Hi all,

I have been getting odd little lag spikes in Skyrim and have not been able to find anyone else who seems to be having quite the same problem. For quite a while I played the game without any trouble on ultra settings. I'm still playing on ultra settings (I did drop the aniso and AA down to nothing) and using Game Booster, and I'm still achieving very high FPS - right on 60 most of the time and occasionally dropping down to mid-50s. The lowest I've seen it get is mid-30s during a dragon attack in the Pale where there was a lot of water, a lot of action, and a lot of fog. I have no issues in interior cells. What is essentially happening, and I notice it most just when my character is running. It gets a little jerky despite the FPS staying high. Every second or two there is a slight jerk to the FPS, and it's really irritating given how frequent it is. It gets worse as the FPS drops, making it very noticable in the mid-40s. I cleaned out my old GPU drivers and installed the latest Catalyst drivers. Thinking that the problem may have been related to save game bloating I tried earlier saves and new characters, but the problem is just as prevalent there. My computer should have no problem with Skyrim, and it didn't eight months ago. I haven't noticed performance problems in games outside of Skyrim or any of the other tell-tale signs, so I'm ruling out hardware failure for now. Beside Dawnguard and Hearthfire and the Unofficial Patches I'm only running a few small mods (a couple of spell mods, a few little tweaks, a bank mod, all very minor stuff.) I have the high-resolution texture pack, but that shouldn't make a difference given that I have a lot of memory. The GPU is a 6990M. I regularly play in Steam's offline mode. I have not made any .ini tweaks. My HDD is less than 1/3 full and I regularly try to keep it clean and as empty as possible. Any suggetions as to what I should try short of having to drop the graphics down further when the computer should be able to handle the game without much of a problem? Thanks.

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 12288MB RAM
Card name: AMD Radeon HD 6900M Series