Hello,ever since the 1.4 patch my FPS goes down to 1 after 1-2 hours of playing.I had this problem before too and I had done a research on this,people checked their GPU ram usage and they said this started happening after the usage passes a threshold.So in short the game doesn't dump,so you either have to exit the game or ctrl+alt+tab that makes it dump the data.This used to happen to me in every detail setting,even on lowest.Of course it takes longer for it to happen on lower settings and fast travelling made it happen sooner.Progressing through the game also made it happen sooner and at one point when I was very far in to the game the FPS used to drop to 1 the first time I loaded up my save and fast travelled.

I created a new character after this and played for 9 hours without this happening once and I didn't use fast travelling.Then I played this character for days and hours without this happening once,note that I didn't use fast travelling and I wasn't that far into the game.I was very happy to see that memory and performance optimizations were made in this patch so I downloaded it right away.I had deleted my new character before this and was waiting for the patch.Well I started a new character and about an hour in my FPS dropped to 1.Then I deleted my games folder in my documents and verified the game just in case and started from stratch and it happened after two hours.

Like I said it happens on every detail setting but the newest patch made it much much worse rather than fix it,or at least prolong it.Here are my system specs;

Nvidia Geforce 460 GTX 1 GB GDDR5
8GB DDR3 Ram
i7 870 2.93 GHZ Processor
1TB Sata2 HDD
Windows 7 64-Bit Home Premium

Now I know that my system isn't that great,but I have great performance outdoors very smooth.And indoors if I put the shadow detail to high it's again very smooth.I have no such problem with any other game.I can even play the Witcher 2 with maxed settings on this rig,apart from multi-sampling and the performance is very acceptable.In fact Skyrim performs much better outdoors even when the shadow quality is ultra.For some reason the game fills the Vram but doesn't dump the data which makes it like this.So where is the so called memory and performance optimizations?My FPS did go up yes but now the Vram fills much faster forcing me to quit the game or ctrl+alt+tab.Of course I can only ctrl+alt+tab for three times before the game crashes.

I bought the game after seeing that my system was way above recommended settings,but I still didn't expect to play it maxed.I set it to ultra the first time I ran it and was very pleased to see the performance was very smooth,then I entered the keep and saw that the performance was terrible inside,only where shadows were cast.Then I saw the threads that the game uses the CPU to render those shadows.Ok I can accept that,my CPU clock speed is low so it is only fitting that the performance will be bad indoors in areas where shadows are cast.

This is unacceptable though and makes the game unplayable.And I always leave Hardware Monitor open on the background so I had a chance to check the temperatures after these two huge performance drops and they were perfectly fine.GPU was 73 C and the processor cores were 68,67,68,65 C.

I forgot to mention that ever since this patch I have great performance.My FPS is great,loading and saving times are great.The only problem I have is this and it only happens after I leave an interior cell or if I enter an interior cell,or after loading a save game while I am playing.Otherwise I can play for hours and hours and it doesn't happen.As long as there is no loading screen.

Just to chime in here. I have a GTX 460 1Gb too (Gigabyte pre-OC), an intel i3 530 (non-OC), 8Gb DDR3 and WIndows 7 so not a million miles away from your setup (weaker CPU but higher base clock speed?). I'm not experiencing anything like this.

- What version of the nVidia drivers are you running? If you're not on the beta ones, you need to try the one specifically optimised for Skyrim.
- What mods are you using? I use Skyrim HD "lite" among others (and was using "full") so even more VRAM utilisation!
- Have you overclocked anything in your PC?
- What setup options did you pick? Are you running high AA? Shadows?
- Have you made .ini tweaks?
- Are you limiting the FPS or disabling vsync at all? Running with triple buffering?

Let me know on those and we'll see what we can see. I'd also recommend running GPU-Z in the background (tick the box so it continues to monitor) and see what the max resources are after some gameplay.

