I had been experiencing random fps spikes (from ~40fps down to ~9fps) in all areas of Skyrim, running on a Lenovo y570 i7-2670QM, GT555m, 8GB PC3-10600 DDR3. I fixed this issue by forcing Skyrim to use only 2 physical (not HT) cores. FPS drop == gone. This may only apply to i7-2670QM, or only my hardware configuration. Who cares, I can play at 30-60fps now! YMMV To try: 1) Launch Task Manager (CTRL+ALT+ESC or CTRL+ALT+DELETE) 2) Launch Skyrim 3) ALT+TAB to task manager 4) Under the Processes tab, right click TESV.exe and click Set Affinity 5) Uncheck <All Processors>, and check CPU 0 and CPU 2 6) ALT+TAB back to Skyrim If the issue is fixed, you can make Skyrim launch this way every time: 1) Open the directory TESV.exe is in. 2) Make a new text document. Rename it to TESV.bat 3) Right click TESV.bat and click edit. 4) Paste this in: start /high /affinity 0x5 TESV.exe 5) Save file. Create shortcut on desktop to TESV.bat I spent many hours trying to figure out this game breaking issue. I hope my solution is of use to others. -sephiroth2k
