Well, after downloading 290.53 and following your tips (Did all except the ugrids) I averaged 52 FPS in Markarth and the lowest drop was 30 FPS in the worst spot I could find in the city. Top of Dragonreach overlooking whiterun: 46 FPS. It seems that your fix (And skyboost) worked. I thank you good sir.

Bethesda still svcks

To the OP's preamble:

While I'm not happy Skyrim was designed for consoles first and PCs second, do realize that Bethesda is a company that creates products that have to be marketable and profitable or else the company will fall into ruins. Today, consoles hold the majority market share and it would be stupid for Bethesda to ignore that. They want to create a vast, immersive RPG, but they're bound by market pressures and spending millions of dollars to create a game tailored for a minority is far too risky for them. You do realize that most of Bethesda's games have flopped and not been profitable? There have been other titles in the past that have really pissed off gamers (remember Pirates of the Carribbean?). When a company's sole income is based on one game every 2 years or so, it needs to be a very good game and one that appeals to most people.

Obviously, Skyrim has numerous technical flaws, but blame that on marketing. Will they learn from their mistake of pushing to release the game on a once in a lifetime date? Sure. You'll probably never see that again. For the next blockbuster game, they'll also know not to release it with so many critical bugs, so don't be so pessimistic.

I thought I had made it clear that I did understand that Bethesda was a business. I'm sorry if I didn't, it was not my intention to sound ignorant.

Then I'm ignorant for skimming over that!

Nevertheless, I hope my point is still valid.

Everyone in the Bioware forums is freaking out about Origin so you can either deal with minor bugs or sell your soul to EA.


i'm using the beta nVidia driver too and it is solid. No driver crashes in 4 different games.

Well, 290.53 doesn't play well with my card. For some reason, my GPU starts throttling Voltage even though temps never go above 55C and GPU usage suddenly spikes to 99%. Causes lag, freezes, etc. DIdnt happen till 290.53.

After looking at usage:

290.53: GPU Usage stays in the high 70's low 80's, High of 87% and high temp of 56C

275.33: GPU Usage varies from 30-60. High of 85% and high temp of 51C.

That's why I'm nervous of drivers haha

Perhaps this is more because you have changed some of the settings I advised you to change and put more pressure on the card.

Perhaps turning Ambient Occlusion off and lowering shadows to medium will put less pressure on your card. This will get you about 15fps. You could also lower 32CSAA to 16AA and 8x Supersampling to 2x Supersampling, these make no difference on image quality anyway and will get you a few more fps.

Let us know how you get on. The new 290.53 work flawlessly for me.

290.53 works flawlessly for me. In fact, this new driver actually fixed another problem (my GPU tend to crash for some reason after I install Skyrim). COmbined with Skyboost R4, and a healthy amount of tradeoff between image quality and performance, I get respectable framerate in my poor old rig

Bah i wish i can use my mods but alas no go. Mine was working fine with the beta nvidia drivers on vista a day ago. Now on windows 7 mind you with the exact same pc and driver i cannot touch any mods that changes textures and the game would crash.
Even tho it was running perfectly a day ago on vista. Just hope that patch comes soon i was so spoiled with the nice graphics mods out there that i dont even want to look at the crappy graphics without them. So i can understand your frustration. Personally im tired of struggling and gave up on the game till something is done

I've been using Nvidia Beta drivers for a very long time. I can only think of once I had an issue. Even release drivers have the occasional issue.

The 290.53 do have an issue for those, like myself, with 120hz monitors. If the monitor is set to 120hz, as opposed to 60hz, the GPU will never drop it's clock and memory speeds to 2D desktop mode. The lowest the clock and memory speeds will go are default 3D mode. This obviously causes temps to rise, and takes more power if you leave your PC on a lot. Simple fix is just to default back to 60hz after playing a game and changing power management mode to adaptive in nvidia control panel.

Besides this one issue, these drivers have been some of the best yet to come out of NVidia. My favorite features are actually hidden away in NVidia Inspector. There's a frame rate limiter built into the drivers now & there's a great FXAA option now. Dead Space & Dead Space 2 are both notoriously known for their lack of anti-aliasing. There are fixes to get AA to work, but they require quality sacrifices in the game and require pretty old drivers. FXAA is a god send for Dead Space 1 & 2! It looks fantastic now, and runs really well. Another obvious game that will benefit greatly from FXAA is GTA IV. I can confirm these drivers play nice and can benefit with Dead Space 1 & 2, Rage, Saints Row The Third, Dead Island, Crysis 2 (DX9 or DX11), GTA IV, GTA San Andreas, Mafia 2, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Oblivion, Morrowind, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Farcry 2 & Call of Juarez Bound in Blood.

@ The Nanny

If you hear the "DING" as you enter any 3d app then its running(D3D overrider). Do you have triple buffering enabled in Nvidia CP/inspector? also render 3 frames ahead.

Triple buffered just lets the GPU keep a little ahead of what you are seeing. only noticeable difference I could say is my FPS evened out..the high to low is closer. instead of ....30 - 59 FPS I now see 40-59 FPS. Just feels smother overall.

