I would say it's definitely more ineptitude than a design decision. I'm also not impressed with Bethesda almost complete lack of communication with their fan base. I've experienced far smaller companies with far greater practices.

Following the directions..now my SBW and probably other mods, aren't working.

Anyone know how to tell "in-game" what mods are currently running? Like a command line -- listmods or something?

I'm not saying there's an excuse, I just think its unfair for so many posters to blame their individual developers (the guys and gals sitting in cubes working) for the management and marketing decisions that launched an unfinished product and continues to provide shaky support. Even if the individual coders and developers are pants-on-head mentally-challenged, then that's management's fault (again) for hiring them in the first place.

The blame lies not with the individual contributor, but with the management types whose technical prowess extends (maybe) to Excel and MS Project. Management drives the timeline and project plan of the original development and sets the priorities.

I am impressed with Bethesda making a game like Skyrim, as it's very rare that I desire to get into a video game nowadays.
But Skyrim has managed to svck me right in. I appreciate the fact that a lot of people had the drive to work under a lot of pressure to help get this game out there.

In the grand scheme of things, fixes like this just make me appreciate the talented folk that exist within the game's community too.

Ok here's the deal...I was saying this too one month ago...."Oh my game is smooth as butter...oh i'm not getting FPS drops...Oh my rig is soooo much cheaper than yours and i'm doing better...blah blah blah"....it's not true...download FRAPS go to markath and find an angle where you are looking at most of the city and have as many NPCs on the screen.....guess what your FPS will get cut in half...I promise you my rig can destroy both of yours. The problem lies in that for the most part 30 fps is still somewhat smooth it's not "terrible" but when you REALLY get use to 60 fps + then you can notice it...

Edit: So let's keep on topic here ladies and gentlemen so that this thread does not get shut down and swept under the rug and Bethesda actually notices it...let's keep it alive and well

I keep hearing about this Markath place that kills fps.
Where exactly is this monster? I want to test it out when I get the chance.

Wow, im really chocked how good this plugin was, i used to have 35-40 FPS in markanth, now i have around 48-60..

This is a really REALLY good job!

Hey, hey! Stop being so reasonable! This is the thread where we berate Bethesda's development team for making a grossly amateur error in hopes that they won't do it again. Believe me I love this game and admire what this engine can do but I'm getting some what tired of seeing games get rushed out with *glaring* issues like this, enough's enough.

I am astounded that Bethesda wouldn't have compiled with release mode optimizations. A first year programming student would know better. -.-

LOL love that ultra sarcasm.


A general mod like this that changes the way things are handled resulting in even a 10% boost would clearly show the total lack of even trying... but 40% in places.. cmon...

IF a vehicle was produced today that shortly after it's release, one guy was able to with a quick little change, increase the amount of horse power or fuel mileage by 10-40%... You have any idea how much ranting and raving would be going on?

What about 10-40% in just about anything else.. production for foods?.... health? Cure/vaccination success rates...

In any market/system/whatever in which 10-40% improvement could be made with just a few hours maybe not even that... done by anyone that is aware of it, and is able to present the findings and a simple and easy way for anyone else to do... just screams how poorly the orginal was done... like it was purposely done.

To put it simple... This has been the case for Beth games since morrowind. Whether its unofficial patches, stutter removers, performance enhancers, there has been a mod for it. Through elder scrolls to fallout 3.

Maybe this mod was "simple", but by now shouldn't it be expected that we need these kind of mods? Lol I mean, I see it like I know the next call of duty will have shooting.

I don't really care either, as long as mods like this can be made, and we have wonderful people taking the time to make them, we still win at the end of the day.

I remember the experiences of Wayward Design, the developers of the WW2 flight sim B-17: The Mighty Eighth. They had a "close" relationship with their "fan base" and when they eventually announced that MP was to be pulled, those guys were openly insulted and even threatened. It was a disgraceful episode. I have no trouble whatsoever in the distance that Bethesda maintains with their fan base. Particularly considering this particular forum, I've seen some pretty unsavoury posts here even without the added glee of knowing that developers are definitely responding.

Dude read my signature if you have doubts....go to markath and at the entrance look up and to the left as if you're lookin to the far side of the city ****WITH FRAPS ON**** I can barely notice it visually, the biggest drop i've gotten is down to 31 fps, which actually isnt that bad, in markath at the worst possible angle I can find...however other people with slower processors are gonna notice it a lot more with drops down to the 20s where one can REALLY tell ...

I have been having no real issues with FPS when it comes to towns. Riften is a little on the slow side, but it still runs fine.

The only issues I've been having is lighting flickering, which I have been able to treat. The game runs fine for me.

Oh wait. Is that the city where to the left you can see a pathway up to different ruins and temples. Okay I remember now how badly my fps gets when in that area. I'll have to try it again when I get in game next. Thanks for pointing it out. I couldn't remember what city Markath was.

Finally. Some valid questions are starting to surface.

Yeah to be completely honest with you I couldn't notice it either until I read some of the posts on here downloaded fraps and then make myself notice it...lol and as much of a tool it makes me sound like...it bothers me now >.< I still didn't think it was worth bashing bethesda on it until now...when a 3rd party can fix stuff a lot faster than the original distributor...i mean that bothers me...if it doesn't bother you more power too ya! Why would I hire a chef to cook for me and my family than have my grandma "fix" the meals...might as well be payin grandma for her superb dishes XD

According to the genius of Arisu - his 'patch' is a mere demo of what Beth could achieve with apparently little effort required to re-compile the Skyrim code.

Beth really need to have a look at this.

To be fair to the actual issue: From my understanding, the "TESV Acceleration Layer" basically does what an optimization compile flag does by using lowest-level machine-level code (as source code is obviously not available). No one codes game engines in straight assembly these days except John Carmack (especially not cross-platform as it's not portable). This seems to be misstep when it comes to compiling and debugging, not coding. Yes some of the game engine code most likely goes back to the NetImmerse days of Pentium II processors, but this wasn't the case of old unoptimized code. This was a case of simply unoptimized code. You can get this code with modern coding methods just by telling your compiler not to use 21st century optimizations.

I just went there and with the SKSE fix and the new Nvidia beta drivers I am getting 20fps when standing in the far left corner looking up at all those stairs and temples in the rockface.
It's amazing because before I was getting less than that just running around the whiterun town.
And that was before I turned on Ambient Occlusion (new drivers let me do it!) and I even had the shadows down a quality level previously to get half decent fps.

I am finally getting to see how beautiful the game looks. lol

Please explain to me how the fact that all of this could have been avoided if Bethesda hadn't neglected a simple, basic step paints them in a BETTER light?

I'm trying to avoid judgement and opinions, just giving out what I believe to be clarifications.

I don't think it's wise to bash Bethesda on this.
Something like this could just be the result of a person tasked with many responsibilities and under a lot of pressure for a long period of time. Situations like that make it very difficult to care about anything more than simply getting the job done with.
These are people we are bashing here. People who have been working on something huge for years and we've had the luxury of enjoying the fruits of their labour without being in their shoes during the development process.
We really should chill this animosity back a few notches.

As a general rule, I don't sympathize over anything that I could fix in less than 60 seconds.

We have collectively paid them an enormous amount of money for this product and they neglected to even so much as toss two flags into the compiler to make it run 25% faster for us, no we should be flaming them long and hard for that and again: So that perhaps *this time* they'll listen and not slack off on obvious crap like that anymore. Overworked staff? I don't really care, that's not part of the equation.