So, I've noticed this problem before with a mechanical hard drive, but it has seemed to get worse and worse as Skyrim has recieve more and more patches. Now though it's gotten to the point where I know that either the engine svcks, or there is a problem on my end.

Now, as assets "load/stream" in, as you're moving around the world on foot, or sprinting around on a horse, my game FPS will become really choppy until the new information is loaded. Now, Skyrim streams a-lot of data in and out as you just walk/ride through the world, but is the framerate really this choppy as things load in for everyone? Even with a powerful PC?

My PC;

i7 930 @ 4.0 Ghz
3x4 GB's of DDR3 RAM (12 GB's total, 1900 Mhz)
Nvidia GTX 680 4GB
Vertex 4 256 GB Solid-State-Drive.

Yes, my Steam and ONLY my Steam games are installed to this stand-alone drive, so I would have thought that textures would load in almost instantaniously... Sure my game loads very quickly, but just streaming the world in creates annoying FPS hiccups.

All my drivers are up to date as well... I can play Battlefield 3 or Crysis 2 at maximum settings at 60 FPS, but I can't run Skyrim smoothly? What?

Its quiet possible Skyrims engine doesnt like SSD drives themselves or even some particular makes of SSD, its a bit of a picky engine at times. The 360 version I have on my HDD is very smooth in streaming with only occasional hiccups when new animations kick in after inactivity (ie weapon switching = small pause). I would expect much better results on a PC with mechanical drive as the 360 model aint exactly stellar on read/write times. Do you have a mechanical drive in that system where you can move the steam instaltion and game data to? It would be worthwhile testing to see if its just the SSD not playing nice with Skyrim.

You should also ensure there are no tasks running in the background that may interefere with the game, and that no "automatic" defrag programs are running during play .

(I have a 60 GB SSD boot drive, a 1 TB drive for general games & program storage, the new 256 GB SSD for games only, and a 256 GB external USB drive for mass general storage)

I had Skyrim installed to a 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Black drive before, the SSD is a new addition. There is actually slightly less load in stutter, but its still noticably there. I'm just wondering if this is just me or a widespread thing.

I only use Seagates in my systems, so I have no experience of WD models though as far as I am aware CB are supposed to be pretty good. I would not expect massive stuttering in any case with the rig your using, maybe some minor hiccups here or there like when weapon switching as I mentioned earlier.

Do you have the external drive connected during play? I know some PC games have performance problems when external drives and USB devices are attached, though tbh I havent heard of Skyrim exhibiting this kind of behaviour. If you havent, try the game with no devices attached.

Using any high end visual mods or have you modified your ini? Particularly have you changed the Ugrids setting? That has a major effect on game performance. Delete your ini files in your save folder and the game will auto generate new ones on next start. Also you may want to check your graphics settings in the NVidia control panel. Some settings here may have an effect on frame rates and cause slight choking resulting in apparent hangs and pauses which are actually frame drops. Make sure everything is set to "application controlled" and that any special AA filters are set to standard versions to test performance. Any option for "max frames to render ahead" or similar titled should be set to zero.

And as a some final points, you may want to use the steam option to "verify game cache" to check the game files are all ok. And its advisable to install the latest DX9c redist. Although DX versions higher can run DX9 natively, numerous games fail or have problems when run via this method. Titles can fail with dx error messages or have degraded performance due to this. Having DX9c installed on the system will not hider performance in any way and will improve game stability and performance where a title has specific requirements for DX9.

(Going to sound like an [censored] probably, but I'm way above that level of PC know-how, I do appreciate the input though)

Well, I managed to find a post in another forum about the exact same issue I'm having, and it's either a driver error OR I'm overdue for a reformatt of my Windows install (It's been over 14 months). Going to verify it's happening even on low graphics settings as well though.

EDIT: Well, it's definitly the drivers. Exact same problem.

In safe mode I uninstalled the current drivers, ran Driver Sweep and found all the old files of my 5870 I upgraded from, deleted those, and rebooted my PC. After making sure they were gone I reinstalled the current drivers for my GTX 680, rebooted the game, and the game ran BEAUTIFULLY... Locked at 60 FPS even at Ultra Settings, in places where the framerate would chug & drop horrendously..

So, the real test was seeing if the changes would stick after a rebooting my PC.... And they did not.

So, Im going to reformatt my PC, and everything will supposedly be better, which is what fixed this other guys issues. Damn, there goes my Thursday afternoon.