why is my FPS so low?

[myztikrice]

 

Feel free to also lower your resolution for some free FPS.

 

That's not free fps, it does come at a cost to visual quality. The blur added isn't too bad, but it's not 'free' at all.

 

It's not noticeable at all. Obviously if you go from 1080p to 480p or something you'll see a difference.

[LargeStyle]

Well I guess it's financially free, but realistically has a cost which may not actually be that bad...

 

To me the general consensus is that games should apparently be 1080p @ 60 fps - and is hoped for within the next generation consoles. However I think this is not neccessarily a good thing:

 

1080p is great if you either just like it or you're playing a game that has graphics with enough detail to truely utilise all of the resolution. In my opinion games are not to a standard yet where 1080p is fully ultilised as they're still based from meshes and textures, not per-pixel renders. Sure game may look better in 1080p to some people, but again this is purely a matter of opinion. I play on 50" Samsung plasma via HDMI and 1080p (native resolution) makes things have what I call the "cardboard cutout" effect - it's just too clinical an image for me to the extent where I'd prefer current gen (PS3 style) 720p image quality. This said, 720p looks a little rough unless you throw a load of MSAA or equivalent at it, so long story short (too late) I now play at a custom resolution of 1440 x 810 (16:9 ratio) as 1440 is half way between 1600 (x900) and 1280 (x720) with the same logic applied to the vertical resolution, then all upscaled on the GPU to a constant 1080p signal. To me this actually looks better than 1080p by looking natural and finds a nice balance between image clarity and quality. I can even save approximately 24% more GPU use by rendering @ 21:9 aspect ratio of 1440 x 617 (and looks quite sexy too). Just ensure that you get the GPU to upscale the non-native resolution into your monitors native resolution so it's not a blur-fest.

 

As for 60 fps, I'm not convinced with this either. Yes it looks great in a technical way, but it really reminds you that you're playing a game by presenting the frames in a clinical manner much alike my 1080p comments above. I personally prefer games to run at 30 fps not only because it'll save you a huge amount of money to target 30 fps not 60 fps, but it seems more natural to me, much like how a film is presented (24 fps). The Hobbit film made in 48 fps came under a lot of (deserved) criticism as the 48 fps feature made it feel like you were an expensive tv program, not a film. The arguement of control response is to me a weird one that I've not experienced problems with and therefore don't really understand. To me, as long as I get a totally consistent 30 fps then the controls respond fine and are totally playable. I've seen many "eliteist" pc gamers stating that they couldn't play a game if it less than 60 fps, but to me that's complete **** as this would make the entire current gen console platform redundant, which obviously hasn't been the case. I'm a proud PS3 owner and providing games doesn't have vsync / tearing problems (developers: why?) then I'm ok with gaming on PS3.

 

I've recently made a choice between upgrade my pc or wait for PS4, and I've decided to stay with pcs as not only do I like my modding, but I like to control the way the game is presented to me as I'm not yet convinced and have trust within the gaming industry to make the right calls in this matter. Again, just my opinion.

 

Sorry about the rant, I'm doing a stack of Steam game backups right now so have a lot of time to kill :mellow:

 

 

EDIT: Back OT, if you / anyone wants to monitor your computers activity while playing games then I've recently found a good program that works with MSI Afterburner (so no ENB allowed) which I've stated on this recent post...

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1161558-skyrim-crashes-randomly-tried-all-recommended-fixes/page-2

Edited October 19, 2013 by LargeStyle

[huber69]

fifteenspades - i did use some of your recommendations. this one:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6387/?tab=2&navtag=%2Fajax%2Fmodfiles%2F%3Fid%3D6387&pUp=1

i used the first 3 from this link.

FPS Background Booster i didn't try, didn't like the concept, thanks anyhow.

Razor Game booster - did you mean Razer Game booster? i don't like third party programs tweaking my computer, i like to know exactly what is changed and how, but thanks for the offer.