This sounds similar to another thread so I'll repeat it here too. This sounds like a heat problem. Check your CPU and GPU temps and make sure your PC is clean with no dust on any fans. There is no "vram not dumping bug".

I had this happen to me before too.


I7 860 @ 3.8 oc
8gb ram
570 sc

It was happening due to mods I believe. My pc used up all of the VRAM in the card(570) and also maxed out the shared system ram. I deleted some texture mods/updated them to newest versions and got rid of some completely. I haven't experianced this issue since. Before it was happening almost every hour, and eventually it would happen 10 minutes in to an hour.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1316417-extreme-fps-drop-when-exiting-indoor-area-is-there-a-fix/.If If you read this you'll see that something is definetely wrong with memory management.

I played even more yesterday and the temperatures were the same,GPU 73 C processor cores 68,67,65,69 C.Perfectly normal temperatures,in order for me to lose so much FPS due to heat the GPU temp must at least reach 90 C.I am still running 275.33 driver version because I have driver stopped working messages in the latest driver,they say the latest beta driver fixed it but I don't trust beta drivers so I am waiting on the WHQL one.I don't use any mods,nothing is overclocked,no .ini tweaks and I am not limiting my FPS nor did I disable V-Sync,I don't use triple buffering.My monitor is 60Hz.There is no dust on fans.

As for the options I tried all presets,happens sooner or later,much sooner since 1.4 patch.I tried manually lowering every setting to it's lowest value,happens again.A friend who used to play with a system that matches the recommended system specs told me he had this same issue too and had it happen to him with every setting.Again no mods,no .ini tweaks etc.Now like I said I can play the Witcher 2 with maxed out graphics apart from multi-sampling for hours,the performance is very acceptable and I can play it for hours without any problems.That game is much more GPU intensive and has much better graphics than Skyrim.One user in the thread I posted at the beginning of my post said he also had this in Crysis 2 too.Well I played that one maxed out too and never had anything like this.I am hoping the newest WHQL driver will fix it,but I don't have much hope.

Edit:Oh and it gets worse and worse when I progress through the game.

I had/have this same problem, game runs great on full ultra no lag nothing till i load a new area like going into a dungeon/city/house etc etc, after that my FPS drops from 40-50's to 10's and stays that way till i tab out or restart the game client. Turning shadows down to High from ultra or just going into the ini and changing shadow resolution from 4096 to 2084 fixed the issue for me but i would really love to play with ultra shadows not high.

its an odd situation and it happens no matter if the game is fully vanilla or fully modded. I.E i can take the game full vanilla with base Ultra settings and bam this happens, i even tried to lower AA to nothing to see if it was a problem with Vram and no help unless i lower shadow res. Now i can run the game with full ultra 8xaa 16x high quality AF through NCP and AO TRAA throw in Vurts flora overhaul as well as other (lite) texture mods and the game still runs great as long as i have shadow res down to 2048 but soon as i try to go ultra shadows then i get huge lag after loading new area's .

This really erp's me cause like i said i can turn everything up to above ultra even shadows and run around the world for hours with no lag at all, till i load into someplace, something during the loading of the new area causes crazy crazy lag and the only thing that prevents me from lagging on loading new area's is lowering shadow rez. It has nothing to do with a time issue cause i could run around the open world for 6-8 hours with no problem as long as i dont load into a dungeon/city or anything with a loading screen.

I have had this problem since day 1 of release.



win Vista 32bit
460GTX oc 768 mb - beta drivers
AMD dual core 3.0
4g ram

I've had this since day 1 too.If you do a forum search you can see a lot of people have this same issue,but the threads are kinda old,guess they gave up on this,or upgraded their systems and fixed it.Chances are you will encounter this again sooner or later even with shadows on high.You just need to play long enough.The lower the settings get the longer it takes for it to happen.So if you play on the lowest settings you need to play for a looooong time to encounter this issue.I don't remember how much time it took for it to happen to me on the lowest settings but I am sure it took more than 9 hours.

