Hello Bethesda forums,

So I recently got PC Skyrim after buying it on Xbox a year ago, thanks to a new laptop, and I've been having so much fun rediscovering it with better hardware and the help of the amazing modding community. With tweaking and a handful of mods I think I've gotten it to the point of being almost perfect for me graphically and mechanically, except for one thing - it's gotten, probably predictably, a little laggy. I don't think I've done anything really extreme, and I expected my new system to be able to handle it well, so I'm curious if I really being too demanding for my specs, or if there's some bottleneck somewhere that I'm ignorant of but could fix. I'm totally new at this, so there may be a really obvious answer, but if I gave an outline of what I'm playing, could I maybe get anyone's thoughts?

i7-3610 and Nvidia GTX 660M at 1080 resolution. Indoors it's no problem, I probably average 40 fps, sometimes it hovers at 30 with fog, snow, etc. Outside gets bad I think most of all when I get near lots of shadows and lots of grass. Water is no problem. Most of the time I average from the mid 20s to the mid 30s, which I think is totally playable, but in the broad, grassy pine forests around the Eldergleam Sanctuary, say, it's like high teens to mid twenties. And that's pretty annoying I think. High Hrothgar in the brightest morning sunlight same problem. I probably played through all the episodes of Half Life 2 at a framerate not much better on my old laptop and still got a huge crush on Alyx, but when I read forum posts about anything under 60 being unplayable, I guess I expected better than 20?

Ran through the Nvidia short tweak guide and longer optimization guide and adjusted accordingly. Shadows high, 4x AA, 16x Nvidia AF, uGrid=7. Installed a handful of mods through Steam and NMM, including 2K HD textures, W.A.T.E.R., Realistic Lighting, SMIM, Enhanced Distant Terrain, SkyUI, a few gameplay ones, Lush Grass/Trees. Saves seem unbloated, playing in Steam's offline mode.

If I say I have trouble with grass and shadows, I'm sure it seems obvious to turn the shadows down from high and turn off the Lush Grass. But LG advertises no fps hit, and good lord I think the shadows really look terrible on medium and low, especially when you get those dozens of sharp lines moving across a wall or a character's face, and what look like 8 bit black blocks on high res snow. Any tips? Am I reasonable in expecting better performance with the system and setup I have, and is there anything I can do to achieve that, or do I need to start scaling back?

Thanks!