The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PC Performance discussion

Corky said:
From my own observation, neither, gpu hovers around 50% usage, cpu hovers around 25-30% usage on each core with the odd 50-60% usage on one of the cores.

It's odd really. With all that spare capacity. Why don't folks get a absolutely solid 60fps out of it. Strange.
 
Ledsen said:
Read my post a couple above yours, You should have perfect fps at High/Ultra settings.
Are you sure? If anyone has the same hardware I'd love to hear about it. I had nothing else running besides Fraps/D3DOverrider and the Steam overlay, and I didn't even have the Steam web browser up. I basically went with recommended high settings, turned things down, and promptly turned off the couple of shadow tweaks from the OP after it wasn't running well.

*shrug* I'm not too hung up about it since I got sucked into the game world once I had reasonable controls and 30+fps, but if there is something wrong it is always nice to fix it. :)
 
Looked at the OP and I will definitely be trying out some of those tweaks, but I was wondering how I could get it to stay at a constant 60 FPS It's probably the only thing that has been bugging me the most.

I'm on a i5 2500k @ 4.0 GHZ
Nvidia 570
8 GB of Ram
Using the latest Nvidia Beta Drivers

Has anyone played this game with a similar rig at a locked rate of 60 FPS?
Any tips on fixing it or would it be better to wait for a patch?
 
Salaadin said:
Just fought a dragon and his texture didn't load or something...just a purple blob. Anyone else see this?

I took a screen bit it came up as invalid

I've had the missing texture thing happen on a few npcs. I just save, quit to desktop and load it and it's fine.

One thing I love about the game is how quick you can start it. There's just one splash screen and boom, title screen.
 
cyberheater said:
It's odd really. With all that spare capacity. Why don't folks get a absolutely solid 60fps out of it. Strange.
It's not really strange. Not a lot of effort was put in the PC version. Isn't such a big problem though as the game itself is strong enough to keep itself upright among better looking titles. Not really a surprise that we need modders to really push elder scrolls to the limit.
 
Blizzard said:
Are you sure? If anyone has the same hardware I'd love to hear about it. I had nothing else running besides Fraps/D3DOverrider and the Steam overlay, and I didn't even have the Steam web browser up. I basically went with recommended high settings, turned things down, and promptly turned off the couple of shadow tweaks from the OP after it wasn't running well.

*shrug* I'm not too hung up about it since I got sucked into the game world once I had reasonable controls and 30+fps, but if there is something wrong it is always nice to fix it. :)
Look,i have a budget laptop from early 2010 with a graphics card maybe 1/3 as powerful as yours and a 2,1 ghz processor, and im getting the same fps. also turn off d3d overridr coz deduktion ingame vsync is already triple bufferrd and gives better performance.
 
Ookami-kun said:
Wut...

Menu says: Press R to drop, F to favorite an item
Actual input: pressing R causes an item to favorite, F to drop

Yeah, drop, favourite and a couple of other features are a bit messed up in that they'll change to whichever keys you set for various other functions (sheathe, unsheathe, etc.) but in all the menus they'll still be displayed as the default lettering.

I don't know why, but I made sheathe H (holster, maybe?) and then drop became H, even though it was down as R on the menu. Interestingly, store was still R - fuck knows why!
 
Gen.Grievous said:
It's not really strange. Not a lot of effort was put in the PC version. Isn't such a big problem though as the game itself is strong enough to keep itself upright among better looking titles. Not really a surprise that we need modders to really push elder scrolls to the limit.
I never played it -- did Oblivion have mods that made things look better AND improved performance?

Also I have decals at high, not medium. I have no clue if that makes much of a performance difference.
 
cyberheater said:
It's odd really. With all that spare capacity. Why don't folks get a absolutely solid 60fps out of it. Strange.
Because the game never uses all the GPU's power when in caves/towns or any other place with lots of shadows. A normal game would have 99% GPU usage no matter if the FPS are locked or not but I have seen this game having 60FPS and yet only 50% GPU load.
There is something holding the data (that has to be calculated) back and that causes the lower FPS and lower GPU/CPU load.
 
grkazan12 said:
Looked at the OP and I will definitely be trying out some of those tweaks, but I was wondering how I could get it to stay at a constant 60 FPS It's probably the only thing that has been bugging me the most.

