Miles00x Posted September 30, 2014 Share Posted September 30, 2014 First off i apologise if this is a non-thread, not news, or shouldn't be here because its not a question, but i wanted to share this for others who may be having a similar problem. Fix is at bottom of post :smile: Ever since i installed Skyrim, I've had strange spikes of FPS loss.Which I've finally found out the cause of today and fixed it! Reading forums it seemed my specs should be able to hold 60fps at 1080p without a hitch, manhandle many ENBs even, never mind a few graphics mods. However monitoring my game with Skyrim Performance Monitor (SPM) i noticed my GPU was at 99% everywhere except loading screens, and my FPS fluctuated from anything between 56fps and 14fps. The drops were only for a few seconds, but frequently occured in places like Whiterun plains, and even more so in Riverwood, whiterun and other cities. At the top of the steps to Dragonsreach looking over Whiterun i consistently got 24fps. My computer specs are: Desktop PC - Windows 7 SP1 - 64bit,CPU - i7-4820K @3.70GHz (not overclocked),Nvidia GeForce GTX780 3GB DDR5 vram (EVGA SC ACX)Graphics Driver version - 344.111920 x 1080 @60HzMSI X79A-GD45-Plus8GB ram,1600GB HDD space free.120GB SSD (OS installed) I started disabling graphics and gameplay mods one by one to see if i could find the culprit and used SPM to track the changes, even with the all graphics mods disabled and even the official high res texture pack no longer in my load order, essentially a vanilla game, it would still frequently drop to 17 fps for a couple of seconds. I even tried setting my resolution lower but that just made it worse. Anyway, this morning i came across something to do with PCI-E GEN3 and PCI Latency Timer settings in the bios and googled it, most people said you'd only notice maybe a 1fps difference between PCI-E Gen2 and PCI-E Gen3, but i decided to enable gen3. I ran GPU-Z to see if i was now on gen3 but it still read at PCI-E 2.0 x16. So i opened up computer and looked at the motherboard, saw a slot that said PCI-E Gen 3.0 that was frighteningly close to the bottom of my CPU cooler (the reason i must have used a different slot in the first place), I plugged my GTX 780 into that and finally i could now massacre all of Whiterun at a solid 60fps. All the dips gone, in fact the lowest fps i've seen after the game has fully loaded was 54fps, but generally it held 60fps constantly. Before fix: After fix: Other things i have set that may be important are:Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Power Management Mode set to "Prefer Maxium Performance".Nvidia Control Panel > Manage 3D Settings > Program Settings > Elder Scrolls V Skyrim > Triple Buffering = on.Right click my Computer > Properties > Advanced System Settings > Performance settings > Advanced > Click Change under Virtual Memory, Tick "No paging file" and click Set > OK > Apply > OK. Anyway, hopefully that information will help someone, because I couldn't find the information anywhere on the internet. I hope the moderators wont be too angry if this is in the wrong place, this is only my 2nd topic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bben46 Posted September 30, 2014 Share Posted September 30, 2014 :thumbsup: Looks like the right place to me. Typically all we do if it is in the wrong place is move it with no penalty. Any message is just to let you know why it was moved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miles00x Posted September 30, 2014 Author Share Posted September 30, 2014 Oh good, some forums are very strict when it comes to posting in the wrong place. I like your signature "Sometimes I think we spend more time getting mods to work than we do playing the game - I know I do." How very true :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
camaro_69_327 Posted September 30, 2014 Share Posted September 30, 2014 Looking at teh Fixed Graph, looks like you have room to add in some more Graphic goodies!... Yes the Top Slot should always be populated first , dident know it would make THAT big of a differance...good to know. About the Paging File....some say it is OK to have NO page file, Put you may run into a program or 2 that refuse to run, as they require a page file. It does not hurt performance to have one.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Garon Posted October 1, 2014 Share Posted October 1, 2014 (edited) Good job. Might be time for a new PCI 3 motherboard. The graphs are a little confusing, though. PCI 3 has almost double the bandwidth of PCI 2. CPU use and average FPS are up, probably related. Why did GPU use go down when its processing more pixels, not less? I wonder what SPM measures to determine GPU percentage. If the 780 was I/O bottle-necked across the PCI 2 link (what it looks like to me), what the heck was it doing while at 100% in the PCI 2 slot? I wonder if SPM is measuring "wheel spinning" while the 780 is just waiting for data. Or, I guess the 780 could kick its clock speeds up while in a PCI 3 slot. Just seems funny to me. In any case, that's a good tip, and a good, real life promotion for a PCI 3 capable rig. Thanks for posting, Miles. Edited October 1, 2014 by Lord Garon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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