PC FPS issues after 30 hours w/o issue

Hey all, new to the forums.

I ran a few searches for my issue but most people are having FPS issues from day 1 or random lag issues. Google yields much of the same result, most people just having issues right from the get-go.

MY problem is thus; Work has slowed down over the summer so I finally got around to buying Skyrim this week. I bought and installed the game Monday using Steam and had no issues whatsoever. I've been playing on High settings the whole time with nary a glitch. then tonight I launch the game, and the first thing I notice is that the loading screen is painfully slow. Slow as in I had time to run to the bathroom and come back and it was still loading, whereas it had previously only taken 10-15 seconds to load.

Finally, when I get to the game, it is running horrendously slow. I don't know the exact FPS, but I can say the lag is bad enough to make the game unplayable.


so far, I've done everything on the following page, save for a Defrag, which I'll be running after closing out of Chrome;

Skyrim FPS and Performance Issues, Nerds Way to Reduce Lagging in Skyrim Game and Increase its Speed - Nauman Lodhi - Digital Journal

I've also tried fiddling with the settings, playing in windowed mode helped, and dropping to low fixed the issue more or less, but it's really frustrating when I've been playing on High for the past week.

Has anyone else had any issues with this? I'd hate to have to play the rest of the game on the lowest settings :/

here's are my specs in case you were wondering:

Windows 7
Intel Core i7 Q720 @ 1.70 Ghz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M
6GB RAM

Your CPU is substandard for Skyrim. If it weren't for the turbo boost technology you probably wouldn't even be able to run Skyrim. Make sure your power setting is set to the highest performance level. Anything less can interfere with the CPU's ability to use the turbo boost technology.

Thanks for the reply Dagmar!

I don't think the CPU is to blame in this instance, both Steam and Bethesda's website list "Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU" under recommended specs. If my system couldn't run the game I could have just as easily bought it for either console.

And like I said, it was running very smoothly on high until last night. And yes, I made sure my power settings were set to their highest.

If you read more carefully you would see that it says the minimum clockspeed for a CPU to run Skyrim is 2.0 GHz . You posted your CPU clockspeed as 1.70 GHz (and the actual default factory clockspeed is 1.60 GHz not 1.70 GHz for that CPU) which is way below the minimum clockspeed to run the game. Your CPU is reliant on the Intel Turbo Boost technology to run Skyrim which is why I pointed out it's a substandard CPU for Skyrim.

The Intel Core i7 CPUs use Intel Turbo Boost technology to automatically increase the clockspeed of a CPU core to up to 2.8 GHz if an application requires it, but the more cores you use the less it will boost the clockspeed of each core used. It varies depending on the particular model but you can get a dramatic drop in the turbo boosted speed for each additional core in use. Skyrim can use up to 3 cores depending on what is going on in the game, the graphics settings, and the size of your game file. On top of that additional things can reduce your turbo boosted clockspeed such as other programs running in the background utilizing a CPU core and excess heat over time created from the overclocking of the CPU.

Because of all these variants the CPU performance for an application like Skyrim can be unstable if its default factory clockspeed doesn't meet the minimum requirements to run it which is why it's a likely candidate for your problems.

Do you have hardware performance monitoring software for your laptop? It can help isolate the problem.

thanks again for the reply.

I understand what you mean by min reqs, but recommended specs are 'Intel Quad Core CPU'. My understanding of multiple cores is that clock speed begins to take a back seat to numbers of threads being able to be run, and I've read that some people have been getting it to run on all 4.

In any case, the Witcher 2 plays just fine and the requirements are more or less the same, both for minimum and recommended. I don't have any other games on my comp that I can test at the moment.

Minimum clockspeed doesn't take a backseat to numbers of threads your CPU can run. It's also dependent on the coding of the application your running, and Skyrim was coded based on 10 year old CPU technology, i.e. for dual core CPUs, so it really doesn't take any significant advantage of the extra cores which is why benchmark tests only show small improvements for CPU's with 4 cores compared to 2 cores. I've never read any benchmark tests that showed Skyrim using 4 cores and even if it could use a 4th core, it's not optimized for 4 cores and the boosted clockspeed on your CPU decreases with each core that is being used, so it's not really a good thing in your situation if Skyrim uses more than 2 cores let alone 3 cores.

I don't play Witcher games but I've read that Witcher 2 is optimized for quad core CPUs.

What about the performance monitoring software. Do you have any?

Thanks for clearing that up.

What would be a good monitoring software? Google only yields confusing results.

I have to run, but I'll see what I can find for free software later (I use AIDA64, which I like a lot, but it costs $40).

If you can't wait try posting at the forums at Tom's Hardware. The community there can probably recommend a few programs. Minimally, you'll want something that can monitor your CPU and GPU performance including clockspeeds as those are the most likely bottlenecks.

One other thing, which is a semi-shot-in-the-dark, but if your laptop is running Witcher 2 fine then it could be a hardware driver related issue. Sometimes specific driver versions will create performance problems for their hardware with specific applications. For example, some versions of NVIDIA drivers caused problems with the GPU clockspeeds of older NVIDIA video cards. If you did a recent manual update or your system automatically updates drivers on startup then a driver change could be the source of the problem and doing a rollback might solve it.

Thanks, I downloaded CPU-Z.

The driver updates were all done after everything went south :/

So like I said, I've been messing around with NVIDIA control panel and graphic settings and I've reached a happy medium. I'm running somewhere between medium and high and getting a decent frame rate while still looking good. I'm sitting at around 20FPS outdoors and going to tweak a little more, but this honestly looks spectacular compared to how it's been the last 24 hours.

If you can think of anything I could take a look at that might explain why everything went to hell so quickly let me know.

What is your CPU clockspeed with Skyrim running?

Is your GPU running at max clockspeed when you run Skyrim?

CPU is sitting between 2500-2600MHz.

GPU is running at 383/761/301 during gameplay, the maxes should be 550/1350/950 :S

Well now we know that the GPU is your bottleneck. What version driver are you using for your NVIDIA card?

296.10, the latest version as per NVIDIA's site.

Im running 301.24 drivers on video card and i think there is a newer one im not sure...also have you tried turning off AA(antialiasing) and AF(anisotropic filtering) in your skyrim game in options? I found that by turning them off it will preform better.

Not butting in..just adding my 2 cents worth.

This is getting to be ridiculous, I was playing through and getting the same performance I mentioned, then all of a sudden, it just dropped again. GPU speeds went down to 216/432/120 and CPU jumped back and forth between 1700-2200MHz

I downloaded 301.42 and it didn't do anything to bring up performance.

and yes I turned both of those off. Actually setting shadows to low seemed to help the most

If you updated to a 300 series driver it's a beta driver. Your prior one was the most recent official driver. NVIDIA's forums are still offline and can't provide any guidance. I couldn't find anything about the official 296.10 driver having this problem but you want to post on a tech oriented forum like Tom's Hardware to see if anyone there might be able to help.

i already posted this morning, as per your suggestion. no replies yet. blargh

oog, well this is embarassing,

turns out throttling is a known issue with this particular model. I found a guide on how to fix the issue using 3rd party software, which worked, then discovered that I needed to update my BIOS. My problem was fixed in 10 minutes. Still unsire as to why I was getting such good performance then for this long but whatever, I'm happy to have found a fix. definitely feeling a bit DERP'd though.

and currently running on Ultra settings (although AA is off and shadows are set to medium) and haven't dropped below 40FPS!!!