Why cant Skyrim utilize my whole PC's power?

[gib284]

I just have a question thats kind of been stumping me. I've spent the last 3 days modding the crap out of Skyrim which I plan to do a modded play through of, and I don't really understand why on my PC which is very powerful in my opinion can't keep a steady 60 fps. I have Real Vision ENB with Skyrim HD 2k lite textures plus a wack ton of other texture mods all compiled with Skyrim Mod Combiner. I am extremely happy with the way the game is looking it looks absolutely stunning! But what I don't understand is why the game constantly drops down to 30 fps and even sometimes 28. While my GPU's are both at 60%-70% usage and CPU is at like 50% ....Now that just doesn't make sense to me. I have plenty of power left so why would the frame rate drop so low? http://imgur.com/roIiGbY (screenshot showing 27 fps while gpu and cpu are super low usage)

 

My PC

i7 4790k OC to 4.6 GHZ

Skyrim installed on SSD

Gtx 980's in SLI

850w gold power supply

MSI Gaming 5 MB

16GB DDR3 RAM

 

[SMB92]

Because it is a DirectX 9 game and the multithreading capabilities are almost non existent. Plus they designed the game to be played by whatxseems to be pcs without a graphics card. Unless you got a 6ghz, 500,000 MIPS CPU (thats per core), which is a long ways off in this age, all you can do is balance it out.

[gib284]

Ok so I'm not doing anything wrong then. I don't understand how people run the game with so many mods at high frame rates then. =P Must have absolute beast machines.

[SMB92]

Mine doesnt keep 60 everywhere, just mostly. My gpu is only seeing 70% max usage and 2 cores of my cpu are seeing 100% @ 4.65ghz

[gib284]

Thats also what I just dont get...I'm monitoring all 4 cores of my cpu and rarely does 1 hit 90% usage two are usually around 70-80% usage. I thought my bottleneck was my cpu but it doesn't seem to be. It can't be my GPU's they are scaling really well actually.

[SMB92]

There might be some more things you can do in your ini, but i tell you now the bottleneck is the renderer. This starts on the cpu.

 

Have a read of a topic i just replied to in this thread, just below yours. That post has a trick you might try.

[korun]

Thats also what I just dont get...I'm monitoring all 4 cores of my cpu and rarely does 1 hit 90% usage two are usually around 70-80% usage. I thought my bottleneck was my cpu but it doesn't seem to be. It can't be my GPU's they are scaling really well actually.

i7 4790k OC to 4.6 GHZ even standard it's a overkill for Skyrim

 

as said in other post the bottleneck is Skyrim itself

 

try Ewi's .inis (real vision dl page) but no miracle here

 

then if you use only 2k texture, use only one 980 instead, i've had better result with 1 x 980 TI than Sli, because Skyrim engine isn't friendly with sli setup aswell

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Edited October 28, 2015 by korun

[SMB92]

It would take a lot more than 4.6ghz to get absolute beautiful performance from Skyrim. Pure grunt is what this game demands. Unfortunately i dont know of any commercially available CPU that has this. Im talking single core grunt, not multi cores, of course it would be ideal to have a quad core with said single cores.

 

But yes, you are best off with 1 GPU in most cases.

[gib284]

ya i figured it wouldnt support sli as well as it seems to. for me running in sli gives me at least a 15 fps boost which was more than i expected. also both gpus seem to share the load evenly which i was very supprised at.

[SMB92]

You will run into a number of problems with enb if you wver use it. You still can but there can be a lot of odd glitches occur