I was wondering if anyone knew a .ini script or where I could go to modify lighting's affect on resources, specifically fire in caves, houses, etc. combat fire and lighting does not seem to slow me down, but whenever I go into a candle filled room I drop from 50 fps to 25, and i'm trying to avoid that to keep a seamless experience.

I'm currently playing on a laptop and here are the specs.

i7 CPU 2.4 Ghz, turbo boosts to 3.5 GHz
8 GB RAM DDR3 1333MHz
Nvidia Video Card GT 540M 2GB

Any other performance tips that don't sacrifice too much quality would be appreciated too!

I've never understood (beyond a marketing selling point) why there are svck low budget cards slapped with so much buffer memory.

I'll have to play around with things, but I don't think there's a way to disable or lower just the quality of the fire. Your card isn't very fast to start with so I totally understand how so many particle effects could cripple your performance.

Edit: your card is around the 7900gt or 7800gtx in performance. Good cards in their days, but definately minimum to run this game.

Yeah i'm looking for something like this too. It's not entirely the fire here it's also when there's alot of fog or a heavy snowstorm.

I'm using a 295GTX with a core i7 920 and i've the exact same problem. Also i've no problem in any other game than this atm.

The 295 is technically an SLI card, correct? Have you installed the latest beta drivers? They added an SLI profile for the game.

Hell, reducing the number of particle effects would do wonders for my performance. Still trying to find out how to do that though...

Funny you should say that. No i haven't, but i thought about it and made a profile for tesv.exe inside my old driver and put the SLI mode to force alternate frame rendering 2 and it seems to run alooot better now.

I have a GTX 550 Ti which I guess is probably low end cause I didn't pay a lot for it. The game runs fine except around specific fires like the ones in Whiterun at night. One trick I discovered is that if I play fullscreen and then Alt-Tab out when it gets really bad then Alt-Tab back in after the screen is minimized then the particle effects are gone and performance is normal again. It looks like after a while the fires start working again but I dont always have the performance penalty.