Wow. I decided to try and find out why Skyrim is running like [censored] on my gaming computer so I used AMD System Monitor to check my GPU load. Shows 0% the majority of the time while running Skyrim. To confirm I took a look using GPU-Z which is showing 1%. Skyrim is only using 1% of my GPU's power...

Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

I find it amusing that you havent included your GPUs make.

Couldn't you have simply said "Could you include your GPU's make?"

Oh, of course not. That wouldn't be rude and ignorant enough.

Sorry i was just being crude and silly.

Its still useful either way.

Sorry.

System Specs:

Intel i7-860 @ 2.8GHz
ATI Radeon HD 5750
4 GB of Ram
Windows 7 64 bit.

Ive got a Radeon HD 6770.... I'll be following this thread. Im getting fps unrelated lag, im only getting 25 or 30 fps, but my character stutters, ill run, and itll stutter ever other second longer than it is not stuttering.

I get 3 FPS consistently. It might drop down to 2 if I turn fast enough but it usually stays around 3 FPS.

Unfortunately, it seems this issue can only be solved on Bethesda's end. Skyrim is having serious issues fully utilizing the available hardware, such as yours. Sit tight, and hopefully the upcoming patch shall fix this absurd problem.

Are the shadows in Skyrim really CPU dependent?

As a rule, shadows are CPU dependent. Keep in mind that shadows will always be changing in regards to time of day, location of the object, etc. While the GPU displays and renders the shadows, the CPU is responsible for maintaining and running the scripts that mandate where the shadows are cast.

Well, according to GPU-Z my 6950 barely uses 30% of its power, yet my framerate is 25ish FPS. Not unplayable, but not what you'd expect out of a graphics card that's barely outputing 25fps...

HD 6770 user here, playing skyrim on High settings, max fade distance. No stuttering experienced.

I'm using ati mobility radeon HD 3670 on my laptop. "default" settings were high. I experienced about 3 FPS on those settings. After turning everything possible down, including resolution, I'm now getting 60 fps for about 8 mins. Then GPU usage drops to 3%; FPS drops to 40, and then down to 2-7 FPS. This has happened to me 4 times now. It's hard to get into the game when it gives out after approximately 8 minutes.

What gives? I'm getting great FPS for a few minutes, and then the GPU seems to just give up and the game slows to almost a halt. The GPU is not overheating.

One thing I'm curious about with people's lag and what not is speed of the ram and the clock timings. I was experimenting with frequency and timings, and found that running the game with faster frequency and looser timings had a vast effect on the overall fps of the game. Running 2000 mhz roughly timed to 9-9-9-24 on my ram vastly improved the FPS over setting it to 1600 with 7-7-7-22. This is really limited as to the amount of people with this ability, but is still info for thought.

Just to state, nothing else changed within my system.

i realize this isn't related to the GPU usage, but food for thought

Try turning off any power saving modes that your system has --- could be the system is not properly seeing the need for it to run at high speed and is going into power saving mode.

bump

OH MY GOD I FIXED IT. For all those wondering how unless you're a programmer and have the DirectX programming API installed it likely will not matter for you. For those interested I'm a programmer who wants to work on video games one day. So I have the DirectX API installed. In order to debug what I work on I have DirectX 9 set to debug with as much information as possible (This slows down anything running DirectX 9) and have it set to debug mode. I turned it back to retail and turned off my debug settings and I'm getting a much much nicer FPS.

I usually don't pay attention to this detail unless I have a FPS issue, I usually just use FRAPS to monitor FPS on my
Logitech keyboard display. So this thread made me curious and I switched over to my EGA monitor software.

On my system, specs below, with a GTX580 the game was using 45 to 60 percent of the horsepower of that card in the limited test I did
in Winterhold when it was snowing heavily, nearby flame source and went inside with a few light sources and NPCS walking about there.

Typical about 50 percent usage.
Running ultra mode at the screen res listed in sig. No crazy overclocking, minor amount both system and GPU.
60fps typical with occasional dips to upper 40's in some situations.

That said, FPS in Skryim here is not an issue for me so I'm not concerned about this statistic. I merely post it for information for those that like to chew on such.

Please see this thread http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1274857-severe-fps-drops/page__st__20 page 2 my post,it will most likely fix your fps problems.

I find this interesting because I am running a HD5830, much lower than most of the AMD cards reported here, on High settings (in fact I upped the AA) and haven't had any lag at all. Hmmm... Truedark seems to imply he is running DX9 while I am running DX11, could this be the difference?

Phenom II x4 3.4GHz
8Gb RAM
HD5830 1Gb
Win7 64
1920x1080

Ok, and then how do you explain the slow performance in Skyrim in towns ? If the shadows are rendered by the CPU, what the Bethesda buys should change in the 1.2 patch to make the game run better in towns ?

The shadows are NOT being rendered by the CPU, that's simply mathematically impossible since some are getting 60 FPS even with 4096x4096 shadowmaps. Consider the instructions-per-clock, memory bandwidth, clockrates and the number of cores the game actually puts load on and you'll arrive at the same conclusion with no further inspection of the game's API calls needed (and I understand someone did that, too, and could only conclude the same).

The poor performance in towns is caused by the towns having higher numbers of AI-driven characters (pathfinding, animation parameters to derive, etc.), scripts, a large number and variety of other objects and other things that generally keep the CPU too busy for it to keep telling the GPU what to do, which is why the GPU load often seems low in such a situation. Typical CPU cap. Note that each piece of equipment, clothing and such visible on characters is effectively a separate object when it comes to rendering, and rendering a new type of object typically involves a long-ish string of calls to switch the GPU state.

The objects can be sorted and batched up to some degree if the renderer is very smart, but I don't think the one in Skyrim is the most efficient one ever, and too many assumptions about content would make editing it hard.

The large number and variety of objects is twice the problem for the CPU when shadow mapping is being used since the game will have to issue rendering calls for every shadow-casting object at least twice -- once when generating the shadow maps, a second time to draw the objects normally and possibly further renders to deal with complicated lighting on objects since the game's not using deferred shading.

@tzt: Ok, and how did you suggest Bethesda to patch the game in order to have solid fps in towns ?

Or this thing in this open world game isn't possible ?

And we are stuck with bad performance in towns even on lowest settings.

The town FPS could be improved by having fewer things in them

Well, places like Markarth would likely benefit from a more complicated renderer since it has so many opportunities to notice something's completely behind a structure and "cull" it based on that, just skipping its rendering. If you look upwards from the near entrance the FPS drops hard despite only the wall of the large structure and a few doorways being visible, so clearly there isn't a lot of culling going on right now. There's plenty of techniques for doing that, but many of them involve extra work for the level designer, or complicate the renderer a lot without being usable for arbitrary scenes.

Dunno about the nice view from the top of Whiterun, doesn't seem like you could occlusion-cull that very much. Just too many (different) things visible at once.

These kinds of issues are probably why the Imperial City was split up into so many pieces in Oblivion.

I recall the Unreal Engine's editor having several specialized views for determining just how much extra gets processed and drawn + how many lights are landing on each object, wonder if the Skyrim toolset has anything like that.

People who are saying that shadows are rendered by the CPU really need to give up the article that says consoles are trying to use the CPU for shadows because until I see better evidence than some guy on a forum I will never believe it. The only article I have found was for PCs and it was for shadows that were static and did not change or if they did change it was very slowly.