A little about my rig.

Core 2 Duo
2.6ghz
GeForce 9500gt
Windows 7 64-bit
8gb ram




So, my rig's not the best and when I played vanilla Skyrim on Medium, it wasn't terrible, but it definitely wasn't smooth in most parts.

After updating to the latest patches and using the latest nVidia drivers, it did boost my performance and it ran noticeably smoother and it was acceptable.

I just installed mostly texture packs tonight, all high-res and I was expecting my game to drag and thought I would need to disable them.... but it runs smoother than it did ever.

Any reasons for this? I don't have any benchmarks or FPS tests, but take my word for it.

Please help, I'm confused.

The only explanation I can think of, is because you've given your gpu more work to do, it's working harder (obviously) but not choked.

Quicky reply! Nice one.

Hmm... idk. Perhaps, but wouldn't it just strain the gpu more?

I remember in Oblivion, high-res texture mods would make me lose serious FPS, but was never bad (you could say 30fps, like consoles, whereas most people with good rigs do around 60fps).

I seem to have the opposite going on in Skyrim. I'm actually quite content of how smooth it is due to the fact that I thought it would cause FPS loss, but instead it improved.

I don't do things like AA and anisotropic filtering because even the lowest settings of those features definitely slow it down.

I didn't pull that explanation out of my ass by the way lol. I've experienced it before myself. Increasing graphical settings at no performance cost, but sometimes increasing the performance.

Fragmented bsa files perhaps. The uncompressed files might read faster if they're newly created. When was your last defrag and what kind of hard drive do you have?

Good enough for me! I think.

Hmm...... lol, probably 2 years since I've defragged my harddrive. I know , but I forget!

I'm not sure of the brand of the harddrive, I think it's Western Digital or Seagate. 300 gb.

Wow that's like being married to Kelly brook, and not smashing her back doors in daily. You need to defrag atleast once a week dude!

Steam can defrag the Skyrim files specifically. For defragging your entire HDD, I suggest Defraggler.

Windows Vista/7 by default do a defragment of all hard drives/partitions once a week. Excluding SSD's.

I will definitely Kelly Brook my harddrive.

Thanks, GUYS!

Wouldn't it svck if he defragged and took a big fps hit?

Glad to see mods improved your game mate! Where would this entire franchise be without modders?

lmao - What's this about smashing Kelly Brook's back doors in.

- Do I need the latest version of Skyrim to do it?
- Is there a 'Smash Kelly Brook's back doors in' mod on the Nexus?
- Does it require SKSE?
- Does IanPatt approve?
- Will Beth release a 'Smash Kelly Brook's back door in patch' if the community shouts loud enough?

All I know so far, is there is a team somewhere conducting "smashing" tests, and making sure it works in large address aware