Sudden and constant fps drop (from 50 to 15), often after entering new

[nemosw]

Hello dear skyrim-nerds,

 

I'm experiencing a great performance issue: after some minutes of gameplay, sometimes after hours, the fps suddenly decreases from around 40-60 to 9-15 and do not regnerate, even if I wait some minutes or fast travel to another location. only restarting skyrim, sometimes even restatring the computer works out.

 

I read through a lot of google hits to similar issues (here someone posted too (link)

 

This problem grew a lot bigger after installing the 4k-HD-texture-mod (some other texture mods didn't have such a big impact), with the mod installed this problem occures after some minutes of gameplay.

 

tu sum the rest of this post up: a tried a lot of differnt things and configs and got totally no idea.

I tried a lot of diffent things, tried a lot of different versions of Skyrim and mods and hardware configuration, but nothing did realy help. The only thing I can say: 4k textures makes things unplayable, no mods makes things better, but not good. The issue is occuring with Skyrim 1.1 and 1.3 and without any ini mods (I did some in the meantime, though, but had this problem before)

 

my system is a GTX 460 and a i52500k, watercooled and windows vista 64bit. so overheating cannot be the issue (40°C GPU). OC as well not, the problem occures with and without OCing the GPU, even downclocking and overvolting the GPu did not help (though decreasing the OC of GPu helped athers, accoirding to other forums I read in) In one forum i read about reducing the used CPU cores to 2, did not help as well.

it occurs with GeForce 290.53 Driver and 290.36. a first it lood like the graphics card set itself to the middle clockings, but I disabled it via driver, forcing the GPU to run at full speed. I use MSI afterburner, but the stats look totally normal, CPu as well, when the problem occures. It also occurs without afterburner running.

 

Does anyone know this problem (google results show, I'm not the only one) and, more important, does anyone know a cure....? (and I don't want an axe... ;) )

 

thanks a lot! :)

 

PS: this issure also occured every some hours while playing The Witcher 2.

Edited January 7, 2012 by nemosw

[eric31415]

From what you describe, it sounds like you are running out of available RAM. Those high-quality textures use more memory than vanilla, so it gets worse when using them. When you run out of available RAM, you will start writing to the page file, which is just a partion on your HD. Too slow...

 

First, make sure Skyrim is 4gb enabled, either thru the last patch, or via mod if running an older patch.

 

After that, you have a couple options...

 

The best option - Get more RAM, and/or a SSD. (the "axe")

 

The cheap (and easily overlooked) option - Dedicate a USB memory stick to ReadyBoost. If you use a 64bit OS, get an 8gb or better, a 32bit system is limited to 4gb (i think), a good number is 3x your installed RAM. To use more than 4gb of a device on a 64bit OS, you will have to reformat the device to exFAT. Then just click on it's properties and select the ReadyBoost tab, and dedicate the device to ReadyBoost. Your computer will now use the ReadyBoost cache in place of the page file (simplified explanation, see link), at speeds that are reported to be 80-100 times faster.

 

Edit; just noticed this is your first post, welcome to the community.

Edited January 7, 2012 by eric31415

[nemosw]

thanks for the long answer... :)

 

i'm curious about what you said, because: I do already have an SSD (though skyrim is not installed on it), I habe 4GB of Ram (which should be onough, i guess..?!) and an 1GB graphic adapter, which also should be enough. and, what i'm even wandering more about: with the latest patch (which enables 4GB) and the 4k textures things even got a lot worse than before.

 

i'll look at the RAM /swap settings today evenig or tomorrow and post what i foung. what I can say by now is the graphic card is loaded with more than 1000mb (of 1024) when the problem occures.

[ashtorak]

Same problem here with a GTX 560. Windows 7 and Skyrim are installed on a SSD. But still this problem occurs now and then, very randomly. I guess it has something to do with the Nvidia beta drivers maybe. Battlefield 3 works fine though. If the graphic card RAM is the problem, reduction of texture quality might help. Haven't tried that yet...

