Black screen issue sufferer reporting in.
Mind repeating that?

I have a mod for better perfomance that has kept my framerate at 50 or more no matter what. The mod is no longer available for download though

Possible, but if they WHERE the majority I'd expect to hear A LOT more complaints. You know, it's rather rare that those who are happy with a product take time off to post about that in an area dedicated to problems with the product*. But those who are unhappy will certainly complain. Here and on other forums or by some other means.
If the game was as bad as many of the people who have problems think, why are there so many mods already? Many of these mods change tiny things. Do you really think people would spend time on things like that if the game would be as broken as some of loudest people are crying? Also many sites and magazines openly criticize games that are buggy and unstable, some even lower their ratings because of that. Yet there's no outcry by reviewers about Skyrim. Not even by those who usually do write about such things. That all leads to the conclusion that the game can't be that badly broken as a small but loud minority thinks.
(*In case you wonder, I'm here because I'm interested in the game, mostly reading the mod forum and just checking in here occasionally.)


If you go through the complaints here on this forum you can see some patterns:
Many CTD victims have ATI 6xxxx and 5xxxx cards on Intel boards so one might think there might be a problem with ATI's drivers, maybe specific to certain mainboard chipsets? Although both ATI and nVidia are releasing "unified" drivers there are still different driver files for each card or generation of cards in these packages so that older cards have less problems means nothing. Giving the huge streaming world it could be related to graphics memory usage or PCIe bus usage on some chipsets.
Either way, I seriously doubt that there is just ONE reason for the CTDs and considering how many people DON'T have these problems I think it's rather some odd hardware/driver/software combination than a general problem with Skyrim.

Many of those complaining about low, inconsistent FPS have high-end nVidia cards on Intel boards. That allows two conclusions, one that the game is mostly stable for them - otherwise they wouldn't spend so much time complaining about graphics quality and FPS but would complain about instability instead. And two, that maybe their expectations are a little high.
As I wrote before, I'm getting over 30fps in most areas, usually between 40 and 60 indoors and 30 to 50 outdoors. I'm running the game with maxed in game settings and many additional tweaks on an old nVidia GTX 275. It's factory overclocked and has 1.7GB RAM but is still rather dated. Yet it gives pretty good framerates which makes me believe that those using current generation cards are just complaining because their expensive cards for some reason don't give them the constant 60fps they expect.

After some point your GPU doesn't really matter, since the game will not use it at all due to CPU bottleneck.

I do not demand constant 60 or even 50, but at least 36/40 FPS as a down limit would be appropriate, considering that I meet recommended configuration. Yet my FPS goes down to 19/20 in some towns, which is irritating and prevents me from actually enjoying the damn game. The fact that the game is "playable" is not enough for me, since this is not what I payed for in terms of both - the game & my machine. Due to given information Skyrim should run fine and smooth on my PC and THAT'S what I had in mind while buying the game.

Yep

Look at this: 1.2 patch notes
"-Fixed rare issue where dragons would not attack"
But it is not fixed. Sometimes dragons fly overhead and do nothing.

Or this http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/470034-quest-assist-the-people-of/
I think they do not even know that there is a bug in Solitude.

Modders won't capable of fixing engine bugs, such as poor CPU usage and FPS drops.

12-12-12 is even better. Last time this century for month-day-year all the same.

Oh hi there, Sheogorath

While most internet communities have a tendency to be overly critical about products. Its clear to me by the exceptionally high volume of troubled users and consistency of the CTD report that this is a sub-par port. Lots of ppl are coming in here to say we expect to much, and that a game will never be completely fixed, or this whole CTD thing is a fluke. Here is the thing, I dont expect completely glitchless or 60 fps, all I want is game that runs smoothly. Like many others Ive had frequent CTD that seems to be getting better but CTD and other glitches are still very disruptive. I save frequently and still Im regularly redoing my last five minutes of game play because of CTD or because I had to back track though saves to resolve some glitch that halted my progress, or I had to reload an area to dismiss some unintended effects caused by a dragon spawning during another event, and so on. The game was so bad at one point I labeled it unplayable and seriously considered sending it back to them. I press on because I love the game and it is still captivating despite the interruptions, but that is no reason to be content, and I honestly would not buy another PC port form bethesda if they fault on there responsibility here.

