After working with the Creation Kit for a few minutes, I noticed that it renders everything with maximum texture quality and a decent amount of anti-aliasing. I don't experience any lag on my laptop, with its Intel i3 processor, 4 GB RAM, and 64-bit Windows 7 operating system. However, when I view my content (or any of vanilla Skyrim) in Skyrim, I get an unplayable amount of lag with everything set to the lowest quality, even in my dungeon with nothing more than some walls and four torches. Has anyone else encountered anything similar and, if so, do you know anything about the cause of this discrepancy?

When just the CK is running there are no scripts etc. running that need constant updating so the engine can render things much faster - once the game is running as well there are a lot more things going on.

There are a lot of differences.

In many ways the CK requires far more than the game does. (mainly memory) However in many ways the game requires far more than the CK. Any number of things could cause lag in your cells ingame, but not in the CK. Does the rest of the game run well for you? Do you have any scripts running, havok objects simulating, or hidden lighting or roombounding?

For Skyrim, your video system is most critical and you don't say what you have.

Textures quality and AA are not such a big factors, unless you have a limited video memory. Sophisticated lighting, shadows and shaders are what matters and I guess they're missing in the CK rendering.
Finally there is the resolution too.

The resolution of the render window in the CK is certainly less than my screen resolution. The rest of the game runs about the same, which seems odd to me, since I have no physics objects, actors, or hidden lighting, unless it's hidden from even me. My video system composes of the integrated rendering chip on my i3 and the 64 MB taken from th which would certainly be limited.

The Havok simulations, AI, collision detection, and other such would happen on the CPU, right? Well, my laptop, where Skyrim runs badly, has this 4-core 2.4 GHz CPU, whereas my desktop, where I can play Skyrim on high graphics settings with no problem, has a 2-core 1.8 GHz CPU (also by Intel). It seems to me that my laptop would be better able to run Havok simulations and AI, given that the CPU can go over twice as many calculations per second.

Could it be that the CK uses the system RAM rather than the VRAM, whereas Skyrim uses the VRAM rather than the system RAM?

• Neither Skyrim or the CK are very multithreaded so the amount of cores is largely irrelevant.
  
• Clock frequency isn't a good indicator of performance.

3d graphic performance on a computer is a question of bottlenecks. The bottleneck on your laptop is probably the integrated graphics system, which is nowhere near powerful enough to run a game like Skyrim. Processor performance is somewhat important in that it needs to be capable of supporting the video system but the video system is critical. That i3 in your laptop will support a decent video processor, but the problem is that you don't have one. Go take a look at a site like Tomshardware.com where they give benchmarks on the different video systems. Skyrim takes a pretty good video card and the Intel integrated graphics is still pretty much at the bottom of the charts in performance.

There's your problem. Most laptops have large blocks of wood for video cards that have trouble rendering the slightest video requirement beyond 'Youtube video'. The CK has a far lower render area resolution and performance management on your video card (Relying on memory mostly), so when you go ingame your card can't handle it and performs poorly.

Alright. Now I know. Thanks for all the responses.