SpiritDrak

Alright final update guys. So it turns out, it actually WAS my fan needing some cleaning. So I did that and am now running a smooth 60fps. Thanks very much for your help guys.

Yea all of my drivers are completely up to date now. Forgot to mention I did that, sorry. Here are the .ini files from My Documents Skyrim: SkyrimPrefs:

Just an update, I've been monitoring my VRAM usage during gameplay as well to check if that was the issue. It seems that my memory usage for skyrim only goes up to 350~380MB before my fps drops. Considering I have 2GB VRAM, I don't think that would be the issue there. Also, I've tested this several times and every time my fps has dropped consistently at about two minutes of game time. I've tested several areas, interiors, exteriors, even the character creation screen, all of which display the same behavior.

Hey guys, thanks for all the help so far. So reinstalling Win7 worked....kind of. I can get up to 50 fps now on medium settings and when I start up skyrim it stays there for a few minutes. Then there is excessive fluctuation between 15 and 40 fps. It constantly goes up and down every second. Does anyone have an idea of what's causing this or a possible fix?

Well I've tried all of those things except reinstalling Win7 and so far I've seen no difference in performance. CPU and memory usage is all fine, hardware temperature is fine and I've cleaned my computer as best as I could. I will try reinstalling Windows some time this week. Thanks for all the help guys, and if anyone has any other insight into this issue it would be much appreciated.

Just a little additional information, when I run dxdiag it only gives me info for my integrated graphics card, even when my 640M is set as the global default. Perhaps this means there is a problem with my computer my 640M as the preferred graphics card? Although at the same time, I have noticed a significant change in performance with a few games that I had on an older computer. So that might mean either that the graphics card is being used for some processes and not others even though it's set to the default, OR the reason those other games improved in performance is because of the CPU upgrade.

I have tried turning off unnecessary background processes and apps and I've tried Game Booster as well. I don't know what you mean by "AV". GPU Driver: GeForce 306.02 -[r304_70] I used the control panel to change the settings that I mentioned in the first post. I do have NVIDIA inspector but I haven't really messed with it because I don't really know what all those things are. If you mean my Skyrim ini files, there they are: Prefs: Skyrim_default: Low: Medium: High: Very High:

Thanks for the reply. I had thought that too originally but I have a profile for tesv.exe already. I've even set my 640M as the default graphics card in the global settings and there's still a problem.

Hey guys, so I've been having some real bad fps issues with Skyrim. In vanilla with all graphics set to the lowest it can be, I can still only manage 15-20 fps, which is strange considering my computer is fairly decent. I've tried tinkering with nvidia's 3D settings, tried different performance mods, and basically most of the common fixes for issues such as these but to no avail. And this performance issue is not limited to Skyrim, other games that I feel my computer should be able to handle such as Dark Souls also suffer from this problem. Here are my computer specs: Windows 7 x64 OS Intel Core i7-3610QM 2.30GHz 8GB Ram NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 2GB Dedicated And these are my current 3D settings: Ambient Occlusion: Off Anisotropic filtering: Off Antialiasing FXAA: Off Antialiasing Gamma correction: Off Antialiasing Mode: Off CUDA - GPUs: All Max pre-rendered frames: Use 3D app settings Power Management mode: Prefer Maximum performance Texture filtering: -Anisotropic sample optimization: On -Negative LOD bias: Allow -Quality: High performance -Trilinear Optimization: On Threaded optimization: On Triple Buffering: Off Vsync: Off Any insight into this isssue would be greatly appreciated.