Skyrim gives me massive FPS drop when looking in the direction of a town. In the wild and inside dungeons I maintain a steady 60 fps with all settings at ultra. Whenever I look in the direction of a town, even if I'm really far away, I'll get this massive framerate drop ( from 60 to 15-20 fps).

I posted a youtube video to show that :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtFYE6p80mM

My specs :

- AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE
- GTX 570 factory overclocked
- 8Gb RAM
- Resolution 1920x1080
- Did a clean Windows 7 64bit install just before installing the game, all my drivers are up to date.

youre not alone, tons of threads about the problem tho i know enough people without any problem, or so they think lol

but its totally natural that framerates drop drasticly the more is going on on your screen, the more fireballs fly, the more NPC eat garlic sandwhiches and so on... in a forest there are basicly just trees and rocks, in a town you got all that fancy FX stuff massing up and hence framerates drop

the problem atm is that its a huge unproprtional drop even the highest high end pcs experience and even worse is that many have stuttering even in areas where they have their magical 60fps

OP, here's what worked for me.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1263528-jaggypixelated-shadows-heres-the-reason-why/

Essentially, you set indoor shadow distance to 1000, and outdoor shadow distance to 2000. The result: vastly superior shadows and higher frame rates in those troublesome spots.

See my own post on about page 3. You need to set all settings to Ultra before you start changing the ini file. Get back to me. I think you're going to be super pleased with this.

Ok thanks, I'll give it a try when I come back home from work. I'll keep in touch with results

Ok I tried the fix and instead of dropping to 15 fps in town, it drops to 22-25, so I gain a few fps, but at least the shadows look good now.
Still this issue should be fixed, it's a CPU issue, if you don't have a top of the line new sandybridge 2500-2600k cpu, you'll likely get this massive fps drop in town.