Been lurking around here for a while, but i'm not seeing many people reporting this particular issue? I expected Skyrim to be the same as Oblivion/Morrowind, where the FPS is hit most outside and sticks at much higher counts inside - but i'm getting the opposite!

With everything maxed out, (including 8x AA and 16x AF) on 1080p I get about 45-60fps in general outdoor areas but inside it hangs around 35, rarely breaking past the fourties. This comes with a lot of huge drops in many places while indoors - as soon as anything mildly busy is on screen. Its everywhere from tiny cabins, to inns, to huge dungeons. The game struggles.

Of course i'm getting the typical drops in places like Dragonsreach in outdoor places too - but curious to hear whether anyone else has noticed this much and what rig their on?

Don't suppose I should hold my breath that there is some simple issue or thing i've overlooked.

I'm on a GTX 470 and an i7 860 @ 3.9ghz.

Yes, I am seeing a common issue on the forums with this. I am getting a small hit as well, so it is strange.

had the same issue until I realized it was a shadow problem I turned the resolution dpwn which fixed it

i7 920 @ 4ghz, gtx 560 ti OC

It's a shadow related problem, try to reduce in skyrimprefs.ini shadowresolution to 2048 OR shadowdistance to 4000


Oh and bethesda thanks for "fixing" the ESC button but not the shadows... niiiiice job

I've noticed a little drop here and there while indoors, and yes I also think its the shadows.
I'm not having your "opposite" problem though. Outside=ok , inside=much better.

I have the shadow mapping set to 2048
im running the game at 1440x900, 2x AA, 12xAF

Turn shadows to medium = fixed.

Right! Shadows it is then. Which do you guys prefer? Altering in .ini or just dropping the option down?

Drop the option to medium, see how you fair its easier to do also.

doesnt work for me.

I think low indoor fps is because of "buggy" lightsources.

Wow! Had a quick look in the .ini but it seemed that my interior shadow settings were already at 4000 so figured, screw it, try the other settings first.

Found a nice location to use as a reference point (looking down the first long corridor in the saphire claw dungeon). With shaodws on ultra the FPS was about 43-45. Decent enough.

Dropped down to medium. FPS became a SOLID 60 FPS. Nothing I could do to cause it to so much as hiccup.

Damn! So I had a look on ''high'' as well. 58-60 FPS. Amazing. I can imagine using high will still cause big drops in certain areas, though, so I think i'll stick with medium. I had a look at both the high and the medium shadow difference and they both look as pixelated as one another, so I see no reason to use any more than medium.

But jeez, what a huge difference, eh? Just goes to show why people are complaining about the shadow system being poor and needing a patch. A 15FPS drop from simply switching from High to Ultra? No thanks.

The candles indoors kill my FPS. I found lowering to high or medium helped performance quite a bit but would like to get rid of the shadow jaggies that I mostly see outdoors now. Anything at the driver level? I have nVidia GTX 550.

Setting shadows to medium introduces the irritating strobe effect again, so it's hardly a solution.

Yeah, true. Having played for half hour or so on medium its now quite clear how huge the difference is. If I could just disable the shadows-updating-with-sun effect and shadows on NPCs, I wouldn't mind so much. But it is rather ugly with shadows now spazzing out all over the place.
Clearly the shadows are just a disaster area. Hopefully modders will be able to fix the whole system?

Changing iBlurDeferredShadowMask in SkyrimPrefs.ini to 16 or 32 (the higher, the bigger performance hit) makes shadows look a LOT better when using 2048 shadow maps (is that high or medium?). There is a tiny performance hit but nowhere near the Ultra shadow setting- and it makes shadows look significantly better than Ultra anyway.

Huh that sounds interesting, i'll try it out.

