Low fps on Asus G50V-A2 please take a look at this

[Feanoro]

First and foremost ty for taking a look at this. I'd appreciate any helpful comments, particularly by people with similar hardware and experiences.

 

I'm using an Asus g50V laptop which has a T9400 (I think) dual core cpu @ 2.53 Ghz and a GeForce 9700m GT @ 512 MB. I have 4 GB of RAM installed, my OS is Win 7 64 bit and I'm using the latest graphics drivers from nvidia (290.53 in beta version I think, I've used some previous ones before as well and had the same issue).

 

Skyrim is patched up properly to 1.3 but I've also played on 1.1 and had the same low fps.

 

Obviously my machine already has 3 or 4 years under it so I wasn't expecting any kind of high settings. In fact when the launcher configured the settings on the first run it disabled antialiasing, anisotropic filtering and FXAA. It originally set my textures on high, but I've since put them on low hoping to coax a few more fps out. Similary, shadows are on low decals on none and the view distance is set to low in all categories except actor, at which I put it at medium (but I had low fps even before I did this and noticed no decrease since).

 

Now I've tried doing the basic stuff you read about on the net. First I've set all the options nvidia gave me to focus on performance instead of quality. After that I disabled the in-game vsync, and it does help remove some mouse lag but it doesn't increase my fps.

 

For a while I believed the lag was mostly caused by smoke/fog and various things requiring particles so I tried to reduce iMaxParticles from the default 750 to various values (500, 250, 50, etc) and not only did the fps not increase, but the game started stuttering.

 

At another point I tried playing with the shadow settings in skyrimprefs.ini by setting iShadowMapResolution to 1 and fShadowDistance, fInteriorShadowDistance to 0. I've also started from their default values of 512, 2000, 3000 respectively and tried to slowly decrease/increase them. Again, no noticeable fps gain and I only managed to make the game look ugly.

 

Since I've tried all these things I've decided to completely reinstall Skyrim (used ccleaner as well for safety). The game looks great again but I'm still having low fps (13-17 in dungeons, and sometimes even lower outside).

 

Do you guys have any idea what I could do to improve my fps? even an extra 5 fps would make a huge difference to my gameplay experience. I know your first impulse will be to say "get a better gpu/computer" but unfortunately that's not possible right now. At the same time I keep bumping into posts by random people on the net claiming to have my configuration (or an almost identical one) and running a constant 25+ fps in skyrim so hopefully there is a way to achieve this through software tweaking.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated guys! (in the meanwhile I'm going to try looking at TESVAL and Skyboost, maybe one of those could help me out-> if you have any idea if they would work for me please post that too)

 

P.S.: Reinstalling Skyrim and loading my old save revived Skjor! YAY!

[Dominionz]

Drivers and setting tweaks can only do so much on an underpowered laptop for Skyrim. Skyrim is a pretty demanding game and unfortunatly your laptop is doing the best it can. The only thing I can suggest is get a new laptop or PC that's more capable to run the game properly. Sorry

[Feanoro]

Would like to, but like I said, not an option at the moment. Meanwhile I'd like to squeeze every extra fps out of this thing so please help me out with any suggestions.

 

I think using Skyboost and doing some experiments with shadows I've now gotten it semi-playable at the cost of a few minor graphical bugs (it averages at 17 fps now and doesn't drop into single digits as much).

 

By the way, I keep going to the official tweaking guide nvidia's site and so far the most helpful thing for me has been increasing fShadowBiasScale to 1 which effectively reduces the number of shadows in the game (by increasing it you reduce the number of angles at which objects exposed to light get a shadow) without those weird blocky things that appear on all objects in the sunlight.

 

Still trying to figure out how to control the amount of fog/smoke/etc. Messing with iMaxParticles doesn't help with that and just makes the game unstable.

[MurrayBfromCanada]

The Bethesda company is famous for releasing buggy software and virtually all companies now do the same thing. Anyone that tried the original "Buggerfall" can attest to this. The only reason that "Buggerfall" became playable was because some kind souls in the modding community patched it enough to run.

 

If you are patient then I expect that modders will come up with ways that will allow you to enjoy the software on your existing equpment. There is a video on YouTube of a fellow getting good results with only Intel HD graphics. He states that he lowered the resolution and downloaded mods from this site that reduced resource requirements. It looks like it runs nicely now.