Actually if you want to talk about the technical side of things. The fact that the shadows are probably being rendered on the CPU is a big deal. Since the game is limiting itself to 2 threads (not cores), you are limiting the game by what your CPU can do because the program is optimized for only 2 threads while more and more gamers are starting to get 4 core processors everyday. Why does it seem when you turn down Shadow detail that you CPU performance stays the same but your GPU usage goes up? You are letting the CPU send more instructions to the GPU to draw instead of having to worry about rendering shaders. I really hope Bethesda optimizes the game for PC's. As it stands now, they are very console centric because of the console's outdated hardware and lack-there-of a good GPU to match the CPU. This is why we are getting degrading performance. As gamers we are usually told to prioritize GPU over CPU because a better GPU will allow higher FPS. Well the GPU cannot function if it isn't sent instructions from the CPU. And when the CPU gets bogged down with stuff that it shouldn't do (I.e. shaders) then the GPU sits there.

So yes, CPU limiting is the current problem. This happens in every single console port. And this is why consoles are holding back PC performance in games.

Want proof? http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1262860-cpu-and-gpu-performance-anolyzed/

Quote from: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1207390-skyrim-fan-interview/

9) Can we have some specifics about the PC version of the game? How will it's UI be different? Will there be a 64-bit executable?
Todd: 64-bit specific exe? Not at this time. As far as UI, it visually looks the same across the platforms, but the controls are entirely different. There’s also a lot of “power user” stuff we do with the keyboard from how favorites work, to quick saves, and more that is similar to what we’ve done before in that area. We’re packing a lot of info on the screen and the whole interface is much less ‘look at giant fonts!’ than, say, Oblivion. The PC version also gets higher res textures, larger render modes, and a bunch of other effects you can scale up if your machine is a beast. Last but most important, is the Creation Kit we’ll be releasing for the PC. Modding the game and making it your own is very important to us and our fans, so we’re going to keep doing whatever we can in that area.


Anyone actually believe much of this now? Aside from the last sentence maybe, knowing that there's a lot of people trying to solve Bethesda's problems for them (numerous other forums), just so we can actually attempt to play the game.

Uldred

Oh modding is out ?

Is there any way we can all complain to Bethesda about them basically releasing a broken game? Would like to let them know that I REALLY don't appreciate it.

I don't think it's broken. It plays well on my machine at the moment, 30 fps in some of the city shots is acceptable for me. But 60 fps outside is great by my standards. My only concern is when the mods come out, how is the unoptimized engine going to handle extra scripts and bigger textures if it is struggling to reach 30 fps at stock in some areas? That's my main concern.

No, I'm not saying modding is out. I'm saying with the number of people trying to get the game to work, the last sentence makes sense - they want people to mod it.. (and make it better) and at this point, make it playable for those that can't even play it right now.

Uldred

1. What pun? Do you even know what a pun is? Derp.
2. The textures in this game were clearly designed to run on craptacualr console hardware, they look awful and there is no denying that.
3. The FPS issue I can not comment on as I have not had any problems FPS wise, however the game crashing with either CTD or hard reset of my machine is a software problem. As for you comment about building a decent computer... you are a troll, I burn trolls.
4. Us "whiney noobs who cant fix their own problems" would like to state that most of the issues we are having are not our problems but the developers.
5. i love the game too, when it isnt making CTD or hard resets a way of life, NO the graphics are not amazing. If I was playing on a console I might say they are amazing but by 2011 PC standards they are just OK.
6. Congratulations on your solid 60 FPS, I ran out of [censored] to give a long time ago.

i don't care if you're the one lucky person getting it to run. That's not what we are discussing. If you're working well and not willing to help us with problems, go away. I can't even get the game to play. Many others can't, either. Beyond that, it isn't taking advantage of our expensive computers. So not only will it not work for some, but when it does work, many others can't use their expensive computers to get it to work. I bought mine SPECIFICALLY for this game, but I can't play it. This is my [censored] birthday, and I can't play it. That just ruins my birthday.

