I'm not sure if this is just my laptop, but whenenver skyrim frames drop to about 35 or even in the early 40s, it seems very unstable. Skyrim's 35fps is about equal to other game's 20. Is this just me? Is it skyrim's engine? Anyone else have this problem, and if so, is there any fixes? Laptop specs: i7 at 2.9ghz overclocked, nvidia gt 540m, 6gb of Ram, windows 7 64bit.

It's the game's engine. Even small FPS drops, like 60fps to 55fps, are very noticeable.

Ok. I'm thinking about finding a good cap for my fps, the drops are annoying.

Yup, good idea. I did a lot of tweaking to get the game to run @ 60 FPS most everywhere so I wouldn't have to see all the chopping. Couldn't get it perfect of course, but it's fairly constant.

It's the game mate. Some games play smooth at 40 or 30 fps, but for me 40fps in Skyrim is like 20 in another game.

Same with me. svcks that I can play most games at 30-40 and it seems totally smooth, but not Skyrim. Like other posters have said, even if my frames drop into the 50s it becomes choppy and lags. Tried everything I can think of including drivers, reinstalls, GPU prerendered frames tweaking, borderless window mod, ini tweaks, frame limiting, etc. but nothing fixes it.

So the only real solution so far is to try and get your FPS higher by lowering quality settings or overclocking more. Overclocking the CPU still seems to be the best way to get frames up for me. Going from 3.4GHZ to 4.0 GHZ (Phenom 965 x4 BE) got me 8-10 more fps in laggy areas. Overclocking the GPU helped to a lesser degree in some areas. There are interior locations with multiple light sources /shadows and fog which heavily tax my GTX 480 (usage pinned at 100%) and going from 700Mhz to 800Mhz got me another 6-8 FPS in those locations.

Even overclocked, I still sometimes drop into the low 40's and my game turns into a choppy mess. Markarth is where I do most of my testing because I get the lowest framerates there. If your frames tank in cities it's usually a CPU limit, because even in the worst areas with my FPS dropping to around 40, my GPU usage is still only 50%.

I know your CPU is already overclocked so there probably isn't much you can do except lower quality settings (especially shadows). There is also a mod on Nexus which disables lighting shadows. Could help get FPS up for lower end machines.

What settings do you use in the launcher and your Nivida Control Panel? You should be getting 60fps everywhere with latest patch and drivers with your hardware.

Also do you use texture mods and how much vram you have on your card? 1gb? 2gb?

Overclocking your CPU is your best bet for performance increases in Skyrim. There is a zero performance increase from upgrading your video card from a 560Ti to a 580 for instance. I upgraded my video card around December, and was really surprised that I didn't see a bit of difference. The extra memory on the 580 was nice, but it didn't net me any extra FPS.

I have this issue, a weird glitch caps my FPS at like 30fps every so often, its awful. I played oblivion at about 20-40 fps for a few hundred hours and even it was quite smooth.

Look at BF3, that game is a pos but besides the point I get 60fps a lot of the time but it does rapidly drop to 50 or to 40 or to 35 even from time to time and unless I have my afterburner overlay turned on I don't even notice it.

I think skyrim fails at memory management and maybe swaps memory a lot. idk. I guess this is part of the difference between a game developed for PC (half way) and a game developed for xbox.

PC specs:

Phenom x4 965 @ 4.0 ghz
GTX 480 1536 mb @800
8 gig 1333 ram
Windows 7 x64

My Nvidia settings are:
AAx2
AFx16
Framelimited to 59
No AO or transparency multisampling
Everything else is default

Game settings: pretty much at ultra with the exception of shadows (high with 4096 resolution and 4500 exterior distance)1920x1080 actor and item view distance settings reduced to half.

Using high res texture pack and a couple of small mods like realistic water and camping lite, but I will note that I did a test reinstall of windows and installed vanilla skyrim which ran at pretty much the same frame rate. Much less video memory used though. I normally use around 1300mb of video memory during play so I don't think it's an issue anyway... I get 59 FPS probably 90% of the time but it drops into the 40's in some city areas and dungeons. For example around the underkeep exit or whatever it's called in Markarth I get about 40 FPS outside that door looking towards the city and some severe lag. Overclocking my CPU Results in large performance increases in Markarth so it's gotta be the CPU, just can't get mine stable over 4.0

The game is still playable and beautiful so I'm not overly concerned about the lag, but it's annoying especially during dungeon combat and I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance.

Do you have latest drivers and patches? Have you tried the latest Skyboost?

Do you have any mods that may influence performance other than textures i.e. More Dynamic Shadows mod? How is your performance in cities when your shadows are default high and you don't tweak them?

I run 4x Supersampling on the whole scene, not just transparent textures, AO - Performance and I still get 60fps in Markarth and my CPU is only 300mhz faster than yours.

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No I don't have any intensive mods like more shadows or anything and I have tried reinstalling to vanilla skyrim with the same results. I already use sky boost and without it my frames drop even lower into the 30s in parts of Markarth. Sky boost doesn't work with the latest patch so I ended up reverting to the last patch just to get better performance. Shadows at default high Give me about 2-3 more frames but not enough to get rid of the lag or stutter. Using the 295.73 drivers and they are pretty much the same as the beta skyrim drivers I was using previously. Havent tried 296 yet. All other drivers and windows updates are completely up to date. Like i said, even tried a full windows reinstall so maybe it's just my system or settings somehow. Thanks for the suggestions. Always nice to know that it's possible.

I am surprised you can get such great performance, especially with super sampling enabled too. When I enable that my frames drop another 8-12. More power to you. Gives me some hope that I can improve performance somehow.

Do you use sky boost? And are you on an intel chip? My friend who has the same 480 card as I do has a 2600k and his game is solid 60 with no drops at all.