I'm on a i5 2500k @ 4.0 GHZ
Nvidia 570
8 GB of Ram
Using the latest Nvidia Beta Drivers

Has anyone played this game with a similar rig at a locked rate of 60 FPS?
Any tips on fixing it or would it be better to wait for a patch?

I'm basically running a setup close to yours, 2600k @4.5 and a single 560 ti @ 570 stock, 8 gb ram and the latest beta drivers. I'm playing at 2560x1440 with everything at max and 2xaa, and using theoctagons ini with ugrids set to 7 and fov to 80.

Stretched over a long enough session my avg fps would most certainly be 60, but sadly the reality is that no matter what setting I change there will always be "those places" where the framerate tanks ( mind you even without ugrid this happens ), two spots where this happens without fail are when you leave the dragonsbreach (?) building and look down upon the down / tree, and one is where you enter winterrun looking at the different stores and all that.
 
Ledsen said:
Look,i have a budget laptop from early 2010 with a graphics card maybe 1/3 as powerful as yours and a 2,1 ghz processor, and im getting the same fps. also turn off d3d overridr coz deduktion ingame vsync is already triple bufferrd and gives better performance.
I realize that it SHOULD scale, but I was just suggesting that it may not scale the way you expect since the engine might be crazy and so forth.

As for vsync, where is the option for ingame vsync? If I pause the game the framerate shoots up to like 1000 fps, and I don't want that since I seem to recall games that do that make my video card heat up like crazy when I spend time in menus.

*edit* Answering my own question, I didn't realize the iPresentInterval ini setting WAS vsync + triple buffering. Having that set to 1 does seem to limit fps even in menus, but I feel like mouse movement in menus is sluggish and slightly delayed compared to turning it off and using D3DOverrider.
 
Corky said:
I'm basically running a setup close to yours, 2600k @4.5 and a single 560 ti @ 570 stock, 8 gb ram and the latest beta drivers. I'm playing at 2560x1440 with everything at max and 2xaa, and using theoctagons ini with ugrids set to 7 and fov to 80.

Stretched over a long enough session my avg fps would most certainly be 60, but sadly the reality is that no matter what setting I change there will always be "those places" where the framerate tanks ( mind you even without ugrid this happens ), two spots where this happens without fail are when you leave the dragonsbreach (?) building and look down upon the down / tree, and one is where you enter winterrun looking at the different stores and all that.

Yeah, I feel ya man. Well hopefully it'll get resolved with a patch or with a mod fix.
 
Crashing like crazy. Intro was fine (one crash). I found this little cave out on the world map and I'm crashing ever few seconds. I knew I should have waited to get this game. :/
 
cyberheater said:
It's odd really. With all that spare capacity. Why don't folks get a absolutely solid 60fps out of it. Strange.

Because a lot of the problems come from streaming/thrashing of data from the storage medium.
 
Spoilers/question about morthal side quest line below.

After the vampire quest line the Jarl gives me a quest (to become thane) that says assist the people of Hjallmarch (2/3) does anyone know if she means Morthal? Also which people? One guy died from a dragon and one died during the vampire nonsense so I'm a bit worried I can't finish this.
 
Quick question. I want to mess around with some of the FOVs, but just in case I don't like any of then. I was wondering what the default FOV is?
 
Yeah, I think a lot of people are HDD transfer limited, especially with modded uGrids settings.

Of course, the real way to fix that would be a proper 64 bit build that actually uses the amount of memory available on PCs. I have enough RAM to store the whole game twice.

... maybe I should try moving the files to a ramdisk :P

grkazan12 said:
Quick question. I want to mess around with some of the FOVs, but just in case I don't like any of then. I was wondering what the default FOV is?
I'm not certain, but if you set them via the console you can try out a lot of them in just a minute so it should be easy to find one that suits you. You can also ready 2 spells and look at the position of the hands, that makes it very simple to judge the degree of change.
 
grkazan12 said:
Quick question. I want to mess around with some of the FOVs, but just in case I don't like any of then. I was wondering what the default FOV is?

I believe the default is around 65.
 
Sigh this is exactly what I mean.

"Ah everything's nice, smooth and calm "

tesv2011-11-1318-22-24j8gq.png


"NOOO you fool! Why did you turn 10 degrees to the right staring at this inanimate object. Your punishment is halved performance until you remove thy gaze."

tesv2011-11-1318-22-3gw86p.png


( ugrid off )
 
Has anyone else tried this out? http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=123
It apparently gives better performance but doesn't turn down any setting.
 