Who said I'm not wanting to help? I can try to help you with problems you have, please pm me. As far as some users having problems, that's inherent and I'm sorry that it's not working for you. Has there been a PC game recently released that didn't crash on load on everyone's computers and ran at top notch performance? No, not in a long time. Why? Because consoles all have the same hardware, while PC's have a myriad of different configurations. There are so many variables out there. OS, DX versions, Drivers, different BIOS, different environment variables, everyone's registries are different, almost every computer is unique in one way or another. There is absolutely no way you can account for all of those variables when developing a game. Yes, they may have rushed it to meet their target date, but it is the luck of the draw now-a-days when getting a PC game on release. When I first got Black Ops when it released, I couldn't play for 5 days because of an ATI driver issue. Once it was fixed though, everything worked fine. Just give it time, I have been in the same boat as you before, it svcks I know.

If you want me to help you, send me your computer specs in a PM and tell me if you've done any of the .Ini tweaks yet.

Thank you! I will do so later, as I have spent way too much time looking into and trying to fix this issue and need to finish up some work. I'll send you my information tonight. Very much appreciate the help.

1) It's actually not that strange for an application to not use every core. It's actually more common that an application does not use 4 cores. Applications truly maximized for more than 2 cores are rare.

2) I agree with the rest, thus my point that CPU limiting is not the problem. It's the fact that the instructions aren't being sent to the GPU. Just using 2 cores is fine, you should be able to run fine on that, but not when it's trying to use 2 cores to do everything and the kitchen sink when you have a perfectly good plumber (GPU) to keep the pipes from bursting.

Edit: Also, as a point of explanation, if you have any recent quad core with a decent Motherboard, they're probably set up to distribute application load across all 4 by default, so even if skyrim only uses 2 threads, your quad core can do the work of distributing that work across four automatically.

look at my signature, realize I am getting roughly the exact same performance as you...

Surxenberg and C89c are both right. The truth is that unless someone ITT is one of the developers, nobody knows how the game is juggling the system resources and are just guessing.

Whenever a new PC game comes out, you can count on a lot of whining in the hardocp forum, nvidia's forum, guru3d forum, AMD/ATI's forum, steam's forum, etc. over the same exact things:

"My GPU usage is only 33% so this game is CPU limited" (PS3 and 360 have don't exactly have state of the art CPUs and it runs on theirs. Contrary to popular belief, Cell is not the beast it was made out to be)

"Why is the executable not large address aware or 64-bit?" (because it doesn't matter for the vanilla game, only when using a ton of mods)

"Why does the game run so slow on my new laptop with Intel integrated graphics?" (if it runs at all)

"DX9? In 2011?" (a legit complaint kinda, but most probably can't see a difference)

"The game only uses 1 or 2 cores" (open up task manager, it's using all your cores just not fully)

"The game stutters like crazy"

"I'm only getting 10fps on my i7-990x SLI 580 GTX 128GB RAM rig"

"I'm never buying a (insert publisher) product again"

You get the idea. It doesn't matter if it's Skyrim, COD MW3, BF3, or even friggin Portal 2. To be fair though, many are playing Skyrim below 60fps which seems a bit unusual considering it is a console port running an updated version of the FO3 engine. I'm playing with a laptop GPU, nvidia GTX 460m and a 1.7 (2.8 turboboost) i7. I'm using 1920x1080, ultra, AA off, FXAA on, shadows on low, no modifications to ini files and the default control panel settings. I'm getting on average of 35fps outdoors and 40-60fps indoors with the occasional dips below. This is still better than the framerate 360/PS3 users are getting with a much better image quality.

