Hey there. My machine is pretty old one, especially my processor which is the bottleneck of my system. I have a AMD Athlon Dual Core processor 3800+ which runs on 2.0 GHz. Its antique. One of the first dual cores, I bought it long time ago. Rest of my system is kinda ok, 4 gigs ram and 9600 GT OC, which is still rather great and gives me amazing performance despite having piece of [censored] CPU.


Now, with 1.5 patch I can run Skyrim at mid 20 fps, with Bethesda's High Ress textures and medicore settings. I wont lower em as they are low enough. I wont enjoy the game if it looks worse than its atm.

Now, Can I somehow make this game runs better forcing my GPU to take most of the load so my CPU doesn't get the impact ? I heard my friends talking about CUDA and how they can replace CPU processing power by far, well my 9600gt oc supports cuda technology, can I use that thing to my advantage?

ANY info that would help me speed up my game, atleast 10 more fps will be a LOT appreciated . I just know my VGA can take some beating up, I just need to force her, just 10 more fps

Cuda has nothing to do with gaming. So sorry, no, you can't use it to your benefit.

The part that requires the most computing in games is the rendering of what you see on screen. And that is done by the GPU. The CPU is doing all the work to set up the data so that the GPU can start computing. Like moving textures from HDD to RAM to the VRAM on the videocard. The CPU does the computing of what happens in the game. Where are the NPCs, what do they do, etc. This isn't even very computation-intensive. But what it looks like on screen is all computed by the GPU. That is a lot more computation-intensive. But luckily, this is exactly what GPUs are made to do.

The amount of work needed to be done by the CPU isn't that high, compared to what a GPU does. The GPU is the real number cruncher. But if you CPU isn't fast enough, or doesn't have the bandwidth to move data to the videocard, then the GPU has to wait more before it can start rendering each frame. Then the CPU is a problem. As you may realize, the GPU can't take over this task. Because the CPU's work is setting up the GPU. The GPU can't do that itself. It can't acces the HDD, etc. Lots of the work the CPU does isn't even compute-intensive.

Your system is indeed antique. You migth consider buying a new box. If you are a little handy, you can order the components from a webshop, and assemble to box yourself. You can keep using your current screen and keyboard and mouse. Maybe even HDDs. Probably not PSU. And you definitely need new CPU, motherboard and GPU. But still, you can build a kickass system for a reasonable price. Lots of info about it on this forum (and the rest of the web).

thanks gryz for the replay. Yeah I had already planned to get myself a brand new pc, like build myself from scratch, but that project will have to wait till June. And the problem is, I want to play Skyrim now
I just found out about this "skyboost" mod which boost your fps by quite judging by others. I will give it a try this evening. I am determined to make Skyrim run better this evening

The above advice is your best bet, sorry to burst your bubble but the 9600gt is barely cutting it as is, you aren't getting more performance out of it without lowering settings.

You can make your GPU work harder by increasing its workload, but unfortunately you can not force the gpu to handle CPU tasks.

Thankfully I'm on my iPhone which corrects spelling, otherwise this post with illegible.

I'm durnks.

have a pint for me

Understood. I had a system that was twice as fast as yours (E8500 cpu and gtx260 videocard). I played with it in December. Was running ok, with some eyecandy. But in some places (Markath, Riften), the fps dropped to 10-20. Just too low to enjoy it.

AMD has released new videocards recently. And nvidia released a new card 2 weeks ago. I was waiting for those for ages. I bought a gtx260. And now I can play the game with all eyecandy I can think of. It just looks amazing. Best looking game ever. The videocard was pretty expensive (500 euros), but I am really happy I did it. With a $200 card (gtx560ti) you could also play with excellent eyecandy. In 3 weeks, Intel will release new CPUs. I'm gonna get me one of those (i5-3570k, $225). And a new CPU needs a new motherboard and ram. Because my case is old (7 years, and I hate it), I'm also gonna by a new case. Put in my old HDDs, SSD, PSU, my new gtx680, use my old keyboard, mouse and monitor. And I'll be as good as new. If you only play games once in a while, it's expensive. But if gaming is your hobby, it's actually really cheap. Try buy a horse. Or fly a plane as a hobby.

Give it a try.
But don't be disappointed if it doesn't do much.
When Skyrim shipped, the release-team had made a huge blunder. They had compiled the engine's source code with debug settings. So that the developers could easily debug their code. While they should have compiled it with settings to optimize the code. One guy (Alexander Blade, I think) did some performance anolysis, and saw that the code was far from optimal. With some cool tricks he was able to replace some unoptimized code with his own code. That gave people 20-40% higher framerates !

Bethesda realized that they blundered. And in one of the patches in December or January, they actually released the game-engine code (the TESV.exe file) recompiled with proper settings. So that the game runs far more optimal. Now all the work that Alexander Blade did, isn't necessary anymore, because it is already in the official game. Alexander did continue to work on Skyboost. But the big gains are gone. His optimizations are now centered around using non-standard parts of CPUs. So on some systems you might see an improvement. On others you might see nothing. Anyway, give it a try. If it doesn't do anything, you can easily remove the mod.