Rennn

It's only a no-brainer if you actually need the performance, however. You're right, that was the first thing I turned down when I was running a GTX 460. Stronger cards, however, should still run ultra shadows if they can handle it without framerate drops, as it is still a modest increase in visual quality. Anyway... I think everything on the subject of Skyrim's shadow settings has been said.

Those specs are wrong. The max amount anyone can generally have of RAM right now is 32GB, and that's ultra rare and expensive. You're describing your HDD, not RAM. With that in mind, we still need to know your RAM. Your CPU is pretty weak. You didn't list your video card, which is the most important part. It sounds like Skyrim is auto-detecting your resolution to be lower than usual, which is common and not a virus or bug. The resolution mix-up would cause blurriness and a blown up Steam tab. Run the Skyrim launcher and select the same resolution in the graphics options for Skyrim as your screen is.

Doesn't the Oblivion Stutter remover cap the game at 30 fps? I don't think that's a bad thing, I cap all my games at 30 fps. I just thought the OP should be aware of the possibility in case it does, because I don't remember for sure. Anyway, an uncapped framerate will cause stutter. Vsync at 60 may help with that, or it may not, depending on what's causing the stutter.

My mistake, certainly not that. Then it was something else I did to reduce shadows, don't remember. Been a while since I even launched Skyrim to test it out and over a year since I modded and tweaked it, moved away from the game since. Ini tweaks to disable shadows will disable lighting, however... I believe there's a mod to disable shadows (more advanced than the ini tweaks to do it) that keeps the rest of the lighting intact.

Worth noting, if you install the game, run the installation and everything else related to Morrowind as an administrator. It helps Morrowind's stuff bypass the unrecognized security of Windows 7 and 8.

My game never crashes, and I don't touch Wrye Bash. I only use NMM because two of the mods I use require it. I suppose Wrye Bash would help if you wanted to run more than 100 mods, but why? At that point it's clear you didn't like the game to begin with, so even more mods isn't going to save it...

You're aware that setting the shadows "off" also disables most of the lighting in the game, aren't you? The game looks abysmal with the shadows off.

Is it really wise to tell him to install mods with NMM? Some mods don't work with NMM, and if he becomes reliant on it we're just going to have to fix his broken game in a couple days...

It's impossible for RLO to only work in a small area around you; the lighting in Skyrim doesn't work that way. It's based on cells, not player radius. It looks like the interior fog is just drowning out RLO. It's not that RLO stops working, and it's not that Skyrim reverts to vanilla lighting. It's also not a bug, as far as I'm aware. Find a way to decrease or remove interior fog, and you'll fix the problem.

I've heard that UFO is out of date. Back when I used it I didn't have any problems that were hard to fix, but it's worth mentioning that it's no longer completely compatible with all the Skyrim patches and DLC. I'm not sure if that's the issue here, however.

Exactly!...and the main problem here is the graphics card, try disabling SMIM and ELFX. Perhaps you need more vram but the real problem is in the GPU. Give a try to HiAlgo boost: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/15123/? Okay, I'll check these mods, I've read about them, already aware of the weight. But, what I do not understand is that I can usually play on almost all the time, and even record with fraps, what happens is these lag spikes every once in a while, and after 30 minutes, they increase. Besides these heavier mods that could pull off, you could signal me some mod incompatible, or useless in the list. Because, I really prefer to look for other ways to alleviate these lag spikes, than disable these mods. If the game starts to lag worse after 30 minutes, it's probably Skyrim's memory leaks getting aggravated by the graphics mods. Anything you can do to reduce scripts or decrease memory use would probably help.

It kind of sounds like a lot of work just to save a couple seconds of time...

That'd be more work than a retexture, it would need a new mesh as well.

Not useless, it is okay for people who want an official alternative to house mods.

I wasn't aware of that. It works fine for me. Wait, are we allowed to help former pirates? :s

Your PCs specs are quite low, you may encounter some stutter regardless of what you do. I'm not certain. But SMIM, WATER, and ELFX are all large performance hits. Better Dynamic Snow also consumes more VRAM than vanilla. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some combination of those mods are causing the framerate drops.

I see... Well, still use performance options of SMIM and SFO whenever possible just for basic optimization. It shouldn't be terribly important as long as you don't use other HD textures though. Also, don't turn antialiasing higher than 4x in Skyrim's options. 8x is just a waste of performance for anyone with a weaker card than a GTX 680, GTX 770 Ti, etc. Anisotropic Filtering will be fine at 8x or even 16x. Your CPU might be choking trying to run all the AI and people in towns, as it's just an older dual core. Any scripts could aggravate the problem, like Frostfall, Wet and Cold, etc. First try setting your system power plan to high performance and running a CPU boosting program before you launch Skyrim like Razer Game Booster (or any equivalent).

Is that 460 GT the 768MB model? If it is, you have to use the half-res options in SMIM and get rid of the Skyrim Flora Overhaul completely. I used to have a 768MB GTX 460 GC, which is faster than your GT 460, and it stuttered horribly when I tried to use SMIM or SFO.

Correct, shield-bashing is when you press the attack-button while blocking with a shield. It disorients your opponent for a few seconds. Renn .. how is it going? ^^ any progress? :smile: I made the oil pools ignite when you drop a torch on them by doing what IsharaMeradin said, but I can't seem to do anything else. For some reason, a torch bash simply doesn't seem to trigger additional spell effects that I put on it. :/

A 780 Ti will barely get 120 fps average and drops to 90-100 fps in stressful areas on vanilla ultra, let alone with ENB and other graphics mods. Your stats aren't accurate.

Relax, it's just an easter egg for HP Lovecraft fans. All his books had those admittedly cheap "unknowable horrors", but ofc they were written in like the 1920s, so what do you expect? It didn't stop them from becoming arguably the most influential horror literature ever. The Dunwich building just alludes to that, nothing more, nothing less. It's like Hackdirt in Oblivion, or Apocrypha in Skyrim. Now that I think about it... the sheer quantity of mythos references in TES and the new Fallouts seems to indicate that Bethesda is a big fan of Lovecraft. That said, I agree with your assessment that survival horror games are painfully limited. If there's a terrifying abomination of some sort chasing me, I should be able to lock doors, barricade stuff, jump out windows, climb trees, and generally have freedom of movement and interaction. Otherwise it just feels like a cheap exercise in frustration. *cough* Dead Space *cough*. Some horror games attempt this kind of environmental interaction (Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth), but none actually manage to fully pull it off. I maintain that the scariest moment I've had in a game though, was being stalked by a rabid bear through a wrecked cabin in the woods, in Condemned 2: Bloodshot.

Skyrim will probably never stay at 60 fps all the time with a ton of graphics mods. The engine just starts to break eventually and dumps performance down to a fraction of what you would expect. Skyrim doesn't scale as well with stronger hardware as other relatively modern games (granted, it's 3 years old but it was even unusually low-performing when it released). With a heavy ENB on Skyrim, you can expect it to still look worse than Crysis 3 and run at a much lower framerate. As for which card to choose, the 290x should offer better performance in Skyrim, but ENB's support for AMD cards has been lackluster at times. You might get shafted if a new version releases... Also, the 780 will still beat the r290 in games with heavy PhysX or Tesselation such as Metro: LL and most of the best looking next-gen games.

Umm.... No, they haven't. Not even close.

Was it always like this, or has it noticeably changed from what it used to be?

I use Chrome, and I can connect easily... Might be a problem on your end, or with Firefox. Or maybe it's temporary and will go away randomly.