Blizzard said:
I realize that it SHOULD scale, but I was just suggesting that it may not scale the way you expect since the engine might be crazy and so forth.

As for vsync, where is the option for ingame vsync? If I pause the game the framerate shoots up to like 1000 fps, and I don't want that since I seem to recall games that do that make my video card heat up like crazy when I spend time in menus.

*edit* Answering my own question, I didn't realize the iPresentInterval ini setting WAS vsync + triple buffering. Having that set to 1 does seem to limit fps even in menus, but I feel like mouse movement in menus is sluggish and slightly delayed compared to turning it off and using D3DOverrider.
It does scale, and other people with similar specs to yours have tons better fps. The game is just buggy and hates radeon cards.
 
Corky said:
Sigh this is exactly what I mean.
It probably has nothing to do with that object. Probably you tripped some threshold that caused the engine to fully load a grid further in that direction, and it's one that contains a lot of dynamic entities or NPCs.

Tattooth said:
Has anyone else tried this out? http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=123
It apparently gives better performance but doesn't turn down any setting.
It says "This .dll will make your game run like Oblivion.", so clearly it will run worse and start crashing randomly. Not interested :P
 
LiquidMetal14 said:
Then the engine will be rewritten!

I think the game looks damn good most of the time as it is. Better textures and characters will be icing.
I agree, I'm quite impressed with it. Especially the weather system and skyboxes. The game has been running really well for me, I may try uGridsToLoad later; I have to add I am one of those weirdos who runs in windowed mode.

Still, I am beyond excited to see what modders do with this game...
 
Varna said:
Crashing like crazy. Intro was fine (one crash). I found this little cave out on the world map and I'm crashing ever few seconds. I knew I should have waited to get this game. :/

Is it Bonechill Passage by any chance?
 
Ok, i spend last two hours on setting shadows, but it just cant be done, why? Because Bethesda are fucking idiots. Here is why:

skyrimprefs.ini said:
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=3
fInteriorShadowDistance=1000.0000
fShadowDistance=3500.0000
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=4096
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096
iShadowSplitCount=2
fShadowLODStartFade=1000.000
iShadowMode=1
iShadowMapResolution=4096
fShadowBiasScale=0.1500
iShadowMaskQuarter=3
iShadowFilter=3
skyrim.ini said:
fShadowLODMaxStartFade=2000.0
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096

Those are options we got to tweak shadows. Ok all command that affect blur, distortion etc works so by that i mean those like maskquarter, shadow filter, biasscale etc.
But those that are important for resolution and performance are not.

iShadowMapResolutionPrimary - not working at all!
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary - not working at all!
fShadowLODMaxStartFade - working a little after setting shadow distance over 3000
iShadowMapResolution - main command and only one that affect resolution
fInteriorShadowDistance - main command to set distance and resolution of shadows [i'll explain in second]
fInteriorShadowDistance - no difference between 1000 and 10000, maybe in some ultra big interiors, only thing that made difference was setting it below 500 i got shadow that covers whole interior

So basically, we cant set up LoDs and i'm not even talking about individual lods for trees, geometry, npcs etc, i'm talking about any lod.
We can set 4 resolution of shadows 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, only last two gives can give us acceptable results, but here's comes Bethesda magic:
So how is shadow LOD working You ask?
You can set up only startup resolution, which is the same for interiors and exteriors, lod is automatic, it checks Your shadow distance and set it automatically through the whole shadow map, it also setup automatically two LOD settings for distant shadows.
So we have 3 lods, close, distant and far away, its not bad if You ask me, so whats wrong? That it covers them awfully.
Normal person would covered close proximity with highest setting, far away with two times lower and far away with much lower depending of distance and geometry amount, but Skyrim set up almost all area with similar quality shadows and You cant change it.
So to have proper shadows on 4096 setting, You have to use distance below 3500, and thats not guarrante that shadows will be awesome or that selfshadowing is ok.
Dont really know how they make shadows for interiors, because leafs from trees outside has better shadows than people 10 object in 6m2 room, i couldnt also affect shadows in interiors but any way except by iShadowMapResolution.

