Man my 580 sli cards both running at 98% i doubt that the problem is this.The problem is their [censored] engine which one of the 3 top worst engines on the planet ive ever seen.

a place that is a common drop for me is right near the entrance of Solitude where the shuttle lets you off. Walk up the hill at night (12:30am), enter the city, and walk east straight down the first street. Pass all the shops, and then circle around the well with the fishing pole on it and walk back west. I get 30fps when walking east past the shops. It then bolts right back up to 60 when i get to the well and stays there when i walk back past the same NPCs.
Not saying it's a massive gamebreaker, but it's definately noticable.

Okay, I just went and did some quick and simple testing. Since I don't know the in game command to display FPS (assuming there is one), I have no good way to measure that. However, I have my PC running through a battery backup with load monitoring capability, so I can check power draw to get some idea of what's going on.

Basics first:
AMD Phenom II X4 945 (3.0 GHz, 95W max draw)
8 GB DDR3 @ PC3 10666
GeForce GTX 465 w/ 1GB GDDR5, driver version 280.26
Win7 64 Ultimate
Ultra graphics settings, except AA off and FXAA on. Visibility settings as high as possible without tweaking the ini.

Using numbers I've measured beforehand, I've noted that my PC draws about 120 watts at idle, and my monitor pulls about 40 watts when active.

I ran Skyrim and fast traveled to Whiterun, Dragonreach. Standing at the gateway to the castle, where I can look out over the town, I read a 300W draw while looking toward the castle. Beautiful graphics, smooth rendering. But when I turn towards the town, getting the market center in FOV, with all the NPCs there (a good 9-12 NPCs), power draw drops to 270W

For that matter, the only time I get noticeable FPS drops is when there are a large number of NPCs in the scene. What this tells me is that there is a bottleneck, it is my CPU, but it has NOTHING to do with the graphics (the drop in power indicates that the GPU is actually being throttled by something, drawing less power because there's less work for it to do). Let me reiterate: Shadow intensive areas that have no (living) NPCs do not drop my framerate to a noticeable degree. Only when there are lots of NPCs in the scene.

What this tells me is that the bottleneck is somewhere in the NPC behavior code. Considering how robust the NPC behavior system is in this game, that's not terribly surprising.

You can just use FRAPS to measure FPS. Or Radeon Pro.

I don't know WTF is going on with this game. I've gotten it to a very playable state, but nothing I change in its options increases or decreases my FPS. I can do all low settings, or all ultra settings and get the same results. The only time I get a noticeable drop is when going from high to ultra on shadows. But with shadows, there's almost no VISIBLE difference between low and ultra. Looks like Minecraft either way. So I'm just keeping it at high for now.

Just as a tidbit, by performance increased by 20-40fps by reverting my overclocked CPU back to its stock clock. Don't ask why.

Poor mutlicore utilization would be the cause for that, on a quadcore machine 25% utilization is one fully utilized core, The intel Core i5 and I7s should get a bit better utilization due to turbo-boost but the Core2 series would probably sit at ~60-70% on dualcore and 30-40% on quad core.

So the shadows rendering by the CPU is the problem, of the poor performance ?


I have 99% gpu usage all the time.

I'm certainly not an expert on this topic, but rendering shadow maps by CPU? It's the very first time I have heard about this, do you guys know of any other games that MIGHT do that? I think that's ... interesting, to say at least.

Hehe, no, the minecraft shadows look perfectly smooth, while I found the Skyrim shadows to look quite chunky.

It would only be a problem if you got a weak CPU and a high end GPU, (AMD CPUs would probably struggle the most due to having fairly weak individual cores and skyrim not scaling all that well across multiple cores), If you got one of the faster Core2Duos or a i5/i7 (with turboboost) you should be able to keep your GPU well fed anyway.

exactly.

You are running the very latest CPU at a massive overclock to get the same framerate I would get in Crysis with my Core 2 Duo. Skyrim does not to ANYTHING that Crysis does not.

Terrible optimization.

Scratch that, NO optimization. They didn't spend any of their development time on the PC version of this game.

Forgive my negativity but Bethesda never fixed Fallout 3's engine issues, nor Morrowind or Oblivion for that matter.

Bethesda's strong point is not technical support, frankly I'll be amazed (but hugely glad) if they take note of these threads, I suppose the odds are higher as I don't remember there being an outcry as big as this previously.

I can't help but agree with people who think DLC will be their top priority now, I just hope the inevitable DLC patches don't cause more issues like they did for Fallout 3...

The worst part is that we only care about this because the game is good

They have given no love atall to th e PC version. That much is obvious.

