30 FPS on Excellent Rig

[kingtitan]

Hello all! So I am just now getting heavy into modding Skyrim. I've been working with Oblivion mostly for the longest time on personal mods but I decided it was finally time to get into modding Skyrim. But here is the "issue" I seem to be having as of right now. I am only getting 30 FPS or so in most locations with minimal mods installed. I've posted by laptop's specs below as well as attached a screenshot of my mods to show just how minimal of a load this *should* have.

 

My basic Specs:

Toshiba Qosmio x70

Intel i7-4700 Processor @ 2.40 ghz

12 GB RAM

Nvidia GeForce GTX 770M w/ 3gb dedicated graphics mem (GPU)

Intel HD Graphics 4600 (I'll explain why I included this further on)

 

I have the game preset to ultra (as you would think that my specs, especially my GPU, would be able to run Skyrim on Ultra with relative ease). However, it seems that I am only getting roughly 30 FPS on average. I have done some extensive research on this and it seems that people with both an NVIDIA card as well as Intel HD Graphics have had similar problems. Before you ask, I have created a profile in my NVIDIA control panel for the skyrimlauncher.exe, tesv.exe, and skse_loader.exe to use the "High Performance Graphics Unit" (or something like that). I did some tweaking according to some presets I found that had worked for other people (http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-14-m14x/624541-m14x-skyrim-performance-questions-best-driver-settings-general-chatter-discuss-here.html) that helped slightly, as well as NVIDIA's tweak guide found here (http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide#1). However, I only saw small minuscule improvements overall to FPS.

 

Another detail that might be helpful is that I am running the game in my native resolution of 1920x1080, fullscreen. I am thinking about trying one of the "fake windowed" programs that I have used for other games as I am well aware that playing in fullscreen can typically have a performance hit on the game. I am also one of those people who likes being able to Alt+Tab, so this more than likely will be a must for me.

 

Also, another thing that was concerning to me was two small details i found in my Renderinfo.txt and SkyrimPrefs.ini files. The RenderInfo.txt file read out that the "Intel HD Graphics" was the device being used, as opposed to the dedicated card. In the SkyrimPrefs.ini file I also found this - sD3DDevice="Intel® HD Graphics 4600". While I have had my fair share of tweaking and modding, this is something I am relatively unfamiliar with. Does this mean that the game is using my integrated graphics instead of my dedicated GPU? In the options section of the launcher, the only option available for graphics is the "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M" card; the intel one is not even an option. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this as well.

 

I also updated my graphics drivers last night as well for both the Intel and NVIDIA components.

 

At some point, I would like to be able to run either RealVision ENB or Project ENB, but not until I get these FPS "issues" cleared up.

 

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone might be able to shed some light on how I might be able to better improve perfomance. I have this gut feeling that there is something I am missing that would vastly improve my FPS. Like I said, I only have a handful of mods installed at present (no ENB either). While I have seen various other threads scattered across the web, I figured posting something a little more specific would be better. I also hope that if a solution is found, it can be shared with others as well as this seems to be somewhat of a common problem!

 

P.S. If I did not include enough detail or failed to cover some important piece of information in those regards, please ask. Don't forget, I have attached my mod list to this post!

 

Edited April 19, 2014 by kingtitan

[kingtitan]

I wanted to add this specifically as a new post as I think it provides crucial additional information.

 

After some more poking around, I remembered that the NVIDIA driver update I got was from the Toshiba website. While NVIDIA "recommends" this, from my recent experience I would suggest going directly to NVIDIA's site. Anyway, I found that there was actually a newer driver available directly from NVIDIA (than the one I had got from Toshiba) and proceeded to download and install it. I did two important things when updating this driver however. 1) I performed a clean install of my nvidia drivers to remove all old and useless junk. I would highly recommend this if you are getting poor FPS and think you shouldn't be. 2) I installed the "GeForce Experience" program that came as an option on the driver update. Once it finished I had a clean install of my new driver as well as this program. The reason I think this step is important is because it gives you the option to "Optimize" your game. While I know that is typically frowned upon by the gaming community because it is the "easy way out," I think it was actually a very good move considering the fact that it takes into account your specific hardware and optimizes it accordingly. Obviously everyone has their preferences, and you are able to tweak accordingly, but after reading forum post after forum post, each telling me to do something different (and typically erroneously), this method is fantastic.

 

Anyway, the end of that story is to report that I at least DOUBLED my FPS. Places that I was getting a consistent 30 or so FPS I now get a consistent 60 FPS. While i hate to say that it is as easy as simply updating your drivers, you might be surprised by the results.

[chanchan05]

You can ignore the info in the Skyrimprefs ini regarding Intel. The game is using the Nvidia card if you set it up in the Nvidia Control Panel. How do I know? I tried running vanilla game once on an Intel 4000 series and I couldn't even get past 24FPS. No mods, everything on low. The fact that you're getting 30FPS and is on ultra means you aren't using that.

 

Do you have Nvidia inspector? Double check that you haven't limited your game FPS

[kingtitan]

The fact that you've had that experience is definitely comforting. It's good to know It's not just me. Sometimes it's just difficult to sort through all the jargon!

 

As far as I am aware, I do not have it. How would I go about checking for that anyway? I've actually been looking for an answer to this for a while now.

 

EDIT: Just looked, I do not have a frame rate limiter. Thanks for the tip though, it was helpful to me still!

Edited April 20, 2014 by kingtitan

[chanchan05]

Well you could just download it anyway and use it to remove any hardware FPS cap you have. There's a video tutorial on Youtube.