My rig:
AMD Phenom X4 965 @ 3.8GHz
GA-MA790X-DS4
500GB RAID 0 SATA 2
3GB PC2 6400
Powercolor ATI HD5870 PCS+ OC @ 900MHz/1250MHz
600W OCZ ModXstream




Hi, first post so Hi and hello

I thought I'd share my experiences with setting up Skyrim.

Although I loved/love Oblivion and have over 700hrs logged on New Vegas I was slow to get my copy of Skyrim and only installed the game about 2 weeks ago.
I duly downloaded the game using STEAM and also applied the free texture packs (more on those later). I then ran the game for a while noticing the snatching or freezing effect every time I turned around. Sometimes it was worse that others and kinda knowing the graphic engine already through previous games I trotted off to Nexus to pick up something to help. I ran Fraps just to make sure the frames per second were ok and got around 75fps with vsync and over a 100fps (in quiet moments) with vsync off.
I tried the FPS limiter but this would give me a sound lag. I then tried changing settings to high, Ultra, shadows on, shadows off and all manner of stuff. I went through the forums and tried almost every fix posted in the community all to no avail.
I thought how come it's running at over 60fps and i'm having these damn snatching moments. It was almost a game breaker until eventually I turned off the free texture packs.... Wooo Hooo That was it! So I now run other mods other than the free stuff and it runs like a dream. I can now enjoy this fantastic game without having a stutter everytime I look at something.

It looks like your running a 32bit OS, so I am surprised the game did not crash on you with the Hi Res Texture Pack. Only people with at least 4GB of RAM can run the texture pack, and they need a 64bit OS to address all the memory the pack needs.

Nope 64bit... Oh I should mention that I'm using Win 8 although the same problems appeared in win 7 too. I'm not entirely sure it's down to me having only 3gig of RAM either as I can run the 2K mod texture pack, which has far bigger textures than the official stuff, without a hitch.

Vram overload for sure. The highres texture pack may not have huge textures compared to some community texture packs, but it replaces texture almost everywhere in the gameworld with textures 4x as large. You need at least 2gb of vram to play with the highres texture pack on a decent resolution. If I'm correct your gpu only has 1gb, which is not enough. I have a 1gb card myself and even with the default textures, a normal resolution and 4x AA I can get 500mb vram usage easily. What matters is the total amount of vram needed to keep all the textures in memory, not the size of a few insane highres textures from community packs. If you add more community highres textures you'll eventually see the same effects depending on where you are.

If you want to make sure that is really the reason check your vram usage, but I'm 99% sure that this is the reason. Because that is exactly what happens when you run out of vram - you turn around and the game has to load the new textures you see from your hd into your overloaded vram, which causes the stutter you mention.

I'm pretty sure your right but I've failed to mention that I was also running the Water and Terrain enhancement redux mod. I have turned this off and can now run the HD packs no problem. I think running both was just way too much. I'm still running extra texture packs but ones that do not impact on performance as much. I also got a new mod for the water too which isn't as good as the redux but at least I'm not getting the damn snatching..

Oh and forgot to mention my resolution is currently 1280x1024 which is perhaps why I'm getting away with running the packs ok..