Sudden micro-stutters?

[mrspongeworthy]

I've never had the "micro-stuttering" issue some people have complained about in FO3/FNV/Skyrim, but all of a sudden I do. Everything was running nice and smooth; I had the usual CPU-bound performance issues in highly populated large cities; but other than that performance was excellent (and TESVAL/Skyboost pretty much fixed the cpu issue also). As of yesterday it ran perfectly. I would occasionally get a little bit of a "texture loading from the drive" pause, as you will see in many games, but once the texture was loaded everything was good. I use a lot of higher resolution textures and consider an occasional hiccup perfectly acceptable as a tradeoff for higher quality textures.

 

Today, however, I'm micro-stuttering all over the place. It's continuous and incredibly annoying. I'll be running, for example, and I can actually see the screen pause for a tiny micro-second every 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 seconds. It's almost like the game is dropping a couple frames completely. The most annoying part (almost), is that between yesterday and today I changed absolutely NOTHING on the computer or Skyrim. No new textures, no new settings, nada. I've checked and double-checked my ATI settings, Skyrim ini files, restarted, all the obvious stuff.

 

Anyone else had this problem pop-up completely at random like this? Any solution you can think of? CPU monitor isn't showing anything unusual; I'm at around 55% in Skyrim with peaks a little higher on occasion. Errant background processes do no appear to be a source of the problem as far as I can tell.

 

System is Windows 7 64bit with Radeon 6870 in a 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 (2x2 Xeon "woodcrest" @ 2.66). Running off a 10k stripped raid array. 10gigs RAM. Running AMD CCC version 12.whatever (latest preview version, which was working great BTW, about a 10%fps boost over the 11.xx drivers.)

 

Thanks for any help you might be able to provide.

Edited January 9, 2012 by Mr_SpongeWorthy

[mrspongeworthy]

Update: After futzing around with this off and on for the better part of the day I discovered what appears to be the answer: A corrupt or otherwise mangled game save. I eventually started loading other saves (including those of two other characters I have), and noticed that the problem went away. Going back to a previous save for the character I initially began experiencing the problem with, I found that the problem went away. I've since avoided doing the quests I had previously done right before the micro-stuttering started, and so far so good.

 

So, if anyone else has this problem and there is no obvious cause (you haven't installed a bunch of textures, for example), then I suggest quitting, relaunching, and loading a slightly older save to see if the problem clears up.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mr_SpongeWorthy