After playing Skyrim for some time, I started to get really annoyed by the low framerates I get when I'm outdoors.
They tend to linger around 15 FPS and decrease to 11 FPS in town. Indoors, though, I've been getting a constant 60 FPS. Do any of you guys know a fix or anything?
I play on Ultra (high increases the outdoor/outside towns FPS to only 18, inside towns 13)

My system:
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
AMD Radeon HD 6850 (12.1 drivers)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055TT (6 core, 2.8 Ghz)
8 GB DDR3 Kingston RAM
ASRock 870 Extreme 3

Outside at 15fps? Something is definitely wrong there.

Is your CPU overclocked at all? Try updating your GPU drivers (as far as I know 11.11c is the latest, 12 wouldn't be out yet).

Edit: The 12.1 preview is out, my mistake.

Much lower FPS outdoors than indoors is what everyone gets on Ultra. Still, your FPS is pretty darn low. You have two bottlenecks in your system:

- Processor, older gen with only 2.8GHz
- Video card memory, only 1GB and only a 256-bit bus

This game's engine manages both multi-threading and Video Memory very poorly, so these are both often bottlenecks at Ultra, especially with added higher-quality Texture Mods. Try these steps:

VRAM
- Lowering Anti-Aliasing (it's 8x on Ultra)
- Disabling Anti-Aliasing and using FXAA instead
- Disabling Anti-Aliasing and using SMAA Injector ( http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html )

CPU
- Lower Shadow quality (alternatively, just go in SkyrimPrefs.ini and decrease fShadowDistance, which will raise the quality while decreasing the draw distance)

If you're using HD Texture mods you'll need the LAA Injector found on Skryim Nexus (Skyrim 4GB)

generalnmx made some good points actually. I'm running the game somewhere between Ultra/High (mainly Ultra settings) on an old HD 4850, but I've forgotten how many tweaks I needed to do:

Turn down the Object and Light sliders. There's absolutely no need to have them on the max, and they can really effect your town FPS.
Like said, disable AA and use FXAA instead. It's a lot less taxing, IMO looks better, and gives me better FPS than having it disabled.
Also like said, turn shadow distance down. Ultra default is 8000, high is 4000. Mine's currently set at 3800, but go lower if you like.

That will help a lot.

Thanks for the replies guys!

My CPU isn't overclocked, I tried overclocking it a week ago, but Skyrim just crashed while loading my savegames, so I reset my box settings.

The anti-aliasing was already disabled (it's a habit of me, so forgot to mention it). Also, I don't use any mods.
The FPS I gained from lowering the shadows to low was around 4 FPS.

EDIT: I do use the 4gb thingie.

Any mid to high end card can use MSAA x4/x8 easy, FXAA is blurry and softens the image which is not the proper way to do AA. Avoid FXAA, use SMAA if you are really sluggling to get good FPS all round or have a lower end card.

FXAA doesn't blur the image, it just anti-aliases more than AA does (and some things it maybe shouldn't, but that's usually not really a problem).

It's entirely personal choice if you like the look of FXAA or not. I do, it's hardly something for low end cards only.

I can also run every game with 8x AA without any issues. My FPS plummet in Skyrim when AA is enabled however.

FXAA is not better than MSAA, it's just an post process AA and it does give the image less quality by over softening it. Articles have said this and it's not the silver bullet for AA. it's mainly good for deferred lighting games like SMAA but SMAA is sharper but still not as good as MSAA.

I personally don't find this to be the case. Also, enabling "Adaptive AA" in CCC or "AA Transparency" in Nvidia Inspector, for the Skyrim profile, really works well with "un-blurring" FXAA. I found 10 friends and showed them the game with 8xAA, and again with FXAA + 8x Super-Sampling AA Transparency and all of them couldn't tell the difference. Some of them even said FXAA + 8xSSAAT was improved.

Unless you have the sharp discerning eye of a 3D graphics artist I really doubt you're going to be able to still say it's much worse after tweaking the AA on the Transparency Textures.

Again, that's just what you prefer. I usually dislike AA in games, but I like FXAA so that's what I use. Plus the added performance benefit doesn't go amiss.

The devil is in the details. Battlefield 3 has both because MSAA does a better job on quality while FXAA takes care of the edges that MSAA cannot do because of the post processing used. I prefer MSAA because it's shaper and 8xCSAA takes a lower FPS hit.

