Taikaru

Just wanted to update for any others who might have this issue down the road. A helpful person on the Bethesda forums told me what was causing it. If I lower shadows from Ultra to High, I still get the FPS drop, but instead of going to 8-10, it goes to 15-20 which is much more playable. I never would have guessed it was the shadows, and it's still a weird glitch (because the shadows themselves work fine with high FPS after alt+tabbing)... but we know where to work now. :)

I get 30-60 FPS running on Ultra and STEP's configuration. Often when I change zones, however (usually leaving a building/dungeon,) it drops to 8-10 FPS and becomes almost unplayable. I have found that Alt+Tabbing or restarting the game will restore me to 30-60 FPS depending on location... but it's really ruining immersion, and the game occasionally crashes when Alt+Tabbing. I've searched and it seems a few other people had the same problems, but most of those had no resolution, or it didn't apply to me. My specs are: AMD Phenom 9750 (x4) 2.4Ghz Geforce 560ti (1gb) / 290.53 driver 8 Gb DDR2 RAM Vista x64 Home Premium I have tried: Skyboost, TESVAL, FPS Booster V1.1 - which seem to help my top-end FPS, but don't stop the major drops. Overclocking my video card a ton (no change,) Of course ENB9 Anti-Freeze (part of STEP recommendations.) And even Low settings without Mods don't significantly help the problem (maybe a little.) I also tried disabling a few cores, setting process priority to High. Probably tried other things too that I've forgotten... have been trying to fix this since mid-December and it's making me pull my hair out. It might be my imagination, but it seems to be getting worse... originally it was mostly when exiting places like Dragonsreach or Labyrianthian, and now it seems to slow when exiting about anything. Since it will run any area at 30-60 FPS after Alt+Tabbing, I really don't think it's my hardware. I do have parts to build a PC with a slightly better processor, but that would mean disabling the current PC, installing and reconfiguring Windows and Skyrim... and I'm not at all sure it will fix the problem. I would be soooo grateful if anyone could help me figure out what is wrong.

Bump.

Bump.

Skyrim is running smooth as glass for me on Ultra in almost every area with a GTX 560 ti. However, when I get up to the Jarl's hall (especially inside or on the terrace) in Whiterun, it starts getting very choppy. And that was the same before and after adding many mods. Ok, so I'm looking out over the whole town, that could happen, right? Well... the bizarre thing is it STAYS choppy/low FPS no matter where I go afterwards, even less demanding caves and such. But if I shut the game down and restart, it's smooth again. Then I tried overclocking the video card considerably (no improvement,) and also installed most of the STEP recommended mods, but it remained perfectly smooth everywhere else I've been, despite all the upgraded textures and theoretical load. This suggested to me it wasn't the video card, but darned if I know what else it would be. Every time I go to visit the enchanting area in the Jarl's hall in Whiterun, I basically have to restart the game when I leave. It's getting annoying! Any advice would be gratefully appreciated!

So, I was fighting dragons and every time they breathed brilliant fire at me, my screen would darken and I couldn't see anything, and take several seconds to "normalize" so I could see again. This made sense at first.... dragons breath must be pretty blinding, right? So I ignored it even though it made hit and runs vs. dragons very difficult. I noticed a similar effect when looking up suddenly toward the sunny sky. Fair enough there too. But since I finally added the better fire mod which made fires brighter and bigger, it is doing it even indoors in the Jarl's great hall! If I stare at the bright fire, then look up quickly, the whole ceiling darkens for several seconds. It SEEMS to be a deliberate effect... anyone have an idea what it is and how to turn it off? I'm running on Ultra with a GTX 560ti in Vista64 with the latest Beta drivers (on a DLP which has no issues with other games.) The problem manifested itself before I had many mods at all, but became more noticeable as I added the recommended STEP mods. Now I see it everywhere - look at anything bright and expect to be blacked out for several seconds. It's almost like self-polarizing sunglasses... but I didn't realize they existed in Tamriel. :D Much obliged to anyone who can point me in the right direction. :)