I had been complaining about the framerate of these areas since release (as had many other gamers), and it looks like they finally optimized it to run reasonably. Now, it's not PERFECT, but there's a marked and noticable improvement.

Good job Bethesda. It only took you 2.5 months to finish your game after you released it.

Nah someone just forgot to run the code through a compiler. I hope they didn't lose their job, they're only human after all, we all screw up.

But yes the new patch gives amazing performance improvements compared to 1.3 and previous patch benchmarks.

Yeah, walking out of Understone Keep or the Temple of Mara is an eye-opening experience. Utterly smooth whilst before it was a choppy mess. Those of us coming from Oblivion or Fallout 3/New Vegas knew something wasn't right and I'm glad they finally fixed it.

Good improvements. However people still running massive mods with ENB series and high end shadows only seen minor improvements. Yes there are performance gains but not as much as I was expecting. People were yelling omfg I was at 30 fps in whiterun now I am at 60 with the beta. There was no such huge improvement gap for me.

Forgot to run the code through an optimizing compiler. If they had forgotten to run it through a compiler, we wouldn't be able to play the game at all.

Compiler optimizations only help when you're CPU limited.

Which is the case I assume. Shadows are still limited by the CPU, does this mean than that I should be able to crank shadows up to 4096 in all sections and see the same performance with that as if they were still set to 2048?