bingPop

Thanks for the suggestions. I did some further testing with my graphics settings, such as playing in Full Screen, lowering graphics, etc., and as you suspected the FPS drop is still occurring. I also messed around with the different Whiterun locations. I basically entered the area, restarted Skyrim, and then loaded the save, once for in the town square and another time on the balcony of Dragonsreach. Just like the original post, I was able to maintain steady FPS on the balcony while the save that loaded into the town square had the expected FPS drop. That said, I'm about to start individually checking through my modlist to try and pinpoint if a specific mod is causing it, since vanilla runs fine.

Yeah, VRAM was what I was thinking too. But I didn't immediately blame it since Skyrim SE was running perfectly fine and stable since release up until last month. It might just be the age of the GPU or something but I just wanted a second opinion. Thanks

So very recently I've started experiencing a problem regarding Skyrim SE. After about a few minutes of playing the game (a fresh save), my FPS will literally tank from a stable 50-60 FPS to around 5 FPS. This persists onto menus, even when I exit back to the main menu and load a new save. This happens literally anywhere in the game; it's not just isolated to dense areas. Alt+Tabbing the game, waiting a few, and then switching back to the game will temporarily remedy it for a few minutes before tanking again. In addition, if I load a save in which I left off in an interior area, like a or a dungeon, my FPS remains stable until I move to an exterior area. This is completely unique to Skyrim SE. Other games (Final Fantasy XIV, League of Legends, Fallout 4, Oldrim, to name a few) have no problems whatsoever. * Load Order * System Specs: * CPU: AMD FX-8320 Eight-Core Processor * GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (2 GB) * RAM: 8 GB * OS: Windows 10 * Resolution: 1920x1080 (Borderless Windowed) * Things I've Tried: * Trying a fresh save with identical mods. * Restarting the computer. * Lowering graphics settings. Even changing the settings to the lowest setting possible and completely removing my ENB still causes FPS to tank. * Updating drivers. * Rolling back drivers. * Running Malwarebytes in case of a virus. * Exhausting every suggested optimization strategy recommended on this subreddit's wiki. * Disabling any new mods I activated in the time between my game was stable and its current condition. The only new mods installed were Ordinator SE, Apocalypse and it's Ordinator Patch, and 3DNPCs. I disabled and uninstalled these mods in every way possible, and despite being the most likely culprits, it made no difference. * Organizing my load order with LOOT. * Creating a Bashed patch. * Reverting to Vanilla. This fixed the issue so it's very likely a mod-specific issue. * Cleaning my computer. One common denominator I found on Google was that it was a temperature issue. However, even before cleaning and replacing the thermal compounds in my computer, my CPU never went above 65-ish degrees Celsius (according to Core Temp). I've been at this for awhile already and I've yet to individually check every activated mod (it's floating around 100 mods so I want to set aside some time for this later), and I'd love to hear any suggestions at this point. NVidia Monitor doesn't show anything unusual in its telemetry (AFAIK).