Jump to content

Poor Performance with new video card


ntin

Recommended Posts

My problems started when I upgraded my video card to a Sapphire 7950 Vapor-X (3gig of vram) a few weeks ago and my Skyrim performance has been pretty poor since that point. I found out the ATI 12.9 and 12.10 for the 7000 series has a bug where outdoor shadows do not render properly so I clean uninstalled the 12.10 driver (and removed the miscellaneous folders and registry keys) then went to the 12.11 beta driver which fixes the outdoor shadow problem. Now CCC does not seem to be able to force AA or AF and it has to be done from the Skyrim Launcher. Also I have tried to use the Skyrim HD -2k Texture pack but it does not load into my game for whatever reason even after archiving the default HD pack in the skyrim.ini

 

My shadows in most environments are extremely jagged or uneven in quality, I have fiddled endlessly with shadow options but the only real fix was raising the shadow resolution to 8196 but this seem to cause freezing when loading or random crashes. I have tried lowering the fShadowDistance value as from what I read that should increase shadow quality. As well as lowering and increasing iBlurDeferredShadowMask and iShadowMaskQuarter, values. Yet my shadows are never near the quality that I have seen in other people’s screen shots.

 

Aside from the new video card I have an i7-930 overclocked to 3.8ghz and 12 gigs of PC1600 (although Skyrim being 32bit that does not matter much). Mod wise I am not running anything that crazy just some character model replacers, armor packs, and Climates of Tamriel. My computer is not the ultimate gaming rig anymore but it seems like I should be able to handle Skyrim with the bells and whistles running where now it is really struggling.

 

Anyone have any tips or ideas, to fix my graphical and performance problems?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Did you use a driver cleaner app when you removed your old card's drivers? I have found more often than not that when I have performance issues on a new card it is because the old drivers didn't uninstall fully and files get left behind that conflict with the new card. Especially the case when you switch Nvidia to AMD or vice versa. Driver Cleaner Pro is my go to cleaner app but there are many other free apps out there that can do the job. The regular uninstaller never does a proper job of it sadly.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Try these settings:

 

 

Skyrim.ini
========

[Display]
fSunShadowUpdateTime=0.500
fSunUpdateThreshold=0.500
fShadowLODMaxStartFade=4000.0
fSpecularLODMaxStartFade=4000.0
fLightLODMaxStartFade=4000.0
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096
bActorSelfShadowing=1

SkyrimPrefs.ini
============

[Display]
iBlurDeferredShadowMask=5
fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000
fShadowDistance=8000.0000
iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=1024
iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=2048
iShadowSplitCount=2
iShadowFilter=4
iActorShadowCountInt=6
iActorShadowCountExt=6
fSpecularLODStartFade=4000.0000
fShadowLODStartFade=4000.0000
fLightLODStartFade=4000.0000
iTexMipMapMinimum=0
iTexMipMapSkip=0
bTransparencyMultisampling=0
iWaterMultiSamples=0
iMultiSample=0
iShadowMode=4
bTreesReceiveShadows=1
bDrawLandShadows=1
bDrawShadows=1
bShadowMaskZPrepass=0
bFXAAEnabled=0
iShadowMapResolution=4096
fShadowBiasScale=0.4000
iShadowMaskQuarter=4

 

Edited by steve40
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...