If using FXAA in conjunction with AA, I recommend disabling AA. FXAA introduces a slight blur but also smooths out the alpha textures (transparencies) as a trade off. I was using FXAA with 4xMSAA until I read that using AA and FXAA together is pointless. I was skeptical, but to my eyes FXAA looks the same as 4xMSAA. AA has more of a performance impact on Skyrim than other games, even at 2x. FXAA has very little performance impact. So try turning off AA and using FXAA, it's pointless to use them together because it will look the same as if AA were disabled and you lose like 5fps.

When the sun moves, the shadows re-render outdoors. Shadows are blocky period so low doesn't bother me but it makes that re-rendering effect more pronounced. I can live with it.

Beware of messing around with the .ini file. Self-proclaimed tweaking experts have been recommending things like turning on transparency AA or water multisampling. Those two settings don't even work in Skyrim. They probably left them from an earlier pre-FXAA build. Either use transparency AA in your driver control panel (which was better than the FO3 dithering TAA anyways) or FXAA. Otherwise enjoy your placebo ini transparency and water multisampling. That's just one example, there are others being recommended that either don't work or hurt performance. You can improve LOD and mess with shadows but in addition to potential fps hits it might mess up how the game was intended to render. Disabling vsync in the .ini will cause the game to speed up when there is no AI interaction. Some people are confusing this speedup with vsync mouse sensitivity. It's not the same thing, the game runs faster than intended when it goes above 60fps and no AI elements are on the screen (FO:NV also did this). Also, if you use Direct3doverrider it probably isn't working. It doesn't chime when the game loads. It didn't work for NV either (but did for Oblivion and FO3).

Experiment for yourself with fraps open, don't take some anon on the internet's word for it (not even mine). This is the internet. People lie. They lie about their rigs and exaggerate their performance (or lack of performance). Ex "I'm always getting 60 fps with everything at max" is probably unlikely all the time with this game. At least right now for most of us. Their framerate is likely dropping and they just can't tell. They probably didn't use fraps either. PC gamers are a strange bunch that don't always see eye to eye (ex, recommending a high res texture mod that destroy the art style with bad taste... or the furry mods) and often don't have a clue what they are talking about.

People said NV was CPU-limited because the fps svcked for the first couple weeks only to find out it was a direct x bug that could temporarily be fixed with a hooking dll. I doubt Skyrim has a similar problem, but who knows? Maybe they can improve it. Just don't expect any improvements for flickering textures in the distance or the occasional loading/streaming hiccup. Those have been part of the engine since Oblivion.

redacted

And that there are many computers that dont have any probs on performance.
I run 60 fps in constant with i-7 2600@4.2 ghz, 8 gigs of 1866 mhz ram and nvidia 570 sc.

I would not say that is a problem with this theory. A problem would be if people were getting high GPU load and low CPU load.


You should be running a constant 100fps imo. But regardless you have the most beast CPU anyone could possibly have. The latest generation intel CPU overclocked to hell.......and only 60fps?

Which is good because it gives us hope that the problem is fixable, the more people I see running the game well the more heartened I get.

i still don't get all these problems you guys have.


Apart from lacking CrossFire support, which is AMD's fault as [censored] always, I have no performance issues whatsoever.


I hooked my PC to my 32" Full HD TV and play with the Xbox360 Gamepad. I'm basically getting the xbox feel of the game but with much better graphics.

My (single) Radeon6870 + Phenom II X6 3.6GHz can run the game @ Ultra with only shadows set on high (shadows on ultra make the game ultra laggy, i suspect this is due to my GPU only having 1GB of VRA) at an acceptable performance - usually 50-60 FPS, around 30 in some hefty situations. I have enabled 2xSSAA ATM because a single Radeon6870 can't handle 4xSSAA in this game without serious performance dropdowns.

The GFX quality/performance ratio of the game is decent. Look at GTA IV, this game still runs like crap on modern PCs and doesn't look very good - that's a really, really bad port.



I imagine that if you play this game on mediocre hardware, say a Core2Quad 2.4GHz or a Core2Duo 3.0Ghz with a Radeon 4870, you will certainly run into performance issues. But the game offers enough options to scale the requirements down in order to provide a decent gaming experience that will probably still beat the suxbox360 or PS3.

hyperthreading make [censored] again ?