Like I said, I don't get this happening and my system is inferior to yours. Do these:

- check your startup processes using CCleaner and disable everything that you can live without.
- run GPU-Z in the background (tick the box to make it do this) and play the game for a good period. Then check the "max" on all the fields to see what they reached.
- get the beta drivers, I'm running .53 with absolute stability.
- delete your .ini files and let Skyrim recreate them.
- get Steam to verify your files

Apart from that, I'm out of ideas. I run with texture mods, pretty much everything on Ultra apart from shadows (medium) and AA (2x). I even force AO onto Performance via the control panel, so extra work for my GPU. All is good, I can play for hours going in and out of dungeons. So it's something about your particular PC.

Like I said I already deleted the whole my games folder and recreated them starting from stratch and got Steam to verify the files.May I ask how long do you play richardb70?

Hmm that could be the case, but like i said the single only thing i turn down is shadow rez and i play with other setting's above ultra, with ini tweaks and graphic's driver tweaks and mods and i generally play games 12+ hours a days and have yet to see this again in this characters 234h play time, its very odd to me.

The shadows in this game are very demanding,especially indoors.So turning them down does help a lot.But like I said there is something wrong with memory management.So it fills up sooner or later reducing performance.Now this can't be a memory leak,if it was the game would start stuttering and the FPS would be the same.The longer you play,worse the stuttering gets until it crashes.If it was only filling the system ram then it would lag more etc. but the FPS would be the same.I had this issue with Dragon Age on my laptop,and it got worse as you progressed through the game and the higher your settings were.There were a whole bunch of threads about it on their forums.

The temperatures are fine so the only reason for this to happen could only be the Vram filling up and not clearing itself.Again the higher the settings the sooner this happens as well as the further you progress the sooner it happens.Also fast travelling a lot makes it happen sooner too.But if you really lower the settings then it happens after a very very long time.But it will happen,there is nothing wrong with my system.This is not a hardware issue,it's about the software,the game.Only a game can make this happen.I don't have this with other demanding games even if I max the settings.

Alright I think I get it now.The patch didn't actually make it worse.I had noticed something,when I played with HWMonitor running on the background this happened much later,if it wasn't running it happened sooner.At first I thought it was impossible for such a thing and it was just a coincidence.So I maxed all the settings and tested this numerous times.Call me crazy but I saw that indeed when it running on the background this happened much later,if it wasn't it happened sooner.Normally it happens in 1-2 hours with maxed settings.Then I started a character from stratch with HWMonitor running in the background,like I said in my very post in this thread I played for straight 9 hours without this happening once.I didn't use fast-travelling and I had just started the game,then I kept playing like this for days for hours without it happening,again I didn't use fast travelling.This was the ultimate test.Then I got fed up with all the gameplay bugs and deleted the character,waiting for the patch.

After the patch I started the game from stratch again with HWMonitor running on the background,this happened withing the hour.So I guess that no longer works now.So indeed the patch didn't make it worse then.It's just like it always was,just that my unusual fix doesn't work anymore.Like I said call me crazy but I did extensive testing and HWMonitor running on the background did make this happen much later.

No, at least in my issue, its a bug no doubt about it at all. You cant tell me that in the EXACT same situation and settings that playing or 6 hours straight without loading and with no lag at all in any way, or playing the game for 10 seconds and loading into a new area and getting instant crippling lag is normal, its just not logical, its a bug and we need to figure out what is causing it because simply loading into a new area isn't that extremely taxing on your hardware.


I.E loading the game outside whiterun and run around the world 30 times with no issues or load the same game right outside whiterun and load into the city and bam insta lag. It doesn't matter where you load into or out of it could be anywhere in the whole world, same situation.






edit - i have clocked almost 11 hours straight without restating the game in its fully ultra/modded state with shadow rez on high with no issues.