Then your are definitely among the more reasonable people on this forum.

Anyway, as for the CPU limitation, I just tried tweaking the settings I posted above some more. Here's the result:
Skyrim.ini:

[General]iNumHWThreads=16[HAVOK]iNumThreads=16

SkyrimPrefs.ini

[General]bUseThreadedMorpher=1bUseThreadedParticleSystem=1bUseThreadedTempEffects=1bUseThreadedBlood=1bUseThreadedTextures=1bUseThreadedMeshes=1bUseThreadedLOD=1bUseThreadedAI=1

I found the additional bUseThreadedXY entries posted in some forum. No idea if they actually do anything. My idea was basically to increase the number of threads the game is allowed to create as more threads help Windows to balance the load over all CPU cores.
Changing the two iNum values in the Sykrim.ini from 4 to 8 daramatically increased the framerate in Markath and also slightly helped with FPS in Whiterun. I tried different combinations between 8 and 16 with little or no difference but my previous value of 4 was apparently still limiting CPU use. As increasing the value from 8 to 12 to 16 didn't have any effect I left it at 16. Maybe CPUs with more cores can still benefit from higher values.

Now with these settings all 4 cores of my CPU are used almost equally. And even in spots with lower framerates the game feels more responsive.
As my cores never reache 100% I assume that my old mid-range GPU is still a somewhat limiting factor. People with faster GPUs and/or CPUs might benefit even more.
Just give it a try.

Bug's can be fixed by modders..What I want is the engine to be optimized. It performs terribly. So much so that the sparse few texture/graphics mods already make my rig drop to 25-30fps and my vram still has 200MB free whereas BF3 will max it out at 60fps. I'd consider investing in a 2nd video card but Skyrim isn't optimized enough to use it properly. Seems the only options are to blow 500 on a 580 for a 10fps increase or wait until Kepler, which is ridiculous. This whole situation is infuriating. I really can't believe they bragged about this POS engine. Quad-core's have been out for years now, learn to use one.

Wait just a second. You can't blame it all on PC specs. Somebody who meets or exceeds the minimum requirements or the recommended requirements should not be having problems. Bethesda supposedly set those requirements. Are you saying those requirements are bogus? Did Bethesda overstate the requirements for better sales? If not then the problem isn't gamer's pc's. It's the software. Besides people with 360 or ps3 consoles are having some of the same problems.

I've run tests with the performance monitor open on a second screen, my CPU is an AMD AM3 quad core, just as with Oblivion and Fallout, the iNumHWThreads and iNumThreads make no difference on the spread, I get the same readings with or without, core 0 and core 2 almost 75% while core 1 and core 3 never much more than 20%

It's not as simple as meeting or exceeding the minimum requirements. it's programming a game to work with many many different hardware configurations. Just because you have more than the minimums, doesn't mean that your exact spec might have been tested to completion by Bethesda because the game would never get released if they tried to do that for all configs.

I'm throwing my hat in with the people that have never had a CTD. All my problems have been bugs in the game, like stuck quest items after a quest, miscellaneous quest objectives not being correct. Things of that nature, which I expect either Bethesda will fix, or I'll find a community fix for it eventually. Either way, none of them affect how much damn fun I'm having with this game right now.

edit: as an addition, I think Bethesda in the past has done a pretty good job of nailing down a lot of the major bugs in their games, and leaving the myriad of small ones for the community to clear up. Is it the right way to do business? I don't know, but I don't expect Bethesda to be able to release a perfect game, not one that is this complicated, so I accept it.

This is interesting. How much testing have you done? Is it stable? Setting threads to 8 seems odd but if it works and is stable I'll give it a shot.

Those settings doesn't seem to do anything, unfortunately.

^This. Modders won't help us unless some serious performance update will be done.

But aside from everything...

What I knows is that I have clean and updated PC, that meets the recommended requirements. But still the game doesn't run as it should. These are the facts. Also, I would prefer to play the game right now instead of [censored]ing on this damn forum - this is also a fact.