Shadows rendered by CPU? ...
You bet SKyrim isn't the only game doing this, I've always wondered why I get (much) better performance by disabling the shadows of so many great games, old and new.
My SKyrim rarely lags, but I'm not running it on utra settings anyway.

OK, Here are some screenshots I just took:

[img]http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/4318/tesv2011111322340759.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img525.imageshack.us/img525/9244/tesv2011111322344135.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/8579/tesv2011111322351347.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1477/tesv2011111322355245.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6528/tesv2011111322365167.jpg[/img]


These are taken on my computer that features:

Phenom II X6 @ 3.6GHz
2x Radeon 6870 CrossFire, with only a single one being used atm thanks to AMD's crap support
6GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 800 RA
Asus M4A79 Deluxe with AMD 790FX chipset.
OCZ Vertex Plus SSD

This PC is hardly high end, if even upper middle class.

The Settings I've used in game:

All Sliders max
No FXAA
No AF
No AA
All settings to high

Forced 8x AF and 2xSSAA in Catalyst Control Center.

The game is more than playable and it really looks nice, not only on these screenshots.

Okay, few things. One, I have no problems running this game on full auto. GPU is pegged at 100% use all the time, except when there's lot of NPCs in the frame. Overall CPU use (all 4 cores being used, though the first core gets most use by far) is relatively steady at 45-50%. I have the unofficial ENB .88 "patch" installed. I've also tweaked my skyrimPrefs.ini file to dramatically lower shadow rendering distance to 2000 units, rather than the 8000 default for Ultra mode. AA is off, FXAA is on, AF is 16.

Now, I said I've pulled shadow rendering back to 2000 units distance. This means that the Whiterun town center is OUTSIDE THE SHADOW RENDERING AREA when I look down on it from the steps to Dragonreach. And I still get a massive GPU utilization drop (down to roughly 45%) when all those NPCs are in the FoV, with CPU holding steady at 45-50%. So shadows are definitively NOT the issue here. Something else, related directly to the NPCs, is bottlenecking the game, which throttles the GPU's data flow and thus the framerate.

ETA: Just realized something. Though all 4 of my cores are seeing use, the first core is seeing the most, being nearly pegged most of the time. What do you want to bet that most of the game's scripts are processed on the first core, including AI behavior? If this is true, then stacking lots of NPCs to calculate behaviors for onto an already loaded core would bottleneck everything.

ETA: Pictures.

Performance graphs looking out over Whiterun. Unfortunately I didn't resize the resource monitor window ahead of time and once Skyrim was running I didn't have the option, so you can only see the individual core graphs.
http://i282.photobucket.com/albums/kk255/r3li3nt/Skyrim/Skryim_Performance_NPCs.png

Note how the soldier on the stairs is not displaying a shadow and the fire pit thing is. I had shadow distance rendering set to 1000 for this image. Still dropped my framerate. Conclusion: Shadows not to blame.
http://i282.photobucket.com/albums/kk255/r3li3nt/Skyrim/ScreenShot6.jpg

I don't exactly how Windows 7's CPU graphometer works, but it certainly displays CPU load in a funny way.

Take GTA IV for example. It shows even distribution among all of my six cores and a total CPU load of 50%.

These 50% make perfect sense. It's a hexacore CPU and the game only uses 3 threads. No more, no less. Windows 7's jizzometer still says it'd be using all six cores.

or applications that actually only use 1 thread... -> 16-17% load, even distribution among all cores.

something's wrong there. don't trust the graph, trust the percentage.

Nothing's wrong there. That's your CPU being advanced enough to distribute load evenly across all cores automatically so one core doesn't have to do all the work. 6 cores working at 15% usage is better than 1 core at 85% and five at 5% use.

That's just the thing, though. My graphs DON'T show even distribution. The cores are all doing different things.