LargeStyle - thank you very much for your quality replay. i do know how to take screenshot, how to rearrange tabs and what is an ini file, but thanks anyway, appreciated.

im using the latest nvidia drivers, 327.23 - didn't have any issues with them. im using dell 23" monitor so the resolution is naturally 1080P. my CPU is the Intel® Core™ i5-760 not OC, is skyrim a CPU bound game? will OC the CPU will make a real change?

about ENB - well it seems im not using any cuz there is neither of the files you mentioned in the game main directory, not "enbeffect.fx" nor "enbseries.ini". i also didn't change anything manually on any of the games ini files, and i only installed mods using nexus mod manager and never manually.

btw - after uninstalling the duplicate mods/esp "LargeStyle" has mentioned the freezing problem has been solved (the 5-6 sec freezing every few seconds). now the game stutter here and there but nothing game breaking. i will be happy to get rid of that to, but as of now i prefer maintaining the graphic quality from the mods and suffering a little bit of stuttering then disabling them.

myztikrice - sorry, but playing sub 1080P is not an option and as mentioned here any game should run fine on 1080P on my rig especially when im not using AA or using max settings.

thanks for all your replays guys :laugh:

Edited October 19, 2013 by huber69

[LargeStyle]

Glad you have your game working in a satisfactory manner now.

 

 

 

my CPU is the Intel® Core™ i5-760 not OC, is skyrim a CPU bound game? will OC the CPU will make a real change?

 

I've recently read on the net that open-world games are normally more taxing on CPU than GPU. I've also recently done some complete pc benchmarks while playing a variety of games and I can confirm this fact to be correct. Even with a significant amount of graphics mods installed in Skyrim my current CPU (a very ageing Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz) is working twice as hard as my GTX 570 GPU. Borderlands 2 and Sleeping Dogs also behave in the same way, yet Dead Space 3 and Tomb Raider (2013) utilise CPU and GPU to the same level. Hitman Absolution seems to be the exception to the rule, but this is a poorly optimised game. Of course this is all based on my system, and I heavily suspise my CPU isn't doing my GPU justice. This will change very soon as I have an i5 2310 CPU sitting in a box right beside me and is going to be installed very soon, so I'll be rebenchmarking everything to find out the difference a better CPU makes.

 

EDIT: As for overclocking - yes it'll no doubt improve your game performance, but by how much really depends on the rest of your system so it's really hard to predict the improvement amount. Personally I've bought a non-overclockable CPU on purpose as I'm generally not bothered about overclocking, I feel my CPU @ stock will be a good match for my GPU, and I hate computer operational noise so want to keep things very quiet.

Edited October 19, 2013 by LargeStyle

[huber69]

not exactly, i would like it to get better, but at least the real annoying 5-6 sec freeze ups has been eliminated. a smoother gameplay will be welcomed so if you have any more suggestions, feel free to add.

[LargeStyle]

Just remove any mods that you think you can live without, providing they're safe to uninstall. Think about which mods you may wish to remove then go to their mod description page to check if it's safe to uninstall and if so, how to uninstall it / them.

 

I'd still recommend replacing the official HiRes DLC with the DLC optimised mod I linked in the previous page. Amidianborn can be quite demanding for some computers so perhaps deactivate that too. As these are texture mods they are safe to install and uninstall at your please so you can remove them at least to test out any performance changes.

 

Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM) can be very demanding on your computer. I really like the way SMIM makes certain things look, but I don't use it as it has too much of a performance hit on my pc.

 

To help the CPU out think about removing some mods that use scripts - some mods that use scripts aren't written particularly efficiently and can cause a bigger fps loss than you may think it would. It's sometimes difficult to tell which mods use scripts and which don't - you can either manually look at the mod files that you've downloaded or go back to the mod description pages to read more about them.

 

I've personally also had a noticable performance loss when using Enhanced Blood Textures so perhaps remove that.

 

The only way you're going to be able to truely tell which mods slow down your fps is to remove them either one-by-one or no more than 3 or 4 mods at a time - so if anything goes wrong you can quickly identify which mod is causing the issue(s). That said, there's normally no one mod that ruins fps, it's the combination of all your installed mods that cumulatively damage performance. Ultimately it's up to you how you want to set the balance of mods used and performance lost.

 

The most important thing is while you are removing mods, try to not actually play the game and progress with the story / quests just in case you run into problems and have to go back to using a save game file that was made before your removed the mods.