That's fine, the fact that your prefer it it not the point because technically they are different and do different jobs. FXAA for performance, MSAA for quality, both depending on the game.

Why are you arguing about FXAA then? The OP is getting very low FPS outdoors, a number I'd say is unplayable (~15). Along with saying "Try lower AA", saying "try FXAA" is very reasonable as first you're trying to lower AA (I would assume all the way down to 2x in increments) to see if it makes any difference, if not, then you try FXAA and see if that runs any better. It may take more than one change to get the OP's framerate up to playable levels, and more options is good. If you want to argue about the maximum image quality of FXAA, please do so in a different thread.

I'm not arguing, I'm just stating a fact but use what you want and if you don't find it useful, don't bother commenting. Note, you are the one that started saying turn off AA and we know that has nothing to do with poor performance in this game, it's the game itself.

If you are still trying to regain performance and keep anti-aliasing the scene, SMAA does a good job for very little cost.

Hmm seems ur gpu is the bottle neck, if i run only one gtx 480 my fps gets halved to the 30's

Err, AA does have an effect. If I turn AA to x8 I lose about 15 FPS.

Looks like a fairly cut and dry case of lower your settings, open world games are always more demanding outside, I remember pulling like 8 fps outside in oblivion when it first launched=p

Your post caught my attention since I'm having the same problem as the OP.

Hardware: Intel qx9650 with a safe overclock, a single EVGA GTX 480SC, 8 gigs of Kingston HyperXRAM. 1920X1200 everything Ultra and maxed out all the way.

I can play the game for a while with nice performance indoors and outdoors but then there will come a point eventually where my performance outdoors begins to decline.

Is that a memory leak or just the nature of the beast? Am I being too greedy with my settings on a single GTX 480? What settings are you using?

What's interesting is: My sister has a comparable rig to mine except she's using a GTX 570 and she has not had this problem. She's ultra, 1920X1200 and it's not happening to her.

Be interested to see what you all think.

our systems are very similar. I had the same problem and this is what I have found works best. Give it a shot, last post in the thread details my current set up.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1308679-graphics-changed/page__p__19760533__fromsearch__1#entry19760533


also, I have discovered that Object distance has a MASSIVE impact on FPS in cities, up to 40%. None of the other sliders did as much to affect performance as Object distance, so consider turning that down, especially in Markarth. And of course, different cards/systems might have a different impact but it's worth checking out on your own.

15 FPS outdoors and 60 FPS indoors... that's odd. By any chance do you have UGrids on 11???

Not sure, but may be something changed in your skyrimprefs.ini? May be because of mods d3d9.dll based or driver update. If it's a one of game bug, try my AntiFREEZE patch v0.096 from enbdev.com or skyrimnexus.com with default enbpatch.ini, many users noticed better performance.

I'll do some experimenting but I'd be willing to cut back some other things before I sacrifice anything on draw distances or object distances or anything like that since at default Ugrids 5, which is the only thing that's stable for me, I'm going to see the occasional albeit mild pop in and pop out and the last thing I want to do is see more of that.

In an earlier post someone suggested taking down fShadowDistance from default 8000 and I did that for laughs and took it down to 5000. We'll see what that does right off the bat.

I hope qwato responds to my earlier post since he really has a similar rig to mine.

@ Q_BZ my system is similar to the OP's system. That is to what I was referring. But, you can mess with Object distance in game, no need for .ini tweaks. Go to Markarth and stand in one of the many spots that causes a serious FPS drop. Then hit esc, open display options and turn Object distance all the way down. Close the menu and watch your FPS jump by at least 10. That one setting shouldn't be causing such a big hit I don't think.

Biggest issue is 2.8 ghz CPU. That will require dropping CPU loads. Like shadow quality.

The 6850 is not an issue at all unless you push 8192 res shadows. It should achieve at least 30-40 outdoors on ultra with a fast CPU.. I have 5850 1gb cards, running 8xmsaa and FXAA and 16 AF with many high res texture packs, and average 56fps with tweaked ini. Most stuff is slightly higher than Ultra, except I dropped shadow distance to 4000 (but higher res at 4096 res). I was running 4xSSAA+FXAA but I find it's a tad smoother going with 8xmsaa, and the difference is minor.

Also FXAA is almost entirely a good thing. I suggest you read nvidia's skyrim tweak guide which is very informative and has an excellent FXAA comparison.