Hi

Skyrim was working very good on my PC till I upgraded to 1.5. In areas near Whiterun game is simply unplayable. Frame rate is very good, but the game stutters terribly when moving. The culprit is Skyrim.exe from 1.5, because when I replace it with the one from 1.4 the game becomes smooth again. Paradoxaly when I maximize view distance and set lod to very high the stuttering is weaker (I suppose someone messed up object caching in 1.5 and when the new scenery has to be drawn the game stutters). I have the latest 12.3 Catalyst installed. Are there any downsides when playing Skyrim 1.5, but with the Skyrim.exe from 1.4?

Have you tried generating fresh ini files without any changes to them? Good practice to do that after each patch.

Yes, I tried, but there wasn't any difference. It's Skyrim.exe that's completely messed up in 1.5.

EDIT:

I have found the stuttering is related to shadow settings. Shadows flickers when they are set to High and when I set them to low game becomes playable again. However, this is regression introduced by 1.5, because with 1.4 game was perfectly smooth with shadows set even to Ultra. I also noticed some textures aren't displayed properly and the mountaing peaks also suffer from flickering.

Aye 1.5 introduced shadows on grass, that's the only shadow change, so maybe that's why you're suffering.

As to mountain flicker, everyone has had that on some mountains since the game was released

I tried some tweaks to disable this change, but I didn't notice any difference. When I'm not moving everything is perfectly smooth, so while I have no FPS drop with this effect enabled, but just stuttering this probably isn't the case (or it's just crappy effect and CPU rather GPU dependent). I wonder if this effect is enabled with executable from 1.4?

I have to check, but I probably don't suffer from flickering mountains when using 1.4. PS. consoles should die.