Both stuttering and lower than expected FPS

[Necronomis]

Firstly, my rig:

 

Core 2 Quad at 2.8 (liquid cooled, never have I seen it go above 40c)

8 gigs of memory

two 480's in SLI

500 gig hdd

 

 

My FPS usually hangs around 32-38. Playable, but not where it should be. Also, every time a new area is loaded, I have to turn 360 to "flesh out" the area, otherwise it will, without fail, stutter in combat when I turn around.

 

I've gone into the ini settings and made quite a few adjustments that I've found on this board that have gotten good results and responses from others, but still nothing has changed for me.

 

My resource usage, though, is well below the tolerable limit. I'm using 30% of my GPU power, max. About 50% of my CPU, spread fairly evenly across the cores. And my memory usage peaks at less than 4 gigs. I heard about save-game bloat from a friend of mine, so I checked my mods and my save game file size. I run a new character on vanilla skyrim, same thing. And none of my save games are larger than 4 megs. I read about running multi-gpu's and causing micro-stutter. Single GPU is the same. I go up to 60% usage (so a single card pushing the same power) and nothing changes performance wise. I even tried scaling back my settings, which I obviously shouldn't have to do. My resource usage drops slightly (on high settings, I peak at 24% gpu usage in SLI), but the problem persists. I always keep my graphics drivers updated, check every week. When this kept happening, I installed the new beta drivers, 301.24, but that's had no effect. I've switched my sli settings from nVidia recommended, to force AFR 1 and AFR 2. No impact.

 

I've run out of ideas as to what could be the cause. I don't have anything on here to limit resource consumption (fresh OS install, just wiped it about a month ago. All that's on here right now is my AV/AS, Steam, Origin, and Chrome). I don't have an FPS limiter. I've toggled vsync with no effect.

 

Any input would be appreciated.

 

-Necro

[oldbookheaven]

make sure your Skyrim screen resolution matches your reg monitor screen resolution. FPS limiters work for me on this problem set at 60 (Skyrim's max capability)

[Necronomis]

No effect. And again, I did the whole song and dance of switching up video settings and all that. Reacts exactly as stated in my OP.

 

Thanks for the input, though.

 

 

Anyone else have any ideas?

[Rennn]

Yeah, the same happens for me. My specs are in my sig, but here are the basics:

Phenom II 995 X4 at 3.2Ghz

4GB DDR3 RAM at 1066Mhz

GTX 460 768MB GC, factory overclocked with DX11

750w Antec Earthwatt PSU

 

I've checked with speccy and through my task manager. Internal, video card, and cpu temperatures never break 60c, with the video card holding the highest temperature. It sometimes climbs to 56c. It can't be heat. My cpu is only ever at 20% load when playing Skyrim, my total RAM useage never breaks 70% unless I play for several consecutive hours, and my GPU doesn't run out of VRAM (which is a little surprising since it's less than the recommended amount).

 

I haven't checked the VRAM usage specifically, but when I installed 2k textures my HDD was the first thing to cause problems; it caused separate stutter of a different style, longer stutter which was less common. After that I got purple trees and black textures, indicating a lack of VRAM. That doesn't happen with mostly vanilla textures, so it can't be VRAM shortages. Not only that, but my VRAM is GDDR5, so it should easily be enough to support Skyrim's textures because I watched a Youtube video where a guy had a 512MB 8800, and he played Skyrim with Fraps without stutter. I don't see how he can run Skyrim better than I can, because his settings looked to be at least medium, and I still stutter at medium settings. My FPS is huge at medium, but it still stutters way too much. That guy had a weaker card, and my CPU is never above 20% load, so wth? I'm getting frustrated. It's like it's only using one core, but it's allowed to use all four and I've even tried .ini tweaks for it.

 

With my PC running below full load while playing Skyrim, it's amazing (in a bad way) that it can stutter so much. It stutters constantly unless I run Game Booster, and even then, at a framerate higher than 60 but capped at my refresh rate, it still stutters. I can even cap it at 30 when it should be running at 60 fps, and it still stutters slightly. With ENB my framerate hovered comfortably at 30 fps, but it would stutter massively if I turned around quickly, all the way down to 3 fps at times.

 

I've installed the game twice, and both times the problem has persisted even in vanilla Skyrim. I have no idea if this is just the Creation Engine being itself :confused: , or if it's something on my end, but I would really like to find a fix. I've tried disabling my paging file for a while, which, not surprisingly, caused my game to crash due to a RAM shortage after about half an hour, but it still stuttered from the moment I began playing so It's not a paging file issue. I opened my case and checked the power connectors, and they're all solid. It's a pretty expensive modular PSU that I bought right after Skyrim released, so I doubt that's the problem, especially since I never get graphical bugs in games, nor do I crash unless I disable my paging file, which, as I said, causes a ctd after a while due to lack of memory.

 

I've had BSoDs twice, both while playing Deus Ex: HR, which is a bug related to AMD CPUs running Deus Ex with DX11 enabled. In other words, that's not a problem with my rig, that's a problem with AMD, so my BSoDs must be unrelated to performance issues. I've considered getting 8GB of 1666Mhz RAM from Corsair, and I probably will anyway, but before I do that I want to make sure that my Skyrim problems are actually related to RAM because no other game has this problem, and it doesn't generally exceed 70% in Skyrim. In some games my RAM use is as low as 2GB, of which Windows 7 is probably using 1.5-1.9GB or thereabouts.

Edited May 1, 2012 by Rennn

[Necronomis]

Bumped in hopes of more possible ideas.

[fms1]

You may want to check this thread also I found out why Skyrim stutters?

[uberness23]

SLI/Crossfire are finicky in these games. I've found with every driver release from both Nvidia and AMD that things get broken as they get fixed. Want to know what fixed my GPU scaling? Opening the CCC. Nothing fancy, just opening it. No changes or anything. Also, despite my hardware, I can't for the life of me get Skyrim to run more than 5 ugrids stably and I still only push 35-45 FPS. I think it just comes down to an outdated engine, really.

 

My hardware:

Intel core i7 3960x OC'd to 5ghz

16 Gb DDR3 at 1600 MHz

XFX Radeon HD 6990 dual chip VGA 4gb VRam

Corsair AX 1200 watt PSU