Palamabron

So I've been playing Skyrim for a couple of weeks and this issue has been persistant, but hard to nail down. Doesn't seem to change at all with higher or lower settings in-game. For the most part Skyrim runs alright (30-40 FPS, occasionally dropping to 20ish in some scenes), but on a regular basis it will take a huge FPS hit and run at 2-4 FPS for a few minutes then return to normal. The game may run for an hour or more without further issues or just five minutes. Some users have reported that alt-tabbing resolves similar issues, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between that and just waiting it out. System Info: System: Vista (32 bit) CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ 3.12 GHz ASUS M3A78-EM Motherboard GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4670 RAM: 4GB I'm reasonably sure this is a hardware issue as the fan always speeds up just after performance returns to normal. I'm also confident that it is not related to in-game quality settings as the issues is the same running on high or as low as possible. Skyrim is currently running on Medium/High settings with a few mods (4GB LAA, ENBSeries, and a couple of re-textures). Catalyst has AA and AF set to run on application settings. Started with 11.11 and since updated to 11.11c, not that it should make much difference with a Radeon HD 4xxx series card. I've changed a few BIOS settings as well to no particular effect one way or another (just turning on cool'n quiet tech etc, no overclocking). Sounds like others are having similar issues with newer ATI/AMD hardware as well, but I have yet to find any fixes.

I'm not sure if this will help, but I was having similar issues with an AMD Athlon / Radeon HD4670. As it turns out the GPU was fine, it was the processor that was being over-taxed. I downloaded a fresh version of the BIOS and associated utilities (temp/fan control mostly) for my Asus motherboard and things have been running much better. TLDR: Look for updates for your BIOS / Motherboard. Don't assume drivers that are a year or so old aren't updates, chances are yours haven't been updated since you bought your machine.

* Update * So I was focusing almost all my efforts on my graphics card and the game settings. After re-installing the BIOS and associated utilities for my processor/motherboard things have been running more smoothly. I haven't tried increasing the quality, but no problems running on medium since.

Done and done. This particular time the FPS hit came upon reloading a save. The FPS Limiter keeps my FPS in the 28-35 range while playing, but when the lag hits it drops down to 3-5. It still seems completely random to me. It was unplayable last night, giving me 5 minutes or less before choking on the way up to High Horothgar. Running back the other way today I had about 2 hours of play across several areas, including Whiterun. Now it's back to giving me 10 minutes or less. Completely rebooting or clearing RAM seems to have little to no effect (i.e. FPS lag will only clear up for another 5-10 minutes).

Despite all the issues that are being reported, oddly enough Skyrim hasn't full out crashed to the desktop on me yet, however I have been experiencing intermittent, severe FPS drops. Every 30-45 minutes, the program will stall and start getting supper chunky (like 1-3 FPS chunky). If I'm just running around selling stuff or crafting it remains barely playable, but if I'm fighting it's pretty much game-over. Sometimes after a little while, usually 10-20 minutes the FPS will pop back up and I'll see another 10-15 minutes of normal play, but this inevitably ends. This issue has occurred with no pattern I have noticed in terms of game play actions. It's kicked in while running around Whiterun, or shortly after engaging an enemy, or just moving through the world. It does seem that my character is always moving when the FPS lag kicks in, but that could just be when it becomes most noticeable. The launcher picked high settings for me, but I have mostly been running on medium with several tweaks to my system settings, the SkyrimPrefs.ini file and a few performance mods in my attempts to solve this issue. Said tweaks and mods have achieved better performance under normal conditions, but there has been no discernible effect on the frequency or severity of the intermittent FPS drops. Thus far I have tried the following: - Updated Graphics drivers - Installed LAA patch - Tweaked SkyrimPrefs.ini to fix mouse lag and blocky shadows - Installed mods: ENBSeries Patch 5, and FPS Limiter (using a 30 FPS limit) - Cleaned all CPU / GPU fans - Run a system cleaner to repair directories, etc. *As noted above, some of these efforts improved normal performance in Skyrim, but none had any noticeable effect on the FPS drops. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ (2 CPUs), ~3.1GHz RAM: 4GB RAM GPU: ATI Radeon HD 4670 (1GB) System: Windows Vista Home Basic (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2 (6002.vistasp2_gdr.110617-0336) DxDiag (Abbreviated):

So I've been having similar issues as others running Skyrim on medium level machines. Runs smooth for a while, then randomly gets choppy (occasionally near unplayable) and will then smooth out for a while. There are plenty of workarounds and tweaks available but, given that I bought the game on Steam I've had a hard time deciphering which files need to be tweaked. Specifically I've got a few .ini locations. C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Skyrim\SkyrimPrefs.ini C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Skyrim.ini C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\SkyrimPrefs.ini The SkyrimPrefs located in the Steam folder doesn't seem to reflect the settings I have in game (most notably the resolution is off), but a number of tweaks point to this file. Anyone know which files Skyrim looks to for which settings when running through Steam? Dose the most recent Skyrim4GB .exe effect that?