On medium the defaults are:
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=1
fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000
fShadowDistance=2500.0000
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048
iShadowSplitCount=2

Yup, I had this exact problem. I was running the game at Ultra settings (no .ini tweaks) @ 1920x1200 on a 2500K + 560Ti system and the FPS outdoors for the most part was around the 60 FPS mark. In some indoor areas it would drop into the 30's but the most annoying part was the major mouse lag associated with this drop in FPS. I also tested in a part specific troublesome spot and figured out that simply changing the Shadow detail from Ultra to High fixed this annoying bug. I also disabled AA, enabled FXAA and tweaked the AF settings via the Nvidia control panel (much more detailed textures/water). I also enabled the self shadowing on Trees/Rocks and increased the Draw distance for Grass. My game now runs at a constant 60 FPS indoors and out so I'm happy

AF Tweaks described here: http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/Guides/five-fast-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweaks-guaranteed-to-make-your-game-look-even-better

.ini Tweaks described here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1166659/the-definitive-skyrim-ini-file-before-and-after-modification-photo-comparison-thread (as mentioned I only used the trees/rocks self shadowing + the grass fade tweaks)

Oh, one more thing. If you do make changes to the settings (in-game or via the launcher) your .ini tweaks will be disabled (as far as I'm aware).

On another note, disabling AA for me was definately worth it as the mem use on my video card dropped from just under 1Gb to around 600mb. My 560Ti only has 1Gb and using FXAA seems to have no real performance impact and is more useful than the standard AA as it also works on textures.

Not really strange. Shadows, as other people pointed out are a cuplrit and setting them to Medium helps with little loss in visual quality. However, the biggest hit on interior framerates is Lights. Now, these are not just lights like the torches or braziers or lanterns, but the point sources of lights that are used when creating a cell. These point sources are used for ambient lighting, overall cell lighting, to give shadows (not the dynamic ones) and variations in the room lighting across the room. There can be dozens of these in a cell, even one that is relatively dark.

With the past games, modders have come out with mods that reduce or remove the light sources from interior cells and that can help framerates. However, if you are floating in the 40 range indoors, I would not sweat that too much as these types of games don't need 60 FPS like a shooter does. In other words, using one of these light reducing mods would probably make the game less pretty with not much of an appreciable increase in indoor framerates. Folks who drop into the 20's or even low 30's would gain benifit.

I did the same, FXAA IMHO looks even better than regular AA, especially on tree branches

Ha, I love the people saying "I usually get 60, it drops to 45!". In the first mine (Embershard?) and in the general goods store in Riverwood, my framerate drops from 50-60... to single-figures. Seriously, I installed Fraps just for this, and it hits 8-9 for about 30 seconds then rights itself and goes up to the 30s or 40s.

getting it to, pretty annoying since it should be lower fps outside..

Antialiasing is really a problem in a game that does all its lighting like this (well, ok, it's a problem in a lot of non-trivial shading techniques). Most games that scatter light sources around this much use lightmaps, deferred shading or something, but the Skyrim engine seems to just forward shade them all by drawing full objects repeatedly, which is probably causing some indoor scenes to get drawn a dozen times before all the lighting has been accounted for.

With multisampled AA, additional samples have to be stored (and written) for each pixel even if the non-edges only need 1 pixel shader run, causing some serious memory bus abuse.

Of course, I bet none of this really matters at 720p even with the GF 7800 derivative on the PS3.

True...

I do have my shadows on low anyway, but you do make a clear point about those lighted areas. For Oblivion I had to use All Natural because of all the lighting and bright light areas that bogged me down

Ya, really! Arthmoor or SomeWelshGuy mentioned that RPG games are not really made to always get a constant 60 FPS as if it was a shooter. I may be wrong

But I do know what you mean, I have seen ion the past people were trying to figure out why they would drop from 100 FPS to 60 FPS indoors (I think it was Obivion as well) and it would bother them.

Same here

The only reason I noticed this was because of the mouse lag that accompanied the drop in framerate (I don't permanently run a FPS indicator, just when initially trying out a new game & settings). I generally wouldn't mind a framerate in the mid 30's for this typre of game but because they never enabled Triple Buffering, you end up with mouse lag wnen your framerate drops. Mouse lag is super annoying as it negatively influences gameplay, which is why I tried figuring out the problem.

Something I would actually like to try is enabling Ultra Shadow quality again then disabling VSYNC in the .ini and enabling it in the Nvidia control panel (incl. triple buffering). That way, when the FPS does drop I shouldn't get mouse lag. Will test it out and see if it works...

Wow, just found out that using the Nvidia control panel you can disable Vsync by forcing it off so no need for messy .ini tweaking (tha gets reset everytime you change your display settings). Forcing it on and enabling Triple buffering seems to work too, all I need to do now is find a place indoors where the Ultra shadow setting causes problems. If the mouse doesn't lag but the framerate still drops into the mid 30's then I will be happy with leaving the Shadow quality on ultra