My old monitor had a native resolution of 1280 x 1024 and I could comfortably cap the frame rate at 60. My new monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and I can very uncomfortably cap it at 40. Short of lowering the resolution, which makes it look terrible and negates the purpose of the new monitor to begin with, is there anything I can do or am I SOL? (i.e. get used to it?)

I would definitely leave the resolution up at 1920X1080, but you may need to tweak some of your other settings like AA and stuff. I think one of the biggest hits I've noticed in tweaking my graphix was enabling Ambient Occlusion. Based on what video card you have, I think there is a pretty decent write up over at geforce.com showing you how your settings should be set to get the best picture and FPS.

Thank you Aviar. I had AO turned off but I'll turn it on per your suggestion.

Here's my setup:

GTX 550 Ti
Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 ghz
4 gigs RAM.
Latest beta drivers for GPU (or second to latest maybe)
1.4 patch (non-beta)
Skyboost r_5

Is there anyone else running at my resolution with a similar setup who can confirm better fps than what I posted?

Larger resolutions have more impact. It's just like that. Like Aviar said, Geforce's Skyrim tweak guide lists some pretty good tweaks which boosts your FPS by 1 or 2 each without major quality loss.

Some things you can try:

-Replace AA by FXAA, it has much less of an impact
-Turn down light and specularity distance, it will boost your fps by 4 max and will have no noticable quality loss (and yes you can turn it ALL the way down, you will not notice.)
-If your LOD is put on Ultra, lowering it to High will increase FPS and it doesn't affect quality that much
-Lowering shadow quality from high to medium, though this will impact quality pretty great
-Actor, item and object slider tweaking
-If your FPS drops are frequent in water areas, consider using only tree and land reflect, your water will still look pretty.
-Skyboost or TesVAL to help you boost FPS
-Be sure to upgrade your Nvidia driver to the latest version, it's reported to increase FPS a lot.

Expected since you've increased the number of pixels that need to be rendered by roughly 50% going from 1280 to 1920.

As others stated, you can reduce AA, draw distance, shadow detail, etc. to get acceptable performance with your existing hardware

or

You can upgrade your hardware to get better performance at 1920x1080 with the same settings. Not sure what you are running now, but if your board/card support CF/SLI that's a fast/easy way to improve performance. Otherwise you are probably looking at a $150+ GPU (GTX 460/5850 or better) to run 1920x1080 with mostly High/Ultra settings, maybe 2xAA max and get close to 60FPS.

Sorry if you misunderstood me, but definitely leave it off. When I turned it on is when I noticed the biggest performance hit. I think it cut my FPS from 60 to just over 30.

Sorry!!!

Also here is a link to the geforce site since you have an nvidia card that shows what they recommend all your settings should be:

http://www.geforce.com/Optimize/OPS/Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim-GeForce-GTX-550-Ti-OPS

If it's really neccesary (it DOES look pretty ) leave it on Performance in the control panel.

Oh OK, LOL.

BTW re: FXAA, I actually use SMAA (injectSMAA_by_mrhaandi_1.2) which is fantastic, so I can leave in-game AA off completely. As for shadows, I've tweaked them in the prefs so much that I honestly can't say whether they're high, medium or low. Probably a combination of all. I'll look over these ideas and work on this. Obviously the best solution is a new GPU, but since this one is just 3 months old I hardly think it's time to spend more money on that.

Hmm never knew 40 FPS was bad ........................ blows my mind heh

Are you using any texture packs? 550Ti should be fine with that resolution, but iirc its only around 1g vram.

Be of course absolutely sure you have the latest driver (since you said you might not have the latest one). Also, changing blur quality does almost nothing, just saying .

I would disagree with pretty much everyone here.

The reality is most monitors are garbage these days unless you NEED these huge resolutions, which gaming PCs don't require. If you want a PC purely for gaming then 19 - 21" is optimal.

A res of 1920X1080 will KILL performance no matter what system you're running - unless 60FPS is amazing to you, which it's not... but most people now settle for it because most LCDs have a max refresh of 60hz... which is downright terrible when running with vsync...

I run a 19" @ 1280x1024 with an 85hz refresh... I can get about 85 FPS anywhere in Skyrim... keep in mind smaller monitors look better than bigger monitors at lower resolutions, and you will feel the performance gain.

If your PC is your multi-media world then by all means go higher but your gaming will suffer ... don't believe the hype.

Keep SSAO off.
update your driver. There's a new WHQL out now.
keep shadow resolution and texture resolutions no higher than 2048. the 550ti is a great card, but it's by no means high end.
Possibly try without skyboost. r5 is an alpha, may or may not work. Plus I'm not sure if it has support for the patch that just came out today.

It's not, but it's more than fps for me. I'm noticing sluggish movement on the screen that wasn't there before because there are so many more pixils to push around. The animations and movement is all fine, but for me, the lower fps is indicative of a more sluggish overall game. Too many things turned on that now have to be turned off.


I'm not using the official HD pack. Not really. Instead, I broke open the bsa and replaced only armor, weapons and clothes. The rest of the game is native low(er) rez Skyrim.


I'm using the 295.51 drivers. When the last betas were issued, someone on this forum said the fps increase wouldn't be that great between beta 295.51 and beta 295.7x. Unless something newer has come down the pike?

Thank you everyone for your tips and advice.

His issue here is that he's stuck with it nonetheless, and unless he lowers his resolution, he can at least try to boost his FPS a little.

It's not a beta anymore, they've "officially" released it. The latest driver is 295. 73.

I find its best to use the Launcher to set it to Med or High, and then adjust only iblur and shadow distance to taste. Most of the other shadow settings dont make much of an effect(even resolution) to warrant it.

At full Ultra everything, x8AA 16X HQ AF 1920x1080 and AO on plus HD textures my 560TI GTX 2g has no problem capping Skyrim, i would think his 550 would at least run it at default ultra with no problems in the 40s+.





@Seagram you do NOT need 80 FPS in any way, and at 1920x1080 with full on Ultra and Vsync at 60 on a 24' Skyrim runs flawlessly as well as every other game out today, no problems looks amazing and runs amazing.

The problem with your plan is that most games are built to run at 60fps. Some games can run into really bad timing issues if you're going much faster than that.

It's probably a bioshock when you've been hitting 60 and then suddenly get to 40 While it's still playable.

Wish I'd talked to you before getting this LOL!


Well, the store has a 14 day return policy. Still, the wide screen is gorgeous and I finally have a kind of peripheral vision in the game so if I can regain say half my fps (at the cost of some eye candy) it'll be acceptable I think.


Downloading now. Thank you.

Hmmm. I only have 1g vram. That might be the problem.

Sad I know... and you're right... but then you just use a frame rate limiter like Nvidia Inspector. DXHR falls right into this category for timing issues.

yea back on my old 1g card with HD textures and Ultra setting, i would get slight lag, with this 2g i got more than enough wiggle room.


The biggest things that effected my Vram usagle other than the HD textures was AA and Shadow resolution, dont go over 4 aa or 2048 shadow textures and it will cut down on vram usage.

Yeah which if you're using a framelate limiter you might as well be playing at a nicer resolution for that same 60 fps

Of course I can't get higher than 30ish in DXHR... too cpu bound, I guess.