You probably now asking why not use 8096 resolution, ok i thought about that too, it gives quite good balance between quality/distance and of course affects performance, but its acceptable outside, but inside? Inside i get 1-3 fps and shadow quality still isnt too great there [i'm using OGSSAA for clearance].

How could Bethesda solve this? Really simple even without changing a lot in renderer. Make adjustable resolutions for interiors and exteriors and give us ability to set up shadow resolutions and distances for 3-4 lods setting. Like:
8096 npcs, 4096 objects <5 metres from You, 2048 5-25m, 512 25+m and we are set, very high quality selfshadowing, good interiors and geometry shadows, rest is great for performance and still have good quality.
 
I got a mod that replaces the spiders with bears. It works wonderfully.

C009B160A6624B492182AAF3F562E134E0FD2E86


The only bad thing is I don't think I can loot the spider corpses, unless there's some very specific sweet spot.
 
Durante said:
It probably has nothing to do with that object. Probably you tripped some threshold that caused the engine to fully load a grid further in that direction, and it's one that contains a lot of dynamic entities or NPCs.

It says "This .dll will make your game run like Oblivion.", so clearly it will run worse and start crashing randomly. Not interested :P

Actually, it's just as barren in all directions at the spot I took the pictures, i.e no reason at all for the drop. Matter of fact is that in the direction where I get 60 there's tons of more geometry and objects.
 
Chainmail Bikini mod

looks good

I plan to finish vanilla this time and play it again a year later with all DLC and mods installed. I think it's the best Bethesda's game in its vanilla state (I didn't play Morrowind without mods, so I don't know).
 
Hmm weird, I haven't seen any other race outside of Nords and Imperials... maybe the occasional Dark Elf.
 
Have a GTX470 and Core i5 750 @ 2.6GHz, having the same issues as everyone else with framerate inconsistency, turning shadows to High helped a lot but it can still dip pretty low in towns (20-30fps at times).

It's hilarious how much these bottlenecking/optimization issues remind me of Morrowind.
 
Changing audio to 24 bit, 44100Hz did NOT fix the CTDs. Running without FRAPS and not taking screenshots seems to keep it from crashing so often. Going to keep playing but I hope they patch this soon. :(
 
Yesterday I played on a 460 GTX for the first half of the day.

.....then the mailman came.

Second half of the day I played on a 580 GTX SC. :D

I'm still getting some major framedrops in cities. Are any other Club580 member experiencing this?

My CPU is a AMD 1055t Thuban 6 core. C&Q disabled and OC'd to 3.5Ghz.

Getting an unflinching 60 fps with every maxed out 8xAA when I'm outdoors. In cities I drop below 30 with the AA. With MSAA turned off I can keep my head above 30fps in cities, but I'm not a big fan of the smeary FXAA.

Is there a config that fixes this? Is my 580 fucked up?
 
Blizzard said:
Are you sure? If anyone has the same hardware I'd love to hear about it. I had nothing else running besides Fraps/D3DOverrider and the Steam overlay, and I didn't even have the Steam web browser up. I basically went with recommended high settings, turned things down, and promptly turned off the couple of shadow tweaks from the OP after it wasn't running well.

*shrug* I'm not too hung up about it since I got sucked into the game world once I had reasonable controls and 30+fps, but if there is something wrong it is always nice to fix it. :)


I've got a pretty similar set up to you.
I have a q8300 (quad OCed) and a ati 6870 1GB (a bit better than yours) and I'm getting pretty similar performance.
Pretty much no matter whether I have it on low or High, its like 50+ indoors, sometimes goes 70-90. Outdoors is anywhere between 20-50.

In some places it tanks SO hard. The 2 spots in Whiterun and just outside looking over the plains, it tanks to around 20.
The interesting part is that even if I change the settings from Ultra, to low. The difference is barely 9-10fps.

Its playable, but I feel I should be getting so much more out of this.
GPU usages sits at like 30-40% when I'm getting 20fps :S. CPU between 40-60%.
 
Corky said:
Sigh this is exactly what I mean.

"Ah everything's nice, smooth and calm "

[IMG/]http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-11-1318-22-24j8gq.png[/IMG]

"NOOO you fool! Why did you turn 10 degrees to the right staring at this inanimate object. Your punishment is halved performance until you remove thy gaze."

