I am currently running the game on Ultra, sometimes when I start up the game it runs perfectly fine and i get around 40 FPS running around outside and I am able to go inside buildings and get about 55 FPS. After varying lengths of gameplay, anywhere from 5 min to maybe 45 min, when I either enter or exit from a building or dungeon my FPS will suddenly drop to anywhere from 2-10 and stay that way indefinitely. Sometimes I am able to fix it by staring directly at a wall in front of me and I will get around 55 FPS, and once I turn around the lag will be gone and I will be at around 40 FPS, but that only works sometimes. Other times I can enter into a building and my fps will go up to 55 and when I exit the lag will be fixed too. But sometimes no matter what I do and how many times i restart the game I will be stuck at 2-10 fps and I have to set my settings down to high to be able to play. I am not sure whats going on and am wondering if there are any fixes for this problem. Heres my system stats

Intel? Core? i7-950 Processor
geforce 460 GTX 1 gb
6 gb ram
windows 7

any help would be appreciated. thanks

bump

Same problem here. Game runs smoothly on ultra settings. After some time (can be 30 minutes, can be more) there's heavy performance issues. I can't measure the framerate, but 2-10 sounds about right. Unplayable. Quit the game and restart - working fine again.

AMD Phenom II X4 955
RAM 4,00 GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 (1024 MB)
Graphics Driver 285.38
Windows 7 Professional (64Bit) SP1
Resolution 1920x1080

I've had this happen to me on High. Only 2 times so far in 24 hours of playing so it's not often and it seems to be after I spend a long time in a dungeon (45+ minutes), I go outside and I have about 2 FPS it seems. Restarting it does fix it, just like it fixes the trees/bones/armor with no texture (just a purple blob) but I'd like to not have to do that at all.

I don't think it has much to do with PC specs but

Intel i7 860 2.8ghz
Ram 10GB
GeForce 550 TI
Graphics Driver 275 (Yeah I know, I'm not gonna update yet, besides if updates aren't working for others they won't work for me either)
Windows 7 Home 64x


So as you can see, it's happening to people with different cards and drivers leading me to believe it's the game itself.

If you're experiencing such problems, please post your specs in this thread!

bump! still having this problem

Try alt tabbing out, and tabbing back in. I know my Radeons get micro stutters, and for some unknown reason this seems to sync them back up.

As a cliff note, you might have to tab back into the game twice, once to select the window, then just alt tab back into its self, and that should maximize it. Not sure if others have this, but its what i gata do.

yeah i have trade that blueshade but it doesnt fix the problem. and also what you were saying about having to tab twice i have to do that too, not sure why.

Good to see I'm not the only one. I made a thread the other night but didn't get any replies.

i7 930 2.8ghz
4gb ram
geforce 9800 gtx+
driver v. 275.33
win 7 pro x64

GPU is pretty outdated I know, but still runs great aside from this issue.

Will try the alt tabbing method next time it happens and update.

it is old problem since Fallout 3 and Oblivion
it was never fixed

really? i never experienced it in oblivion but i cant believe they havent fixed it...

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=134#content

Not sure if it'll fix your problem but this might help something. Skyrim is currently limited to 2 gigabytes of Ram or something.

Alt-tab method works for me. I never tried it before because I didn't realize I had to tab to Skyrim twice to get back in. I always assumed tabbing out crashed it. Thanks for the tip.

I made a thread on this as well. Been having this problem since launch of the game, mine gets fixed 90% of the time by alt-ctrl-deleting and then bringing up task manager (alt tabbing takes longer for some reason and seems less reliable as a fix. Strangely, I've got completely different system specs than you:
AMD Radeon HD 6850
Windows Vista
Intel Processor

Have to get back to you on my processor, i'm at work.

If anyone figures out a fix to this, please let us know. My machine is doing this every 15-30 minutes now, its getting really annoying.

Thank you random for this, it has made the problem a little better but still has not completely fixed it. When I am playing on ultra now 50% of the time when i go into a new zone i will have horrendous FPS for maybe 2-15 seconds, then the game will even itself out and the fps will be fine. After a longer session though it will start lagging again and waiting after I zone doesn't fix it. I can play on High now almost perfectly but still get the same slowdown, but with that fix i can play for maybe 50% more time before the slowdowns start Anyways, baby steps! Hopefully this will be resolved completely soon.