Skyrims runs GREAT for first 5 minutes.

[kawaitei]

When i first installed Skyrim on release day last year, i had to tweak the game for almost 2 days before i could run it at a decent FPS. ironically, turning the graphics settings UP fixed the majority of my problems. After finding some ini tweaks and reading through some guides online, i figured out how to keep my game looking stellar while getting a nice FPS boost. Since then, i've been running the game happily with no issues.

 

Now, fast forward to last week; i bought a new monitor for my computer.

 

Once i opened Skyrim's pre-game options menu to change my resolution, i was greeted with the message, "Setting graphics to optimum settings! LOL" and all my hard work and tweaking were over-written with non-working options. My game is now virtually unplayable past the 3 minute mark. Just as when i first installed the game, the first few minutes of the game look AWESOME. i get a solid 60 FPS with zero slow-down. The game looks great, keys are responsive and mouse movements are fast and fluid. Except no matter where i am, what i'm doing or what's being loaded and shown on screen, the game drops to 5-30 FPS instantly at around the 5 minute mark, give or take. i've followed the same guides as before, restored all the ini tweaks i downloaded way back in November of last year and nothing seems to fix the dramatic FPS drop. i've even tried HiAlgo Boost with no change in performance. All it seems to do is drop my graphics and resolution down to that of a Windows95 game with the same 5-30 FPS drop as before.

 

My specs are :

 

AMD Athlon 64bit Dual Core 3800+ Manchester 2.0GHz

GeForce 8800 GTS (2GB)

4GB physical memory

WinXP Pro

 

Anything beyond that is superficial. Any and other games i play work flawlessly; Crysis2, Half-Life2 and other Source games, GTA4, Fallout3/NV, and a pimped-out, fully modded, visually tweaked Morrowind that -currently- out-performs Skyrim. i don't use ENB shaders, i'm play-testing on a clean save file, my graphics are set as reasonably low as i can get them, i'm using the newest drivers for everything on my system, i've installed the AMD multicore patch for Skyrim, i've turned any and all graphics-specific mods off in my game and i still can't play for more than a few minutes at a time. And would you believe that having Skyrim set all my graphics options to EXTREMELY LOW, actually makes things worse? The game actually RUNS worse than it LOOKS.

 

Please help me?

 

All the reading i can find for possibly fixing my game is old news and pre-dates all of Skyrim's patches.

 

-Kawai Tei-

Edited June 21, 2012 by Kawai Tei

[NicVic]

Have a similar issue with my laptop. Fraps shows I'm getting 60FPS or so when I start up the game, and about 5 minutes later it's dipped into 15-20FPS. It's been a few months since I last played Skyrim, and did not really notice these issues before. If my game started stuttering, it was usually after 2-3 hours of playtime, not a mere 5 minutes later.

 

In my cause though, it's possible I might just just be getting throttling. Been monitoring my temps and the FPS seems to really take a dive once my GPU temp hits a certain threshold. If I alt-tab out of the game for a few minutes and let the GPU cool down a bit, the FPS seems to return back to normal until it hits that threshold temp again, the stuttering returns, rinse and repeat. I'm not sure why it's changed so drastically over the past few months, but hoping that cleaning my system out a bit and getting a cooling pad may help.

 

Anyways, not sure how much that helps you, but perhaps monitor your temps in game just to make sure they aren't getting too out of control?

Edited June 21, 2012 by NicVic

[kawaitei]

i'm confident it's not the CPU temp. No other game or program slows down the same way Skyrim does. As soon as i quit Skyrim, everything else on the computer runs great. i could easily quit Skyrim and hop into another game if i felt so inclined.

...unfortunately, all i want to play is Skyrim.

 

-Kawai Tei-

[Georgiegril]

If you have recently updated your drivers, (by recent I mean in the last year....) there is a good chance you are experiencing video card related problems due to improper update. It is no longer possible to use the standard driver update procedure for NVidia. Updates to NOT write over older updates, and rollbacks do NOT remove drivers. You MUST follow a specfic new procedure. This is listed in the NVidia driver update readme, but no one reads those any more than they read the mod readmes...

 

Here is a link to the instructions.

correctly update NVidia drivers