Hello,

Overall the game seems to run pretty well on my system (GTX 580, 2600k, 8gig ram). I get a near constant 60fps except for in a few
seemingly random places.

For example when standing on the steps of dragons-reach looking down at the tree in whiterun the game becomes really choppy and
my fps drop to around 30. At first i thought 'Ok well thats just becasue there are lots of lights and npcs in one place'. However as i
began to explore a bit more of the game i noticed there doesn't seem to be such an obvious cause to this problem.

I can be in a forest for example; look in one direction and have a silky smooth 60 fps, then turn around looking at virtually the same
scene (so you would expect a similar performance right?!) and get a choppy 30fps. Or look at a fort in the distance and get 30 fps then
turn until its just out of view and have 60fps again.

Ive tryed a few things to fix this which are as follows:

Updated and rolled back drivers to no effect

Run on lowest settings with no AA/AF (peak fps was higher but still dropped to 30's in the same places)

Disabled v-sync in the ini settings.

Disabled xbox controller support

Updated my direct x library.

I've also tried the d3d9.dll performance boost from skyrim nexus, which causes the laucher to suggest settings of ultra rather than high,
but results in a blank screen with sound only at launch. I also noticed that i didn't have a d3d9.dll in my skyrim folder to begin with (im
not sure if thats normal or not)

Hopefully its just driver related or is an issue that bethesda is aware of, but its really hampering my enjoyment of this great game at the moment.
Does anyone else experience this?

regards,

Check this thread, I think the answer for you is there http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1267822-tip-shadow-quality-is-a-huge-performance-hog/

Basicly shadows are software rendered by CPU. Even the most powerful CPUs (read overclocked 2600K) gets FPS drops in some places if set "Shadow quality" to Ultra. Try lowering Shadow quality to High or medium and see if FPS changes in that spot. Hell even post some comparision screens while you're at it, would be interesting to see from a 2600k user.

And no I didn't have a d3d9.dll file in my Skyrim folder either so it's probably normal.

This is a fairly common issue (FPS drop at dragons reach looking at the tree, other town squares, etc). It seems to be happening on lots of different types of rigs, including SLI and non-sli.

Bethesda needs to address it but hasn't yet. Currently there aren't really any fixes, sorry.

Hi
Shadows quality in options must be set lower than "ultra". "distant object detail" dropdown box for view distance tab must be lower as possible, because it affect fps a lot. Same for over parameters in view distance. Water quality "reflect objects" and "reflect land" are also cost some performance, but depends from location on the map and camera. Antialiasing is not the reason of low fps (on your videocard especially), anisotropic filtering almost free, so 16 is best. As for d3d9.dll, after installing it you must reconfigure game again, not automatic (better download second version of this patch from my site), do not use xfire, afterburn, evga tools. Just have in mind, that lowest performance in same place but different viewport rotation is when number drawed objects bigger or they are skinned (too many data send to videocard). Hope this helps

RPGWiZaRD:
>Basicly shadows are software rendered by CPU

Sorry, that's not true.

Thanks for the fast replies guys.

@ENBSeries Thank you very much for those tips! It turns out that lowering distant object detail and shadows to medium, as well as disabling water reflections has netted me an average fps of 50 in the areas i had 30 to 40 before. Plus the game doesn't really look any worse for it either.

I guess i was just a bit complacent thinking i could max out every setting. Although i find it kind of funny that i tried all of those complex methods when just changing a few settings was all it needed . Thanks again!

Care to prove me wrong? I think based on my test in this thread it heavily points to that: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1267822-tip-shadow-quality-is-a-huge-performance-hog/

I experience the exact same thing. FPS is pegged at 60 (80+ with vsync off) except for in certain places where the frames randomly drop by about 20-30fps. There doesnt seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why it does it in some random places. It is not so bad as it only drops things to 40 - 45 fps ish but it is very noticeable because the game runs at a constant 60fps 99% of the time! When the fps drops, so does my GPU usage, so clearly something is bottlenecking the card somewhere. To behonest my GTX 480 doesnt seem to be even breaking a sweat throughout the whole game so it looks like it is something CPU related in the game code.

I would really like Bethesda to fix this!

Spec: 2500k at 4.3GHZ,16gb Ram,GTX480 OC.

Well if GPU usage drops it's almost certain to be CPU being the bottleneck and like said shadows are taken care by the CPU in this game. :s Consoles had faster CPUs than GPUs which seemed to benefit from letting CPU do the task but then Bethesda just ported that over to PC even if the graphics card in just about any game takes care of the shadows on PC because it's more efficient at it. They didn't even bother changing to let our beefy graphic cards do the job. If they had they could easily have upped the resolution of the textures and still get sufficient performance too.

I wish Bethesda would just come out and admit that this is happening because the game uses the CPU to render shadows. It is stupid as doing things this way has rendered peoples top of the line graphics cards useless. It is crazy that you need a sandybridge at 4ghz+ to get over 30fps in some of the frame rate drop areas.

Even more annoying is the fact that the game would probably have run fantastically 100% on top of the line pc's if they had sorted this issue out.

For graphic modification i did all rendering processing of game, perhaps i'm closer than anybody else by knowledge of this to game developers.

Uh damn, sorry, i forgot to say. Just checked that performance isn't much affected if i turn off rendering completely (internal engine code is slow, seems all what prepare objects to rendering and enumerate visible to camera frustum), i get from 24 to 35 fps (24 is enabled rendering, 35 - disabled) when looking on to horizon (most quality setting are lowest) or from 71 to 72 when on to the ground (only few objects are visible).

Yup, I get FPS drops from the Ultra shadows as well. Pretty much same specs as OP:

i7 2600k @ 4.5ghz
8 gigs ram
GTX 560Ti @ 950mhz/2149mhz

If I drop to High shadows, my FPS is a constant 60. I can't even tell the difference in the fidelity of the shadows from Ultra (4092 shadow res) to High (2048 shadow res).

Yea well it's good to know what causes the FPS drops at least! And yea high shadow quality is still very usable and looks relatively good still so.