Exactly my friend,our issues are the same.Mine does it after loading screens too.Have you read the thread I posted?That thread confirms that this happens due to Vram filling and not clearing.This is the issue,the only thing other than this that can cause the FPS to go crazy like this is overheating and we don't have that.So the only thing remaining is the Vram filling.The higher your settings are the quicker it will fill,the more you fast travel the more it fills,the further you are into the game the faster it will fill.So let's say you first started the game with max settings.In my situation it does this after 1-2 hours,only after a loading screen.Now if I put a lot of time into the game,done lots of quests,explored lots of places etc. I load my save,fast travel to someplace and after the loading screen bam,FPS goes down to 1.Of course sometimes it goes down to 10 but it doesn't matter it's still unplayable.But no matter what it will happen sooner or later,you just need to play long enough.If you have a super system you will not encounter this of course because I doubt anyone would play the game for the time it would require for this to happen.I guess it would take three days for such a system?

This is a bug,and it is because of the game.I found lots of threads about this both here and in other forums.So all our PCs are broken in some way?I know for a fact that my PC has no problems whatsoever right now.Not to mention I can play other demanding games,which are more demanding on the GPU than Skyrim with maxed settings for hours and hours without such a problem and good performance.the Witcher 2(I only disabled super-sampling),Crysis 2,Deus Ex:Human Revolution,Shogun 2:Total War(only disabled depth of field,haven't played it after the DirectX 11 patch so not sure how my system will perform there).

ya the vram is a large issue, even more so for me cause my card is 768mb not 1g, but i am soon building a new rig with a 2g vram card so i will see how the issue is then. Something to note, i have never ever fast traveled so that could be helping my stability in this situation i think

AS i posted in the thread linked.....If you watch your GPU mem (with something that shows you GPU system memory used) you will see that this occurs as you overfill your GPU ram. When this happens , every single time i get this drop in FPS.

Loading to the world and running around outside is not the same as...
Loading the outside world then instantly loading a town into RAM.

I use "sysinternal's, Process Explorer (free from microsoft) and this shows how much the GPU is using for 3 things.

GPU usage ( the engine)
GPU dedicated Ram
GPU system RAM...(this is when you will get the low FPS) IF the GPU is overfilled it floods into your system ram.

Ahh i see, i knew the issue was with shadow textures at 4096 but didn't know it had such an effect on loading new area's , hopefully with 2g vram this will not be an issue.


p.S i seen you were active this morning camaro so i have been kinda waiting on you to chime in on the situation.

Thanks for the input mate.I've seen people reporting this issue with AMD cards too so it's definetely not an Nvidia issue.Also this may only effect certain cards,but I highly doubt that.It probably effects all systems and it will happen on every system,you just need to play long enough.With a high-end system you will not encounter this,or at least with a GPU that has high Vram.Because it will take a long time and noone plays a game for over 16 hours right?This is a bug with the game and must be fixed.

And yes Boreilx I suppose that's why you haven't encountered this after putting the shadow detail to high.Because I tried playing without fast travelling when I was very far into the game,my unusual fix was still working back then,I had HWMonitor running in the background,it did this after 5 hours.As I continued playing it became 4 hours,then 3.And at this point whenever I fast travelled even when I first loaded up my savegame it did this.So I decided to start a new character,I was bored of that one anyway.And once again like I said in my first post,I played with my new character for 9 hours,settings maxed,no fast travelling and this didn't happen(HWMonitor open of course).

I am sure they can fix this,they just must be made aware of this problem.So please everyone who is reading this,if you have this issue just chime in and tell us so that we can get this fixed.

Well, I don't have this issue so I'm out. I regularly play for 2 - 3+ hours at a time, going in and out of buildings, saving and reloading, no issues at all. Same card as you too, and I run with a load of extra stress on the GPU with textures and stuff I set via the control panel.

Good luck, hope you sort it, but at this stage I don't think it's a bug in the game unless it's related to the size of your save games (maybe that's why you're not getting it with new characters immediately?). Can you let us know the sizes? I'm only L21 or so with a 50 hour playtime, if that helps. You also need to let us know the outcome of the questions and suggestions I made in my second post (e.g. full GPU-Z info and trying beta drivers).

