I have an EVGA 560 ti 1GB, a Dell h67 Motherboard, an Intel Core i7 2600 @ 3.4 Ghz, 8GB of RAM and a Corsair 850W PSU alongside a Hitachi 1GB 7200 RPM HDD. I can get playable framerates in AvP and both Crysis games but Skyrim seems to give me unbearable slowdown anytime that I'm indoors. How is this game more demanding than Crysis 2 DX11 when so many textures are blurred and ugly and there are so many blocky low-poly models and why does it slow down when I'm inside and less Vram is used?

I'm having the same issues. It's ridiculous.

The worst part is the cities. No matter what I do, my FPS drops to the 30s on high, not even ultra settings.

Okay, what the hell? I set the game to ultra and now it's running perfectly, even the vertical mouse movement is better. I'm confused.

*Use forum search function.. this issue has had many hundred topics in last 24 hrs.. please use it..

Also ini tweaks
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1255692-skyrim-pc-ini-and-console-tweaks/page__st__120__p__19176021__hl__tweak__fromsearch__1#entry19176021

for the lazy people.

Wow, so I'm not alone in having these issues.

I also drop to 30 or 40 odd in towns. Similar system to you. If its not patched, it's probably the scripting etc similar to fps drops in morrowind and oblivion

Okay, not a single one of you has mentioned anything genuinely relevant to your situations. What's your AA settings vs your card(s) memory and most important what resolution are you trying to run it at? If you exceed what your card(s)' memory is capable of holding you will experience severe degradation of FPS and the usual two largest candidates for doing so are overly ambitious AA & Shadow settings.

I'll give you guys something to strive for: I'm running 3240x1920(which is very likely triple the resolution most of you are) with 4xAA & 16xAF, Medium shadows and ultra/high setting on everything else. I get 40FPS as an average and a low of about 30. I'm using cards that are several years old but in SLI/span, 3xGTX280s. They each have 1GB of video ram and these settings almost max out that memory but don't exceed it, therefore things stay smooth. My CPU for what its worth is a 2600K running at 4.8Ghz but I guarantee you that doesn't really mean much at all in this situation, ram as well is meaningless since I haven't seen Skyrim use more then about 500MB at any given time (which is odd, neat but odd).

Do you know what GPUz is? Are you using it? If you aren't: Go find out about it and most importantly look into how it'll tell you how much of a video card's memory is in use at any given time. Use that to ensure you don't exceed the memory vs the various settings and you'll get your ideal experience. AA is your biggest video memory consumer, reduce it to 0 and then work your way up from there, high screen resolutions of course will amplify its needs but if my aging 1GB cards can 4xAA a 6MP resolution then surely your own can do something more effective then what you've configured them to run at as well.

maybe it's because there is more to process in towns, more shadows etc

just a thought lol

30-40 is very acceptable anyway!

That's all fine and dandy, but I have an AMD Phenom II 1100t at stock 3.3ghz, 8 gig ram and 2 GTX 580's in SLi config, so 3gig of VRAM. With all setting max and 1920x1080 I'm getting 30-40fps outside. Whilst checking my MSI Afterburner, I'm getting a max of 40% usage on my top card and 20% usage on my bottom card, never any higher.
I even turned all the setting to LOW and had a frame drop of 52fps outside. There seems to be a problem with certain setups that don't partner with the game well. It's not my system that's the problem, alot of other people are having the same issues with GTX 580's and others in the 500 series, too many to be just a coincidence.

Okay, first up you don't have 3GB of video ram as a whole entity, you have two cards with 1.5 each so they each have an upper limit of 1.5 to draw their respective frames (but yah, 1.5GB is enough to do most sub 2MP resolutions even with 8xAA+). Are you using the beta driver with the SLI profile for Skyrim? If you aren't: That was night/day difference for my own situation, dooo it. But yah I agree for all intents and purposes 2x580s should be roofing the vsync on this title at 1920x1080 for sure.

Yeah Im using the beta drivers, the performance is horrible. I'm just waiting for some kind of fix before I start playing. Which is a shame, 'cause I've been looking foward to this for so long now. It's nice to know that some people are having a good time though.

Turn shadows to low or off, they seem to be causing major lag problems for people from what ive seen. I had slight lag with high settings but by turning off shadows and putting everything else max the game runs great. Shadows don't look much better on ultra then they do on low.

Is there anyone out there whom could post their FPS performance IF they have a similar system to mine..i want to know..weather my pc should be playing better or not..also state what drivers you're using if ATI. TY

my system is a pretty average one.

Q6600@3.2
4gb ram
ATI 5850

im running skyrim on the Default High settings

Whiterun = 30 fps minimum (daytime with ppl roaming)
everywhere else between 50-70fps



To me personally 60 FPS is playable its smooth and fluidic anything below irritates me, (and yes im well aware of my sytem spec limitations) just trying to point out..how syrims engine is pretty badly optimized considering RAGE looks alot nicer and runs maxed out 60+fps im hoping Bethseda really push out the patches!

Skrull, got Steam?
My PC is almost identical to yours, get about the same FPS.

Agreed, from my own experiments going above the medium setting is just asking for trouble. I've read elsewhere that this particular engine relied upon the methods of the consoles for drawing the shadows and the PC method is a cheap knock-off and well yah the results of playing around with that setting do seem to indicate that its just not very good at doing what its doing once you go above medium. Keeping that at medium gives me a very solid and smooth 40FPS the majority of the time, going over it creates pockets of lag and significant drops in FPS at random times along with texture flickering.

Much like crysis, it appears skyrim's PC shadow engine svcks.