[IMG/]http://www.abload.de/img/tesv2011-11-1318-22-3gw86p.png[/IMG]

( ugrid off )

Can you explain why it does that? It makes no sense, I get buttery smooth 60fps+ looking one way, with mountains, but looking another with mountains 30fps. What the hell is going on, and I know people with computers better than mine that also get the same effects.

My CPU is used 45% and my GPU is used 45% (around that area) as well. It is not even using my computer its maximum potential, and they tell us we need a quad core to run it, when it barely uses my quad core. I can't wait for graphic drivers and patches to fix optimizations for this game.

Also what is ugrid, and how do I turn it off?

EDIT: Thanks.
 
Smash88 said:
Can you explain why it does that? It makes no sense, I get buttery smooth 60fps+ looking one way, with mountains, but looking another with mountains 30fps. What the hell is going on, and I know people with computers better than mine that also get the same effects.

Also what is ugrid, and how do I turn it off?

I have no idea mate, wish I could tell you. And if you don't know what ugrid is then you haven't enabled it. In short ugrid increases the LOD/"drawdistance" significantly, it's a manual tweak you do in the .inis of the game.
 
Last night i mentioned that the framerates went from butter smooth to unplayable after i entered the bleak dungeon, when i started the last save this morning it was back to smooth framerates.

Is there's a memory leak in this game?
 
Am I alone in getting a permanent - and I mean permanent - 'LEVEL UP' label in the bottom right of the screen? I'm wondering if it's because I used a no-CD executable (well, whatever the modern equivalent of one of those is) to do the LAA patch with, though it doesn't go away when I revert to the Steam exe and start over. Thinking back, I can't even remember if it was there when I first started playing.

It's very annoying.
 
Bungieware said:
Is it Bonechill Passage by any chance?

Just uninstalled the game and going to try a clean install. Don't recall the name. Found it right after encountering the
stray dog
that is following me around. One wolf right at the entrance along with a single body.
 
kamspy said:
Yesterday I played on a 460 GTX for the first half of the day.

.....then the mailman came.

Second half of the day I played on a 580 GTX SC. :D

I'm still getting some major framedrops in cities. Are any other Club580 member experiencing this?
I'd guess that cities are more CPU intensive. Should have upgraded your CPU, I'm paying on a 460 and never drop below 30 :P.

I'm wondering if it's because I used a no-CD executable (well, whatever the modern equivalent of one of those is) to do the LAA patch with
Why did you do that? It works fine for me from Steam with just LAA patching the standard .exe.
 
Durante said:
I'd guess that cities are more CPU intensive. Should have upgraded your CPU, I'm paying on a 460 and never drop below 30 :P.

Why did you do that? It works fine for me from Steam with just LAA patching the standard .exe.

Yeah, well, I didn't know that there wasn't some terrifying DRM attached to the exe that might play havoc with my Steam account if it detected the change. I've re-downloaded the proper exe from Steam and patched it now but this stupid 'LEVEL UP' thing's still there.
 
Durante said:
I'd guess that cities are more CPU intensive. Should have upgraded your CPU, I'm paying on a 460 and never drop below 30 :P.

Well I thought my 2600k would've been enough, because I'm dealing with the same shit.
 
The 1055t basically becomes a regular Phenom II when you turn off C&Q and Turbo Core. Instead of the cores all changing frequency, they're constant. Game is single threaded to death anyways. My CPU usage is always mostly on one core. Game also seems to scale to clock speed almost perfectly.

CPU%20Clock.png
 
Theres some major issue with the fps in cities. Im no able to get a descent fps in them, no matter the settings.
It's really wierd. And I've also noticed that a quest npc like in the forest also lowers
the fps alot, just by standing to a bridge or something.
 
kamspy said:
My CPU usage is always mostly on one core. Game also seems to scale to clock speed almost perfectly.
Mine is on four, but it takes about 20-30% of a core.

Is there a way to set CPU affinity before launching exe? Because we know how tolerant on alt-tabing Skyrim is :P
 
Durante said:
I'd guess that cities are more CPU intensive. Should have upgraded your CPU, I'm paying on a 460 and never drop below 30 :P.

Why did you do that? It works fine for me from Steam with just LAA patching the standard .exe.


In Whiterun, the game never goes over 50-60% cpu usage and I get below 30fps.
 
Top Bottom