That's exactly why you are not getting it,you don't play long enough and your shadow setting is at medium.Like I said I can play for a looong time at lowest settings.Never tried setting only the shadow quality to lowest,but that will probably make me able to play at least 4 hours without this problem.

I already told you the results by the way,I deleted the whole my games folder,verified the game and started from stratch.I am not going to use a beta driver,I had troubles with them in the past so never again,I am waiting on the WHQL.And I don't need to use GPU-Z because it's clear I have the same issue as Boreilx and Camaro.Have you read their posts?Or the thread I linked?This is about the Vram,no driver is going to fix it,no setting is going to fix it.They may only prolong it.It's a bug in the game.A technical one.I listed the games I can play without this problem,how come I don't have any problems with them?

Some games have memorly leaks which cause stuttering and crashing,some games fill the system memory and cause it to lag horribly and some games fill Vram and cause the FPS to drop.When it comes to filling memory,usually the higher your settings are the sooner the symptoms show and it gets worse as you progress through the game.I just started this character and I am 4 hours in.First two hours this happened.Then I again played for two hours and again it happened.

Not to mention all the other threads that are here and on other forums about this.They all talk about the FPS going down to 1-10 after a loading screen.Boreilx have the same problem and he is using the beta driver.So there is something wrong with all these people's computers?They all report they have no problems with other games,that they can play Battlefield 3 maxed out etc.it's poor memory management on the game's side.I don't want to sound like I am boasting or I am being rude but I know what I am talking about here,if there was something wrong on my side,I'd know.I've been dealing with computers since I was 12,I studied computers and computer programming in both highschool and university.

I have insight as to how hardware and software works.I already did all the necessary troubleshooting,because I was having problems with freezing while saving.I checked the hardware,I formatted the disk,installed everything from stratch,made all the maintenance work necessary(both hardware and software) and moved the case to a better spot so that it can cool down.I posted the temperatures which are perfectly fine.I no longer have that problem.Everything's in pristine condition on my end,it is the game there can be no other reason.Everyone has it,because it's in the code.People who play with high end systems will not encounter it because they have large rams on their gpus,so it will take longer to fill.People who play with lower settings may not have it either depending on their hardware.You for example,your rig is not that lower than mine,you play for 2-3+ hours most of the time with shadows on medium.You need to play much longer than that for it to fill.Let's take Boreilx's example,he plays with shadows on high,he doesn't fast travel ever,which is one of the causes that makes this happen sooner,so he didn't encounter this problem after he set the shadows to high.I can guarantee you that he will encounter it sooner or later as he progresses through the game.

Sorry for the long post but please don't tell me it's not the game.There can be no other reason for this.I guarantee you that the newest driver will not fix it for me.

Mate, I'm sorry I can't help you here, I'm not from Bethesda, just a regular player who was just trying to provide some useful feedback based on my similar setup. A "thanks" would have been nice but what can you do these days, eh.

Like I said, I hope you get it sorted out.

What are you talking about?I am not bashing you or anything,I mentioned I didn't want to sound like I am boasting or being rude.I am sorry if I came off that way,I am just explaining the problem in detail that's all.Sorry if I offended you in some way and sorry I forgot to say thanks.

Edit:Thanks for your input of course.

Sure they do...or at least I do...

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Skyrim/Skyrim19_hours32Mins.png Skyrim ran for 19 hours 32 mins...lol

http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Skyrim%202012/memuseGPU.png This is the last 2 hours...notice the bottom graph, thats system mem in use . if this were to climb, I will get this problem. As long as I keep the center Graph from filling to the top, this will not ever happen.

I just ran for 3 hours today. Am just taking a short break..During these long runs I do not ever get this. BUT, I can cause this any time I want. All i have to do is add in a few more texture packs. Watch my GPU usage climb to higher then my card allows (1 GB of VRAM) and this is guaranteed to happen.

Does the "pcb" command still work?