Skyrim is HEAVILY CPU limited! As is every game nowadays that tries to push consoles to the limits.

It is because of a common practice that game developers have been doing to get better graphics on consoles that have weak GPU's. That is specifically, have shadows rendered by the CPU.

BF3 does it, and now skyrim does it.

Are you possibly wondering why you drop to such low FPS all the time with you uber graphics card? Its because you CPU is rendering the shadows, and even though you have a great CPU.....CPU's are just not great for this. But it is what we get with cheap console ports. Your CPU is struggling to give work to your GPU.

Prove it to yourself. Go download GPU-Z and monitor you GPU load while playing. When your graphics drops really low, stay there for a while, then minimize and look at GPU-Z. Most likely your GPU is running at LESS THAN 50% LOAD! Mine is almost always running at about 30% load. Your CPU is struggling so much to do EVERYTHING that your GPU is not being fed information fast enough to run at full speed.

Want to prove that it is shadows that are causing it? Put shadows to Ultra play for a little while, whilst monitoring GPU load. Then check the graph. I bet your GPU load is really low. THEN set shadows to the LOWEST setting. Now your GPU load will go up? Why would GPU load go up when shadow settings are turned down? It is because turning down shadows releases stress solely on the CPU, which allows it to feed the GPU faster, which allows the GPU to do more work.

Bottom line, developers make games for consoles......and toss us PC gamers broken scraps from time to time.......enjoy!


To truly elaborate on how horrible a problem this is.......test your GPU load with GPUZ and post it here.

ITT: weak CPUs.

Wells its not weak CPUs....

The problem is that our GPUs are very powerful as well......and shadows should not be rendered on CPU's.

The only problem with this theory is that lots of people (me included) are getting low CPU usage and low GPU usage.

The Tom's Hardware article pretty much said this as well. It's dumb because the shadows still look like crap on ultra, but you take a fair hit in FPS by turning them up anyway. A Phenom II x4 @ 3.4GHz benchmarks at around 45 FPS on ultra shadows, and i5s/i7s don't fair much better at around 50/55 FPS.

Anyone and everyone might as well keep their shadows on low, because there's almost no visible difference on ultra. Looks like Minecraft either way.

Funny thing is, is that this uses a global real time shadow system.....just similar to crysis. So if this engine was actually properly coded for PCs, we could have truly GORGEOUS shadows.

People need to really speak up about this! If they could rectify this in a patch we could get better performance AND better visuals at the same time!

Exactly. My GTX 580 is getting 14-25% Usage during gameplay... 1 or 2 of my CPU cores are getting 80%s-90%s

Makes sense to me. Perhaps an option to render more on the GPU?

OP is 100% correct. This should be a sticky.

I've seen a lot of people with 'high end' rigs complaining about low performance, and I wonder how many have modern processors that are running at 2.8GHz and below, but with a fast GPU?

To put it in perspective, I've got the game running on Ultra with just the shadows turned to low.
My system is XP with E2160@3.5GHz on air, 2GB RAM & GTX260 @ 700MHz core, and I'm getting steady 40 outside and 60+ in towns and dungeons, it runs absolutely fine.

I've a feeling that people have paid a lot for these so-called 'EXTREME gaming systems' where the CPU doesn't even break 2.8GHz and it's got an ultra-expensive GPU slapped in to make it look fancy. If anyone's having performance issues with such a rig, I'd suggest OCing your CPU to 3.2GHz and over, turning off vsync and mouse softening in the ini setting, and hey presto, the game will fly.

People on these forums with 4+ GHz CPU's are complaining about low FPS. So that's not the entire scope of the problem. It also has to do with the game not UTILIZING the GPU for crap. My 580 is running at max 25%... in The Witcher 2, it was running near 100% and that game was gorgeous to behold, smooth as butter. Someone needs to find the switch to get this game using our cards like they're supposed to be used.

Only thing is, you DON'T WANT it to fly, trust me. Or you'll have to deal with ghosts picking up and throwing objects which bang around infinitely indoors, and a possessed vertical axis on your mouse:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1260165-physics-is-affected-by-framerate/

Just like RAGE, they didn't spend even one week testing this game on the PC. They definitely didn't want anyone turning of Vsync.

I have an i72600k at 4.5Ghz , that should be enough to play the game smoothly but i still get fps drops to 40's in ultra settings.

My 6950 2GB is getting around 40-50% usage.

Nonsense. I have an i7 2600 @3.4ghz and hd 5870, but getting fps drops into the 20s.

That is weird - my card rages at me for running this game at the OC'd speed, but it does oblige nonetheless.

If that's the case with newer cards then I'm stumped! I wonder if it's something in the latest architectures? Perhaps even something to do with the OS?

Exactly! And love the forum pic!

This is exactly it. Regardless of what performance you are getting.......you could be getting much better if they game was programmed to run efficiently.


Unfortunately that switch is probably somewhere in the source code, and bethesda would actually have to put effort into properly doing it. Its so sad. All of this [censored] just so outdated consoles can look like high end pc.s

Get your head out of you ass bethesda!!!

To all above - the easiest thing to do would be to compare your set-ups with mine, and ask what the fundamental difference in operation is which is causing the low performance in systems that should, in theory, run twice as fast as mine.

Anyone tried purging DX11 before running?

Camrick the shadows are rendered by the CPU......that is the fundamental problem. Its simple...... try to grasp it.

+1 and a bump

now off to play my console version :-\

My friend bought it on steam and was forced to buy an additional copy for PS3 so he could play it.

So lowering the shadow detail can allow older dual core, or even fast single core, systems to run Skyrim at a playable frame rate without losing much in visual quality?

Yes.

lower the shadows to low or turn them off with these commands in ini

fInteriorShadowDistance=0
fShadowDistance=0

my 2600k should be able to render those 3 pixels the shadows in this game consist of

I know that - shadows are always the first thing I lower the settings on to get top performance.

If all these complaints are because of shadows, then it's problem solved