This sounds very sensible. My graphics card is getting oldish, though I still get pretty stable 60 fps at max graphics (turned down Shadows to high though, really picky about performance so I want it perfect at all times). My CPU is clocked from 2,8 to 4,1ghz, and the usage is fairly low.

Well honestly I don't care as long as this [censored] runs! Frigging loving the game so far, passed out at 8 am this morning after gaming for 14 hours straight. It's been a long time since I did that.

But Camrick's advice is sound - OC your processor if you can.

Best solution: don't buy the game.

Running a 3 year old CPU and a single GTS 250, all graphics settings maxed. No issues what so ever. Sorry that what is probably going to be regarded as the greatest RPG to date and some of the most amazing visuals on any RPG to date is just not good enough for you, perhaps it's your system? It's got to be very frustrating to be so caught up on what you want something to do that you're unable to enjoy what it can do. The game is gorgeous, brilliant, absolutely stunning. It kills me that some people don't see that or seem to want to enjoy it. Schadenfreude I guess? Perhaps you enjoy finding what's wrong with something more than you enjoy what it does well?

Dunno. More power to you, but for what it's worth I suspect my system is inferior to your own but runs like a champ. No graphical or FPS issues. A little clipping here and there and one brief texture issue that fixed itself.

Jesus man, fanb0i much? Why would you come to the freaking PC support forums just to gloat that you're having no issues whatsoever? Maybe if we had the same performance you're having, we'd be singing Bethesda's praises too. But right now, many of us with far better PCs than yours are struggling just to get this thing up to 30 FPS without crashes and etc. And that's on Bethesda, with their complete lack of attention to detail. They [censored] up. Hard to believe, I know. Now go cry to Oprah because I questioned the competence of your favorite developer.

It depends how fussy you are, I've seen lots of people using superlatives like "smooth as glass!" but ultimately these things are perceptual, if you feel that 30fps is as good at is gets you're a lucky man.

I want to see a video of someone running around Solitude and getting a solid 60fps on Ultra.

Well, whatever, because my game is running great. I have a 4 core i7 but not the best one. To me, all is well with the game so far in 8 hours of play

edit-

I think most times, the CPU in PCs is overkill. In Skyrim, it's simply not overkill to have that ridiculously good CPU

Well shock and surprise sunshine, you're in the tech support forum where bad things happen, most of us have CPUs as good or better than yours and we have issues...

sorry bro, but this is the douchiest comment I've read so far reading carefully through the comments, you'll realize that everything boils down to a couple of specific problems on different hardware configurations, espacially the lag and fps issues. this can't be a coincidence.

About three quarters of an hour playing this and it really does feel like a console game, as if a console game has been adapted for the PC. I think we modders can kick this thing into touch though. I cant say I like the feel of it all as yet, but hey ho... time will tell.

I have to agree with the OP that the shadow rendering is being done on the CPU add that to the fact that the game only really utilizes 2 or 3 cores very well and there is your problem since one core is kept busy rendering the shadows if you add a bunch of NPCs to the scene and all of their AI plus all of the thngs going on in the background to load areas etc. you quickly develope a bottleneck on the CPU and the GPU usage drops low enough that if you are not OCing it and shutting off the power saving features -- they think the Video system is not being used much and start throttling back the GPU and then all of a sudden your high end GPU is making the game run at very low FPS because it is saving power.

One question for those that state they are not having problems -- Are your GPUs OC versions and do you have power saving modes disabled ? THis might be the reason your GPU usage is showing high usage where others are getting low usage since their cards have gone into a lower state

I do not have a high end GPU so can not test it myself but my PII 720 (unlocked to 4 cores @3.2Ghz) and 5770 gets perfect results with all settings turned up to ultra levels with the shadows disabled in the ini file ( The flickering that they have every 10 seconds or so as they update was giving me headaches and the blockiness of the shadows even at high settings made all of the textures look awful - so I turned them off completely and as a side result was able to max out the AA and AF with all the in game sliders maxed as well and the game still runs smooth ( not sure of the FPS since I have not tested but the look and feel of the game is smooth )

For those with performance issues try turning off the shadows using the 2 settings listed earlier and run the game with the others settings all maxed and see how your performance is then.

EDIT : Just tested FPS using FRAPS and withhttp://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc189/JDFanning_bucket/settings02-1.jpg -- Vsync enabled with triple bufferring forced -- and shadows disabled in the .ini the game gets FPS as low as 35 and remains around 45 average outdoors in Riverwood and 45 - 55 FPS indoors. And the gameplay feels smooth and looks fine (the textures actually look much crisper with the shadows disabled !)

I did a quick test and my GTX260 is at 100% usage with vsync off, MSAA off and FXAA on.
I don't know the FPS but the game is very smooth (Core i7).