I recently started playing Skyrim again and decided to bump the distant object detail up to Ultra, I'd been playing for a few days and eventually got annoyed at the cell loading stutter (especially on horseback) that I could have sworn wasn't there the last time I played, so after disabling every mod, tweak and texture pack I narrowed it down to the distant object detail option, and only that, I could have everything else on low, with no mods and it would still stutter if I had it set to Ultra.

Now I've got distant objects on High and everything else ultra, I've also got a fair amount of object/texture replacers and it's running very nicely, not perfect but this is Gamebryo (yes it is) we're talking about, I was wondering if anyone else has noticed this quirk with distant object detail setting.

i7 950@3.8ghz
6GB DDR3
SSD
Win7 64bit
Nvidia 580 GTX
Forceware 301.24 beta

I suppose it's possible that the forceware beta is causing it but I really like having the extra FPS they've squeezed out of the game

I'm getting a constant drop in frame-rate (and a massive one), not just a stutter. I'm wondering if that might be my issue as well.

Do you know what settings in the .ini file control the distant land (as I have a tweaked .ini and don't want the launcher over-writing everything)?

I'm wondering if it is the following:
fLODFadeOutMultObjects=
fLODFadeOutMultItems=
fLODFadeOutMultActors=

Hm, that sounds a bit more severe than my problem, I can max out every setting with ini tweaks and mods but Skyrim runs well, flip that one setting to Ultra and the normal cell loading judder you see in Bethesda games becomes extra noticeable, for your situation I'd probably try disabling mods and going back to default settings so you can rule out any bad tweaks.

For the record, the section in the ini that affects distant object detail:

DISTANT OBJECT DETAIL ULTRA:
fTreeLoadDistance=75000
fBlockMaximumDistance=250000
fBlockLevel1Distance=70000
fBlockLevel0Distance=35000
fSplitDistanceMult=1.5

DISTANT OBJECT DETAIL HIGH:
fTreeLoadDistance=40000
fBlockMaximumDistance=150000
fBlockLevel1Distance=40000
fBlockLevel0Distance=25000
fSplitDistanceMult=1.1

Thanks, that might end up being useful to me on my obsessive stutter hunt

*edit*

By tweaking fBlockMaximumDistance I was able to get rid of those low poly distant mountains without adding any stutter, the Level1 and Level0 settings presumably adjust mid ground LOD distance, they seem to be what makes cell loading stutter worse for me, I'm guessing it's another one of these quirky Bethesda engine issues, it's like there's a load of software bottlenecks in there, hardware certainly isn't the issue judging by CPU and GPU usage.