[eric31415]

@nemosw - Basically, here's what is happening. Skyrim doesn't clear unneeded stuff from memory very well, so your'e hitting the 1gb limit for your graphics card. The overflow gets shuffled off to system RAM. The 4gb you have installed is minimal for vanilla Skyrim as it is (i think 4gb is the minimum req for Skyrim on a Win7 system), so you don't really have any extra memory there (a good test would be to run Task Manager in the background, and see if you are using all 4gb of RAM when these slowdowns occur). The overflow from your RAM will get passed off to the page file on your HD, which is slow, and is the most common reason people have this problem (yours seems a textbook case).

 

So here's a couple (more) things you can do...

 

Run GameBooster to close unneeded background processes, freeing up more RAM. It automatically changes your power plan to it's own, which i find is not particularrly optimized for gaming, so i'd recommend using one of your own.

 

Make sure that your page file is located on your SSD, it shouldn't make much of a difference if your game is installed there or not. (be warned; dicking about with your page file can have unforseen consequences, do your homework)

 

Don't underestimate ReadyBoost, i know it seems too easy to be true, but i think it could help you a lot. I have never run Skyrim without a ReadyBoost cache, but when i first started using it for (a heavily modded) Oblivion it very nearly doubled my FPS. Also nearly eliminated CTD's, i have put almost 200 hours into Skyrim with only 2 CTD's and one screen freeze. This on a laptop that, by all rights, shouldn't even run the game..

 

If you are going to buy a USB stick for ReadyBoost, do a little research and go for the fastest read/write times you can find. Also, if you have USB3.0 ports, use those.

 

Hoping to see you through this.

Edited January 8, 2012 by eric31415

[Dominionz]

I'm running 2 460's in SLI on an OC'd 2500k (4.5GHz) 8GB ram and even before picking up the second card i was getting 60fps at 1920x1200. I agree with Eric31415 on the Ram issue. Seriously need to think about bumping that to at least 8GB. Also u might need to drop down to a smaller texture mod to free up some of the 460's ram. One thing you might wanna try is downgrade to the 285.79 beta drivers. I've been using them since Skyrim came out and they give me the best frame rate. I tried the newest beta drivers today and it literally cut my FPS in half.

 

I do have to disagree with one thing tho...you should NEVER have page file on SSD if you can help it.

 

Never used ready boost so can't really comment on that.

 

Hope this helps.

[nemosw]

Hello guys,

 

I had a look and the ram/swap settings. on my computer, skyrim.exe (1,310) is using 1,577,244MB of ram and is a 32bit application(?!), of swap file (8GB SSD) 4,2GB are used. windows says: 4078MB physical memory, cache 1829MB (what's this), free: between 0 and 30MB. Video adapter (1Gb) more than 1000MB used. looks like a new video card (too expensive) or more ram might be a good idea.

 

but what made me more curios: after "the fps drop bug" occurd and looking at all those stats in windows task manager i returned to skyrim: and skyrim suddenly worked totally fine with the normal 40+ fps (without restarting anything, skyrim still running in the background).

[eric31415]

It doesn't really surprise me that re-entering Skyrim after running Task Manager straightens it out. I have experienced something similar, whenever i alt-tab out of the game i re-enter to a black screen with music. Just starting Task Manager brings the game right back up.

 

You might want to wait to see if Bethesda adresses the memory clearing issue before investing in new hardware. In the meantime, try using the console command "pcb" (purge cell buffers) whenever slowdowns occur.

[maboru]

It does seem to be poor memory allocation in the game code and although I haven't found it documented anywhere it seems that alt+tab or the three finger salute clear the memory registers enough to allow for continued play. At least for many people.

 

Even with hi-res texture mods 1gb of VRAM should be enough to play this game without problems so hopefully Beth will fix this in an upcoming patch. ( The game being a console port though I'm not holding my breath.)

[Feanoro]

Just wanted to post and say thank you to Dominionz, he was soo right about the nvidia driver. I have an older card myself (9700M GT) and with the new 290.53 drivers i was constantly going under 10 fps in Skyrim. Today I uninstalled the thing and put 285.79 instead and I can play again!