I have the following specs. Built this machine in 2009, not the best in the world but it's a good, solid system:

ATI Phenom II x3 720
AMD Radeon HD 4850
4GB RAM

I've been trying with this game for hours and hours. In the opening scene I got 28ish fps when looking at battle scenes. When I went outside after the tutorial, I was getting 30fps. However when I entered Riverwood, I got as low as 25fps, and the noticeable lag between going into a house where you'd get 60fps, and outside at 25fps was horrible.

This was all on medium settings, despite the launcher recommended high. I'd even tried low settings, messed with AA/AF, Catalyst Options, different resolutions, DLL files, nothing would get my FPS up.

However similar to Oblivion, I noticed these FPS drops happened around NPCs, so I thought it must be the processor. I'd overclocked mine from a stock speed of 2.9GHz to 3.6GHz, so I didn't think it could possibly be that.

As I was pondering this however, I got a BSOD. No biggy, just restarted the computer. However it refused to POST, so I reverted my BIOS settings (that have been the same for months and months) back to the defaults. I then played the game.

I'm now getting 60fps indoors, 40-50fps outside, and 40fps (sometimes spiking into the high 30s) in cities. I have no idea why. But it seems the engine works better on a non-overclocked CPU than it does on an overclocked one.


So if you've overclocked your CPU and are having FPS, try setting it back to stock speeds. It gave me 10-20 extra FPS, which makes the game a joy to play.