Hello everyone,

I'll get right to the point: My Skyrim stutters when distant land/trees/etc load in while in heavily-wooded areas. The area I use for a benchmark is the path leading N/NE down the river from Ivarstead. If I sprint down this path on a horse I get some pretty hefty stuttering every time new assets load into view. Again, this does not occur in non-forest areas.

For mods, I followed the STEP guide, so I have a significant number of high-resolution textures. I did however pick and choose which ones to install in order to keep my VRAM usage under 2GB. One additional mod I've installed which pertains to this issue is Skyrim Distance Overhaul, which greatly increases the number of LOD objects. I've also done the z-fighting tweak, which in turn increases draw distance for LOD objects.

I run at 2560x1600, 2x AA, 2x Transparency AA, and 8x AF (via nVidia control panel). I have all launcher settings maxed with the exception of sky reflection and Item fade (set to 8).

My specs:
Rampage IV Extreme
i7 3930k @ 4.7ghz
16gb 1600mhz DDR3 8-8-8-24
3 GTX680 2GB Tri-SLI
2 240GB Intel 520 SSDs in raid0 (64k stripe size)

I've done quite a bit of research online, and here's what I've tried/ruled out:
1) Not a VRAM issue. VRAM tops out at about 1850 on the previously mentioned benchmark.
2) Not a CPU stress issue. Usage hovers around 30-40%.
3) Not a save game bloat/script error issue. This occurs on a fresh install and a new game. Papyrus logging shows no errors/warnings.
4) Not a mod issue. This happens with or without mods.
5) I've tried disabling SLI and running on a single card.
6) I've tried disabling vsync and also FPS limiting.
7) I've tried running in Steam's offline mode and disabling the overlay.
8) I've tried several different nVidia drivers (clean installs).
9) I've tried enabling PCI-e 3.0 via the nVidia patch (I thought this was going to fix it for sure... thought I was running into bandwidth limitations).

I'll be honest, the problem mostly goes away when I disable the z-fighting tweak; however, I *shouldn't* have to do this. I'll do it if I absolutely must, but my PC is a monster. It's capable of running this.

The only thing I can think of at the moment that I haven't ruled out is that it's HDD-related. Maybe I'm running into throughput limitations or perhaps my stripe size is too small, but I was thinking that if I broke the raid up, formatted the drives, and did a fresh Windows install on one drive and used the other for Steam/games it might fix the issue.

Thoughts/input/solutions I could try would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

Yea, I have this problem on my setup as well... I recently reinstalled windows 7 on my computer and it didn't help at all so yah, dunno...

My setup is a 2500k@4.5ghz, 8gb of 1600mhz ram, 2gb windforce gigabyte GTX670, tried running skyrim on both a 7200rpm HDD AND my 128gb crucial M4 SSD so I don't really think it would be a HDD or SSD problem. (especially for you )
So yea, my setup is nowhere near as beast as yours but skyrim on ultra should be running fine, not getting those horrible stutters from time to time.

Do you think it could be a kepler driver issue? I'm using the 304.48 beta drivers right now... Haven't tried the others...

Yeah, Ultra + 7gb worth of hd textures does run fine for the most part. I'm sure most of it is the Skyrim Distance Overhaul + draw distance .ini tweaks that's causing the stutter. It's just a massive amount of objects being pulled in at once in a forest environment. As for the drivers, I've tried 304.48, 304.79, and 301.42. They were all the same for the most part.