Is there a way to reduce the indoor and outdoor smoke/fog particle effects?
I'm running the game at 60fps nearly full time but when I'm inside a dungeon my fps just drops to 30 when looking at a lot of smoke/fog.
I tried to reduce the particles in the .ini but that only reduces magic effect particles.
It's not so bad outdoor as there's less smoke/fog or at least less dense. Is there something else besides particles i can reduce in the SkyrimPrefs?

Bump, I'd be interested in a solution to this too.

Bump Bumpington

Bump.

in SkyrimPrefs.INI:

[Particles]
iMaxDesired=750

Change 750 to a lower number maybe (I put it to 250). Haven't really noticed an effect myself.

This don't work for me. Nothing change.

Gonna bump this as well. Game runs great anywhere that doesn't make really heavy use of fog. It tends to slow down to a crawl in those places, though.

Seems to strange how I can be standing in a massive exterior region just outside a town, with NPCs doing their thing all over the place, and my FPS is completely fine. Then I go into a tiny, empty cave with some fog and I can hardly play.

Bumpity Boo. Same thing here. Game runs perfect outside with 60 fps, however, I am in a dungeon right now with a big cavern i nthe middle full of fog and I get 11-15. Please help us.

Lol i've got a problem with water instead.
The four natural elements are just poopin on us all

I'm sure I at some point found some way in the ini to simply switch fog off..
I'd recommend using google.

Oh my god, thank you so much for that idea! We totally forgot about google! Who would even think of that? Thanks for trying to contribute but please dont assume we're idiots. People found 2 lines in the ini that are clearly for the fog particle but switching them to 0 makes no difference for anyone.

I have the same problem. Tried all set all fading options to lowest point. All graphic to low. Dissabled shadows. Nothing But when I set resolution to 800x600 for game I can run it with high setting with no problem. Maybe this is caused by NVIDIA optimus technology and need to be updated?

I have this problem especially in Markath.

You are not alone! Fog, smoke and blowing snow ... so yeah, basically all particle effects absolutely WRECK my framerate. These are just expensive effects, I know, but there does seem to be a disparity with the implementation in this game and the performance hit being seen. ISSUE # OVER 9000! I have a feeling it will be years before this game is running smoothly and it will probably ONLY be because the player community fixes it using the yet-to-be-seen SDK. It is like Bethesda got tired of working on the game and decided to just hand it over to us so we could finish it for them. Just make sure you don't use the word "Scrolls" in relation to anything other than this game ... you could end up on the wrong side of a law suit.

You are right, the game seems unfinished in some points. Not as bad as Oblivion, but surely more than Fallout 3! After spending 60 hours in the world of Skyrim, I'm not at all "flashed" by the graphics on the PC, like Tod announced. They aren't better than what we saw in the demo videos, even running on ultra. And besides that I've encountered some crashes and other bugs. I hope the coming update will fix alt least some of these, but it really could have be done in advance.

open console, click on the mist effect, type 'disable'. so awesome that my immersion is broken as i do this literally DOZENS of times every play session. the 'loading mist' we're faced with just mocks the hell out of me. sigh.

funny thing is, it's only the interior mist effects that slow me down. outside is a-okay. why is that?

This issue doesn't let me use ugridstoload higher than 5. Everything is smooth at 7, but as soon as there is smoke on the screen I get stuttering and fps drop. The use of graphic cards drops down considerably too.
It would be really nice if they could optimize it somehow. Really, this is a big issue of this game...

+1 for you
i had these issues back in 2006/2007 with Oblivion.. sold my pc became a console gamer till 2011.. i bought a great i5 2500K and started to play Oblivion with all the community patches and mods.. it took almost 5/6 YEARS (!) to play Oblivion smooth stutterfree and with Qarlls HD texture with solid 60+ FPS ....
Skyrim? ill see that game back in 2016/2017 untill then dont have your hopes high that Bethesda will optimize the game because they will be start secretely working next year with The Elder Scrolls VI leaving Skyrim half crippled hsnding over to the PC community to do whatever we please..

I have the exact same issue. Markath is the biggest perpetrator for me as well. If I view Markath from the window in the Wizards tower my FPS drops to a crawl.

My system specs:
i7-920 OCed to 3.6Ghz
12Gb Corsair Dominator RAM
128Gb Samsung 470 SSD
2 NVidia GTX 570 in SLi (I have the same issue if SLi is disabled)

There have been a couple of reviews online that mention how parts of this game are extremely CPU limited; cities being one of those parts. FPS sometimes corresponds to your CPU's clock speeds at a 1:1 ratio. See this link: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

Back in Oblivion there was an issue with refraction shaders causing massive FPS drops in front of Oblivion gates, before they were fixed by the community. I suspect the same problems may arise in occasion with some of the refraction shaders. Things like refracted smoke from some candles and torches, energy fields, gas clouds in mines and some of the volumetric particles are oddly present in areas where we get performance hits.

