In contrast to it being completely off I might lose 5 -8 fps tops. 8x kills me.

I use almost the same setup as you do, except that i only have 8gb ram and a 6950 HD card..

This is just bad optimizing i think, how can my game run better on a worse rig?

i have 55-60fps all the time, never drops bellow this, my temps are about 60-70c, which are standard.
minimal overclock on both the i5 2500k and my 6950 card, just to speed up an already awesome rig.

i use both the offical HD pack as well as skyrim HD

I'm pretty sure your GTX 580 is more powerful,although that doesn't explain OP's abysmal performance

@Jackstarr

Using Simple Borderless Window mod I am sitting at 60 FPS almost all the time the difference is uncanny. I was getting avg 45 before using the 4x SSAA now I am sticking at 60 running 8x shadows bumped back up to ultra as well.

As I said earlier, he was trying to use an NVidia feature (FXAA) on an ATI card. FXAA being an NVidia feature kills performance on ATI cards if enabled. Since you have an NVidia card you're not seeing the performance dip he was. That's the difference.

Don't disable VSync in Skyrim. It will only cause more problems. If you're concerned with input lag, use a frame rate limiter to cap your frame rate at 58 fps.


Bethesda never released an "HD texture pack." Perhaps you are referring to the http://store.steampowered.com/app/202485/ instead?


Make sure that AA is disabled in the game launcher as well as the video driver control panel options. This applies to all forms of anti-aliasing. Enabling AA or the wrong types of AA is a likely cause for drastic performance deficits. If you are able to identify this as the cause, you'll then be able to start applying individual settings to find an acceptable performance/visual quality setup.

I think it depends on the display resolution. I play at 2560x1600 on a 30" monitor and what little aliasing I see is handled satisfactorily by FXAA alone. I would probably opt for full MSAA for screenshots, but for regular play FXAA is effective enough. I'm sure at lower resolutions it becomes less so since the performance hit caused by MSAA is directly proportional to the display resolution, so 4xMSAA is more manageable at 1920x1080 than at 2560x1600 on the same hardware.

I use 2xAA with FXAA enabled. Get 60fps with that at 1080p with max settings. I use FXAA because things seem to have a crisp white outline (everything like people, grass etc) when I use just AA alone at say 4x.

My monitor has a button for basically increasing the sharpness of the resolution of the screen, do it does away with the blur effect caused by FXAA pretty much.

On an ATI card I would normally use anything but FXAA. I prefer different types for different games for example:
MLAA Edge Detect for DX HR,
SSAA for Skyrim
and MSAA for BF3
which are the 3 games I currently am playing.

DX HR has Trilinear, FXAA and MLAA and if I toggle it in that I get terrible FPS same in Skyrim.

@ kastagir, If you look back at some of the posts you'd see some of your suggestions was already given, and that the OP has fixed his issues. The only question he had was to do with FXAA, which too was answered and he acknowledged.
In short he doesn't need any further "fix" suggestionsat this point in time.

BTW you can check out this article on FXAA as it does work with ATI cards though the performance hit probably depends on game and card - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/07/18/nvidias_new_fxaa_antialiasing_technology/2

Ya for sure def seems my card was made to take advantage of the Morphological AA and Super Sample AA. It handles AA amazingly as well as Tesselation however the way it loads textures makes me wish I had a faster than 256 bit bus.

Thanks for the recommendation - I just downloaded and tried out SBW but unfortunately seems to make no difference to my fps - I still get 60fps with 8x MSAA and 25fps with 8xSSAA. (This is with no other apps running in the background other than Steam client, CCC, AVG Free, and Asus AI suite).

On the upside, it seems to have solved my "microstutter" issues, so I could use this rather than DXTory...

Well that isn't all bad
Any AA is better than none at the end of the day.