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Severe Lag - Re-install solves only temporarily? Please Help!


Aarchduke

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Dear All,

 

I have recently decided to play the Dragonborn expansion, which I downloaded a few months back and never got around to playing.

Important: At the time I stopped playing, I was quite happily running the game on high settings, with a very nice, flawlessly consistent frame rate which only dropped in heavy, heavy battle sequences.

But now, when I have returned to play the game, I am experiencing crippling lag, regardless of what settings I choose - the framerate remains low and mouse movement delayed severely irrespective of graphical settings chosen at launch or in-game.

About two weeks ago, after reading up on the subject a bit, I re-installed the game and to my delight, everything was as it was - framerates restored and no whiff of lag present. But alas, work got in the way so I resolved in confidence to play it over the festive period, when I have some time off, but to my horror, I have returned home to find that when I open the game to play (at this point vanilla, no mods installed), the lag has returned with a vengeance. I am currently re-installing the game right now but surely there must be a solution to this other than to keep on re-installing every time I want to play?

 

I have tried many suggestions - CCleaner, De-fragging, un-installing unnecessary programs, de-selecting unnecessary background Windows services at boot, graphics tweaking, hard-drive cleaning, frame-rate boosters, all sadly to no avail. And surely the fact that the game can run perfectly after being re-installed proves that it is not a graphics issue? As I said, this machine can run it flawlessly on High normally - what has changed over the past few months?

 

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L855-10P with an Intel Core i7-3610QM @2.30 GHz with an AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics card with 2GB of VRAM and 8GB of RAM. I am running Windows 7 with bags of room on my hard-drive.

 

This is an extremely mystical and frustrating problem that is ruining my Christmas! Please, if you have any solution to offer, I would welcome your help!

 

Many thanks in anticipation of any response,

 

Tom

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I had a problem a bit like this back when I used a 768MB GTX 460. The framerate would sometimes die, and it would randomly increase or decrease when I quit the game and reloaded it. The problem seems to have been completely fixed now that I have a 2GB GTX 660 GC.

 

Just a couple questions. I don't expect it'll help, but we've got to start somewhere. :s

Is your Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit?

How large is your paging file?

Do you use a framerate limiter of some kind?

Do you use vsync?

Have you tweaked your ini at all?

What refresh rate is your monitor?

Edited by Rennn
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Hi Rennn, Thanks for the prompt reply

 

- 64-bit Windows

 

- What is a paging file?

 

- I do use a framrate limiter - I have always used it to avoid mouse jittering, although it's never been an issue before?

 

- I do use v-sync

 

- I have tweaked my ini yes

 

- 60 Hz

 

Any of this help? :/

 

Cheers,

 

Tom.

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Hi Rennn, Thanks for the prompt reply

 

- 64-bit Windows

 

- What is a paging file?

 

- I do use a framrate limiter - I have always used it to avoid mouse jittering, although it's never been an issue before?

 

- I do use v-sync

 

- I have tweaked my ini yes

 

- 60 Hz

 

Any of this help? :/

 

Cheers,

 

Tom.

 

64-bit is fine, it's just 32-bit operating systems that can cause stability and performance problems in Skyrim. (Yes, I know Skyrim is just a 32 bit game)

 

A paging file is HDD space that's used as if it's RAM. Normally it's not used for much, but the paging file is a lot slower than real RAM, so if it is being used for Skyrim for some reason that could explain the drop in performance. I don't know how to tell if that's an issue or not. :s

 

Skyrim can bug out in a number of ways if you limit the framerate to less than 32. I limit mine at 35.

 

Try using triple-buffered vsync, like D3DOverride, or disable vsync to test it. There's a chance that will help. Normal vsync will cap you at 30 fps if you can't maintain 60, or 15 fps if you can't maintain 30.

 

If you rename (or delete) your Skyrim.ini and Skyrimprefs.ini, then start a new game, is the performance still low?

 

No problem with the refresh rate. I've heard that a few people with 144hz refresh rates have had problems with Skyrim.

Edited by Rennn
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Just a quick thought.

Use task manager to monitor your game before and during play. Ctrl Alt Delete out if the problem arises. If memory or CPU have maxed out then that will be the cause of the Lag.

Skyrim itself can only use 3.1 G ram but other processes can hog ram and force use of the page file. A similar thing can happen with CPU usage and external apps or processes.

As you say your PC can run Skyrim fine so it could be external to the game and worth eliminating at an early stage.

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I'm using task manager right now - CPU usage peaks at 50% when skyrim is running, and RAM peaks at about 3.5GB out of an available 8GB... So everything appears normal - as I said, changing any graphical setting does nothing... This really is weird...

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I've been playing around this morning and stumbled upon some settings in my graphics card which looked a little off, so I reset to defaults, and also set Skyrim to High priority and some other programs back to normal and this seems to have done the trick, at least for now (fingers crossed this was the problem, and I can relax!)

 

Thanks for all the help :)

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I'm using task manager right now - CPU usage peaks at 50% when skyrim is running, and RAM peaks at about 3.5GB out of an available 8GB... So everything appears normal - as I said, changing any graphical setting does nothing... This really is weird...

 

If your CPU is at 50%, that probably means Skyrim is using 2 cores to the max, and ignoring the other 2. The same thing happens to me in Skyrim; my CPU hits 48-52% with 2 cores completely maxed out and two idle, so it limits my performance somewhat (Though I can still run 55-60 on ultra). Skyrim is just not very well optimized for quad-core CPUs. It tends to only use 2 cores, and ini tweaks don't help much, regardless of what you might have heard about multithreading. That's actually the main reason why setting Skyrim as a high priority helps you; it makes Skyrim more important to the CPU.

 

3.5GB of RAM use is pretty normal. I have 8GB and it hits 3-3.5 with Skyrim running.

 

It's good the problem seems to be fixed, but if it happens again, I recommend you disable vsync for testing purposes. If your framerate ever locks at 15-16 fps and changing graphics settings doesn't seem to help, the culprit is almost certainly vsync. It does that automatically when you drop below 30 fps, even if it just hits 29. :s

 

Out of curiosity, what driver settings did you change?

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I had been dabbling in making a permanent card-controlled AA and AF setting of 4 samples for Fallout 3 due to issues had in that, but then lost interest and didn't bother changing them back, causing some issues I guess. I also set my card to maximise performance when plugged in (Power settings)

 

For future reference incase it happens again - how do I toggle vSync? I know its a setting in one of the ini's, due to it not being offered anywhere in or out of game as an option...

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I had been dabbling in making a permanent card-controlled AA and AF setting of 4 samples for Fallout 3 due to issues had in that, but then lost interest and didn't bother changing them back, causing some issues I guess. I also set my card to maximise performance when plugged in (Power settings)

 

For future reference incase it happens again - how do I toggle vSync? I know its a setting in one of the ini's, due to it not being offered anywhere in or out of game as an option...

 

Hmm... Generally I would think 2xMSAA and 8xAF would be the ideal mix of performance and quality for a 7670m.

 

Anyway, iPresentInterval=0 in your Skyrimprefs.ini will disable vsync. It would also need to be off in your drivers. That's just for performance testing though, since it's not a good idea to have vsync disabled in Skyrim all the time. It can mess up the physics. If that does end up being a problem in the future, D3DOverride offers triple-buffered vsync without the framerate loss of normal vsync.

Edited by Rennn
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