It's usually not a problem with particles even though it seems like it is. Many AMD GPUs boast high texture fill rates, and equivalent pix fix rates. (Like 50 MegaP/s, and 30 MegaT/s for an Nvidia, or 30MegaP/s, and 30 MegaT/s for AMD).

The actual problem comes from the shadows and grass. These are created everytime you move and such. If you remove them, it will flow smooth (you will be able to see all weather effects, and miss out on the bugged parts where snow flakes try to make shadows. It's not the graphics card trying to fill in the pixels, it's the CPU trying to make stuff for the graphics card to fill in, but falling on it's bottum trying to send the message without crashing. So CRANK UP THE SNOW FOR THE HOLIDAYS! and maybe Bethesda, Maryland will have a way to make new shadows. But don't count on it hehe, they are probably really into Thanksgiving on the east coast , and snow and such

In a similar vein to what Technotronics said, I think the source of everyone's slowdown isn't the particle effect but the light source and associated shadows it casts that is taking place with a particle effect over it.

I found on ultra shadows my game would really start to crawl indoors (places like the Champions Hall in Whiterun, for example) when I got near a particle / light source. I believe the reason this occurs indoors and isn't experienced to such an extent outside is how the game partitions shadows. We all (should) know that outside, if you lower your shadow draw distance, all the shadows that ARE drawn are of correspondingly higher quality (though still unacceptably poor IMO.. but that's another issue).

Well, inside there is a much lower draw distance for shadows since it's an interior cell and so the game is partitioning more resources towards the drawing of each shadow. When you crank your shadow maps to 4096 (i.e. ultra) coupled with interior cell shadow drawing, its a recipe for poor performance.

Some have said shadows are GPU limited, others CPU, I don't know where I stand on the issue. It would be interesting to hear from the Ultra shadow players, if you don't get lag inside heavily lit interior cells, what is your GPU / CPU? It would be especially telling if anyone got little to no lag with a hoss GPU but middling CPU (<3 ghz), or vice versa. Personally, I'm using a 4.5 ghz i5 and a 1 gb 4850 so I'm inclined to think that the bottleneck lies on GPU.

agree with Techno...

though smoke and fog are a problem... but most of it falls on the CPU and shadowing.

modern GPUs can easily handle Skyrim's particles and 'consolized' textures.

As for shadows... the chances of it getting fixed this weekend after over 5 years of trying.... ummm... to say 'not likely' would be a gross understatement.

however, we may be lucky enough to get some more sliders or 'disable shadows' feature.

if the particles and shadows are a problem turn down shadow quality using launcher settings or reduce all 'shadow' related setting in SkyrimPrefs.ini to '0'.

this will smooth gameplay and increase FPS.

ini tweak does not remove ALL shadows from game (so game still looks decent)... it does reduce CPU load drastically and increase FPS.

Tom's hardware did a test of Skyrim's shadowing... CPU load... game is very CPU heavy.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

last options: upgrade CPU or GPU.
CPU = Intel is preferred. a quad core is ideal... running 3.0Ghz or higher is better. this will not work miracles but it does noticeably help with CPU load.
GPU = ATI 6850 or Nvidia 460 minimum.... 6950+ or 560+ better.

When it's the GPU that's limiting, why don't they optimize it for (at least) 4 cores? My i5-2500K could handle the load, if all cores would be used properly.

Yup, I also cannot understand why this is happening. To try and figure out what the problem is I started using MSI Afterburner to monitor my FPS/GPU load and the GPU load is pretty much always close to 100% which would maybe lend credence to the CPU bottleneck theory. However I also have a CPU monitoring gadget (All CPU Meter) and the usage is really low on all cores, almost all of the time. I don't see any kind of abnormal behaviour, save for the fact that Skyrim doesn't seem to be taxing my CPU much. To try and alleviate the problem I have even overclocked my CPU to 4.5Ghz. My specs are below.

My PC Specs

2500K @ 4.5Ghz (Overclocked for Skyrim, doesn't seem to have made any notable difference)
Asus P8P67 Mobo
8Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600Mhz Ram
MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC (factory overclock)

Game Settings

Ultra settings @ 1920x1200 with FXAA enabled and AA set to 2x (was at 8x but turned it down to try and solve the FPS dropping indoors issue)

I am using the Steam version and I cannot understand why this is happening. When I am outside I almost always get a solid 60 FPS however randomly in some indoor spots I get the annoying FPS drop which is made noticeable due to the mouse lag that inherently accompanies the drop in framerate. I haven't wanted to disable VSYNC as I hear people are having issues with that as well...

Any suggestions would be appreciated