPU-Z.
That might tell you more than anyone on these forums.
Good luck.

Did you notice the UNgodly Rez the Op is running???


Was my only point....

Read the link , thsy tested GTX 480's in SLI @ 2560x1600

You must be right, I know absolutely nothing about performance or PCs. I should fire everyone and sell my IT business, and I should give up producing performance mods for games.

I don't normally feed people who are trolling (posting to incite argument without contributing at all to the thread), but you get this one for free.

Now where's that darn Ignore button...

Well said.

Intresting...Sorry OP.. Looks like you can learn something new every Day....

So your telling me the Drop in performance, when i added a Physix card to my board was not due to droping the Bus speed?

This is making me smile..looking at what you posted the Lanes would have the Same access to the CPU..

So my Problem was because I put my 8800 GTX in the second slot on my Board. And that if i were to get a Second GTX 560ti it would work good?

My Board....http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1156/Maximus_III_Formula/#specifications

Again Sorry OP ..im getting excited...lol

Not to be rude but just because you do IT doesn't mean you know about PC hardware, since IT covers a big scope.

Raid is fast but not that fast and if you were running SSD's in raid then that's a different story. An SSD Raid setup would cream a HDD Raid, end of story.

I agree - caching is superior if you have a ton of it. Unfortunately, most people building a gaming rig (or buying one outright) don't know a lot about RAID, and that it can take advantage of multiple drive caching and large stripe sizing to buy performance enhancements. That leaves them with one fast drive that can't fill the pipe adequately, and hence becomes their bottleneck.

SSD is superior for seek times, very much so over a conventional drive. But they have problems of their own if not used right (repeated writes kill their lifetime quick). They can approach RAMdrive speeds when in their own RAID 0 stripe, and are extremely fast in that configuration. But again, that requires knowledge that a lot of people don't have, and a single SSD drive only solves half the problem (fast seeks, limited throughput).

If I had unlimited cash for Skyrim, the easy solution would be a 24gb RAMdrive and just skip SSD altogether. Barring that, I'd put 3 SSD into a RAID 0 stripe and just plan on them dying in a couple years (or less), and call it my gaming drive. Unfortunately most of us can't go with either route, and RAID 0 on conventional SATA drives is the next best thing - slightly higher seek times, but much higher throughput.

Hopefully the next generation of SSD-style drives will get around the problem of destroying their own sectors due to excessive writing. At that point, they will kill old conventional drives for anything except large storage.

I still firmly believe the OP was suffering from disk-subsystem bottlenecking, and barring any change in hardware the amount of data being transferred was the culprit. Memory can help combat repeated reads, but only so much. Still going to get long loads for areas and assets not cached.

Absolutely, a second GTX 560ti will work fine on that board.
If you wanna discuss performance pc hardware, come join us on the http://forums.anandtech.com/.
Everyone is more than helpful and willing to share knowledge.

OP: apologize for the thread crap