CPU will bottle-neck Skyrim

[soot00]

Skyrim is a cpu prostitute. Download a cpu / ram monitor and let it run in the background when you play Skyrim....

 

My CPU (AMD Phenom Ii, X4 955) gets up to 70pct load during heavy play and my ram stays under 35pct load

[Elof Valantor]

What annoys me is when a game comes out with recommened specs of "quad core" and then it only really uses two...

[N3C14R]

This game clearly relies on CPU power, and you need a Sandy Bridge-based Core i3 at 3 GHz or a Phenom II at 3.5 GHz to provide a minimum 30 FPS.

In my situation, my HDD actually causes more bottlenecks than my gtx580 and i7 860 @3.8ghz. If my PC was doing something like a defrag, backup service or heavy downloading my fps in Skyrim would cripple down to like 15fps from my regular 40 to 60's on ultra.

[xilef86]

phenom II x6 1100t (6 cores at 3,3ghz)

16 gigs of ddr3 ram

ati radeon 6950 2gb

 

the game runs pretty bad on mine... 20-60fps... average is about 40, but frame drops below 30 are common and very noticable.

i don't understand why some say this game only runs on 2 cores...

when looking at the task manager all my 6 cores are usually in the 20-60% range, the total never goes above 40% tho.

also the cpu can't be my bottleneck if it never even reaches 50% and no single core ever goes to 100%

all the cores seem to be used equally.

 

i have tried some custom inis but it always stays pretty much the same.

 

frame drops are happening mainly in the bigger cities.. facing the center of the map the fps are often at ~20 which shouldn't happen on my machine considering the

low poly count and texture resolution of most objects. the only reason for the fps beeing so low that i can come up with is the number of NPCs walking around.

it couldn't be the AI because it clearly depends on whats displayed on my screen (even if its hidden behind buildings)

could it be the lack of LODs for NPCs thats causing this?

 

i remember that it was the same in fallout3 and FNV.

in FNV for example the strip always ran below 20fps while most of the rest of the game ran at 60fps.

back then only 1 core was really used.. even with custom inis the other cores never really went above 5%

Edited November 19, 2011 by xilef86

[ogridum]

I bet they dont know what they are doing.

 

They probably didnt even messed with skyrim.ini, skyrimpref.ini, added large aware adress, post processing effects.

 

The first time I tweaked the game, I made so I could see things from much farther away, see hundreds of trees miles away, clouds, made it so fire smoke goes way up high in height, made it so I can see a slaughterfish swimming on transparent water from 500 meters away from higher terrain, basically I can see scripted events from miles away.

 

The compromises I made? Multisampling to 2 and Shadow Textures/Distance to 2048/3000. If I move AA to 4, I lose 15 fps. If I move double shadow textures or distance I lose 8 or so FPS.

I added a bunch of lines that actually make it so more resources are loaded up on the memory up to 5gb, not just I allowed it to happen, but I configged it to DO so forcefully right away. Most people are missing that detail.

I made a bunch of tweaks that activate the hyper threading technology to be used on the game.

Heavilly tweaked the post processing effects, added improved textures for many areas, from trees, grass, water, objects. And didnt lost any significant fps.

 

So yeah, you cant make the game run "as it should" unless you heavilly tweak it like I did. Lots of back and forth, changing, testing, comparing before/after. Once I did what "I HAD TO DO", I initially had the game running on ultra with over 60 fps, then after the changes I managed to keep the game with a minimum of 20-30 fps in the worst case scenarios, with only 1 random crash every 6 hours playing the game at most, while still having 40-50 fps on most areas.

 

Graphics card? An overclocked radeon 5800 using driver 11.6 (now its up to 11.11, but every driver from 11.9 and up destroyed performance, so thats another thing most people dont know).

 

http://www.mediafire.com/?4uxpnlgbkp2uka4 = my current skyrimpref.ini , see what Im talking about forcing load/use hyper thread/assigning memory deactivating things that actually affect performance but very little effect on overall day by day playing. Just make sure you dont do the right adaptations, change device driver to yours, dont use the loader, you need large aware address, and if you dont have a d3d9.dll on your skyrim folder dont waste your time either, and yeah, when you test dont save over your other saves untill you actually know you can run it.

Edited November 19, 2011 by ogridum

[xilef86]

thx for that ini ogridum, now my game looks and runs better.

 

fps still drop down to ~20 every now and then in the bigger cities, but its much less frequently and it never goes below that.

it usually stays between 30-60 fps now, a much more fluid experience.