Most of the mods I've tried don't seem to have a real hit on the ol' FPS too badly. The one ENB was pretty rough until I turned off the SSAO, and then it was fine. ASIS can generate a large enough group of people that under certain circumstances I'd take a small hit in framerate. RCRN...well, the jury's still out on that one in my case.

Part of the problem I think is that I'm only getting AT BEST 30 FPS and that's pretty much just during loading screens. Usually it's more like 13-15 FPS and it can jump down to 4 FPS or so if I'm fighting a large enough group with crap like flames eating up the GPU cycles. These are all performance figures with no mods at all running except LAL to avoid having to run through the damn loooooong opening sequence again.

Any tips? I usually play on Ultra settings, and I'd like to find some solution other than dropping down to high, which is what the vanilla launcher recommends.

Yeah, I just had Fraps do a benchmark test, and I averaged a hair over 14 fps. Not particularly good.

What machine are you using?

A Toshiba Qosmio laptop I bought in 2010. 6 GB RAM, large HD, smallish SSD for the OS, Intel Core i7 CPU running at 1.73 gHz, Nvidia GeForce GTS 360M with these specs:

Memory Speed: 1800 MHz
Memory Bus Width: 128 Bit
Memory Type: DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5
Max. Amount of Memory: 1024 MB
Shared Memory: no

So nothing super-amazing, but then I would have thought it could handle Ultra settings with a higher framerate than 14 fps.

Yep. there must be something wrong. I had better framerate with my old PC and SSAO... and it was worse than yours (much)...
Are you using many texture replacers? your card has up to 1GB, it may be the cause, try to optimize your textures.
Also, with a 1.7 CPU I wouldn't use any kind of mod that added NPCs anywhere (that means no increased spawns); it seems to be your bottleneck, minimum requirements state a multi-core 3 GHz CPU, yours is multi core, but not 3GHz, and Skyrim only uses 2 cores.
Of course, check how it goes with vainilla settings, but I'd bet it's the increased spawns on ASIS

Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think I can pin it on ASIS: I don't think I selected increased spawns in the ASIS GUI.

As for texture replacers, I added both of the downloaded HIgh Res texture packs in the Archive section of Skyrim.ini, and I added a single texture replacer that replaces a few steel and iron weapons with higher-resolution textures. Other than that, nothing at all. All mods have been turned off except LAL and I even did a nuke-it-from-the-ground-up-and-start-over reinstall of Skyrim a couple days ago.

lol

I just watched a teaser trailer for Man of Steel, and Fraps told me that I was getting about 25 fps just watching a video. Time for some experimentation.

Most movies aren't faster than 24 or 25 fps. They just don't have more frames than that. Concerning Skyrim, I'd try going from 8xAA (which I believe Ultra recommends) to 4xAA, as there is no real visual impact, but the performance impact is huge.

Lemme see if I got this straight; you are using the Hi Res Textures (that are recommended for users with more than 1 gig of ram in their videocard) a laptop CPU and laptop videocard...try using more modest settings and texture replacers...

Oh, yeah, that I know. Film is traditionally 24 fps and the video formats that I'm familiar with are all 30 fps. I just didn't think the computer would be operating at that slow a rate, but I see what you're saying. I'll try reducing the anti-aliasing like you suggest.


Yes to all that, but honestly I would have thought the 6gb of RAM and what I thought were a decent CPU and video card would have met the standard. I always played Skyrim in Ultra before I got into mods, but I never did check the frame rate. I'll try keeping the textures and see if lowering the AA a notch does the trick.

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I just played a game of Supreme Commander 2 and I got similar but better results than with Skyrim: around 20 fps if I zoomed all the way out where the whole map was in view, around 25 if I zoomed in to where my territory was in view, and I could get around 35 or a little more if I zoomed waaaay in so that there was basically no animation taking place on the screen.

If there was a big explosion on-screen (ACU detonation) the framerate dropped to about 15 fps. Still, all that is better than I'm getting from Skyrim at the moment.

Fraps doesn't measure your computer's fps, it measures the frame rate of the program you're running.


I'm no expert, but I wouldn't call 1.7ghz decent. I've got a 3ghz quad core, I'd call that decent. Not good, decent.

I agree that it is likely the HD DLC textures and MSAA if that is on. The 360m is comparable to a GT 240 for the desktop, and a GT 240 is quite slow, to put it mildly.

Damnation. And here I thought I had something of a performance machine.

WELL AIN'T THAT A BLOW TO THE OL' EGO.

Guess I'll have to look at further measures. 20 fps has been pretty well playable, but maybe I'll see what frame rate I get with low graphics just to see the comparison.

Also, what's MSAA?

In my opinion, 30 fps is the value to aim for. You won't really notice more than that unless you're looking for it, or are addicted to fps measuring programs.


Multi-sample Anti-Aliasing. I can choose the AA method in my ATI control center, but I'm not really knowledgeable about that stuff, so I just leave it at MSAA, which I think is Skyrim's default method anyway.

For textures, I would recommend http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9080 for a compromise between size and video memory. In my experience, higher quality replacers for individual objects are quite fine, it's the general world and environment textures that are an issue.

Yes, 20 FPS is quite playable if you're used to Morrowind FPS levels. Arkangel's suggestion would be even better.