@ OP...is your card still Over Clocked? Try with stock clocks , and a fan profile. the Game is really smooth with the 290 "beta" drivers. think only difference with any of Nvidia's Beta drivers is they don't have the WHQL label yet.

hmmm...can't get the ding....even tried a new D3D installation. Ya, I have triple buffering enabled, and prerendered frames to 3. Is it the TESV.exe you are attaching it to in D3D? Also, the game has trouble launching on high sensitivity, so I have to dial it down to medium.

Sent ya a PM. So as to not clutter this thread.

They will fix the CPU issues. Thx to SkyBoost and constant complaints on these forums they pulled their fingers out of their butts. I mean, how many millions of dollars profits did Bethesda make off this game? even just from PC gamers? Giving us an optimized game is a perfectly legit demand and they listened to the community

and THEY DAMN WELL BETTER LISTEN TO THE COMMUNITY IF THEY WANT TO KEEP THEIR CREDIBILITY.

FXAA looks like utter crap. It's better than no AA in certain games (GTA IV comes to mind) but hell.... it [censored] destroys Skyrim. Try enabling *real* supersampling, not nVidia's transparency shizzle, the real deal where nVidia's cards fail to deliver for their money and AMD cards excel at. 1920x1080 @ 4xSSAA @ Ultra detail with ini tweaks runs perfectly fine for me on my two Radeon 6870.

thing that svcks about bethesda is they make these [censored] games that reduce my productivity to 0 for years.

I agree FXAA looks pretty terrible in Skyrim. It makes everything blurry. I personally run the game with 8x MSAA and 4x SSAA at beyond maxed settings, and it looks great. The reason I am so in love with the included (yet somwhat hidden) FXAA option in the latest 290.53 NVidia beta drivers is that it makes games that have no AA support look so much better. GTA IV and Dead Space 1 & 2 look absolutely 200% better with FXAA than no AA. There's no denying that. Of course, with games that do have AA support, FXAA usually isn't the way to go without losing visual fidelity. The frame rate limiter that's also hidden in the lastest beta drivers has been wonderful. I replaced the FPS Limiter mod with it for Skyrim, and it works great. I leaves some extra GPU power and memory for mods when I cap my FPS at 35. Even better, it stops the frame rate from spazing out and jumping from 120fps to 30 fps and back and forth making camera control unbearable. Couldn't be happier with these beta drivers. btw, anyone who missed my previous post can get to these somewhat hidden settings through NVidia Inspector. Have fun.

hey i have the same cpu. i just got it oc to a stable 4.2 ghz. its so beautiful its making me weep.....

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/page-261868_29_600.html

im on the last page (13). as this is heavy cpu game, i say crank all you can get!

Wow, that's a very impressive overclock on that CPU! How the Coolmaster Hyper 212 Evo working for you? I ask because I almost got that CPU cooler, but then decided to get the best money can buy and went with the Noctua NH-D14. The thing's a beast, it's so large, but it gives better cooling for my overclock than the Corsair H80 water cooling. It's hard to believe that air cooling, depending on the cooler, can be much better than a water cooling setup. To share your excitement for your quite amazing overclock, I have recently gotten my Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz Q6600 B3 stable at 3.6GHz with FSB set to 400, multiplier at 9 & vcore at 1.5v. If you're familiar with the B3 version of that CPU, you'd know how hard it is to get it to a stable 3.6GHz, let alone 3.4GHz. I owe it all to the Noctua NH-D14, and of course being lucky to have a B3 Q6600 with a VID of 1.2750. Too bad without Skyboost, the performance increase of going from 2.4GHz to 3.6GHz is just a measly bump of 10fps or so for the minimum fps. Skyboost has made the game playable.

...sorry just read this(needed a break from comp) thats a nice oc! ...and 10 fps is in no way "measly" i say every frame counts!

and thanks yes i am excited

Nvidia has offered FS SSAA far longer than ATI/AMD has with both legacy OGSSAA+hybrid modes enabled via nHancer and the newer SGSSAA modes enabled via SGSSAA tool/Nvidia Inspector. They also offer it for all recent GPUs (DX10 or better) in DX9, 10 and 11 paths, unlike AMD which only recently implemented DX10/11 SGSSAA for GCN 7-series cards only.

Nearly 2 years ago, SGSSAA started as a "bug" wtih Fermi and Nvidia implemented it into a feature:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,745901/Geforce-GTX-480/470-with-unmatched-image-quality-in-modern-games/Practice/

And If this game is so Great Like the company says then Way do we PC Gamers NEED 3ed party programs just to get is game to RUN!

GAME of the YEAR! RIGHT...........And just how did they pay off for that!

I'v Played a LOT of Games like over 300 of them and some of them were Bugy BUT NONE of them were THIS BUGY!!!!!!!!!

P.S. Ho Yes and one of the things that made Morrowind and Oblivion Great was it's PC Moding COMMUNITY, But Skyrim cant get this game to run right..So the HELL with Mods!!