Skyrim Heavy FPS Drop and Fluctuation

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SpiritDrak

Honorable
Jul 25, 2013
3
0
10,510
Hello,

I get a steady 60 fps when I start up Skyrim and play for a couple minutes. After about 2 minutes my fps plummets to 10 and from then on fluctuates between 10 and 30 until I restart the game again. Here are my computer specs:

OS: Windows 7 x64
CPU: Intel i7-3610QM 2.30GHz
GPU: GeForce GT 640M 2GB Dedicated
Ram: 8GB

My rig should be more than capable of playing at 40fps+ on high settings. This happens with both vanilla and modded gameplay. I've monitored CPU and memory usage as well as temperatures and they are all normal. My drivers are all up to date. I've tried many performance enhancing mods and programs and I've tried reducing graphics quality down to its minimum, and while this does improve fps, it STILL plummets to below 20 after a few minutes. Does anyone know a possible cause of this?
 
Solution
17seconds
350 MB is nothing. It should come out of the gate at 1GB+. Are you using Steam? Maybe you can reinstall the game, or if you are on Steam "Verify Integrity of Game Files...".

The several things you need to do are:
- Make sure it's not the game (see above), make sure it's all patched up.
- Make sure it's not your drivers, do a clean install of the latest downloaded off the Nvidia website.
- Make sure you don't have some weird settings enabled in the Nvidia Control Panel, i.e. excessive AA levels, Multi-display performance mode, power savers, etc.
- Check out your background processes and turn off any that may be in conflict.
- Make sure your GPU is keeping cool and not overheating.
- Remove/disable all game mods.
- Make sure you...
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17seconds

17seconds

Champion
Jul 27, 2010
10,584
4
51,965
I'm assuming your video card only has 1GB of VRAM, in addition to being memory bandwidth limited. Non-modded Skyrim uses 1.49 GB of VRAM on my system. I'm assuming you're running into a VRAM wall. Please check back to confirm this suspicion.

Best to lower your Antialiasing settings, as well as texture quality and view distance.
 
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S

SpiritDrak

Honorable
Jul 25, 2013
3
0
10,510
So I've been monitoring VRAM usage while playing the game and it does not go past 350MB before my fps plummets. This is with no background processes running except for essentials. Considering 350MB doesn't come close to my max of 2GB, it doesn't seem to be a lack of VRAM that's causing this.

Does anyone else have any idea at all? Perhaps someone can suggest some other factors that I should monitor during gameplay to look for oddities? I've been searching for a while on the internet but I can't seem to find any other probable cause of this.
 
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17seconds

17seconds

Champion
Jul 27, 2010
10,584
4
51,965
350 MB is nothing. It should come out of the gate at 1GB+. Are you using Steam? Maybe you can reinstall the game, or if you are on Steam "Verify Integrity of Game Files...".

The several things you need to do are:
- Make sure it's not the game (see above), make sure it's all patched up.
- Make sure it's not your drivers, do a clean install of the latest downloaded off the Nvidia website.
- Make sure you don't have some weird settings enabled in the Nvidia Control Panel, i.e. excessive AA levels, Multi-display performance mode, power savers, etc.
- Check out your background processes and turn off any that may be in conflict.
- Make sure your GPU is keeping cool and not overheating.
- Remove/disable all game mods.
- Make sure you haven't modified the .ini files for the game.

That's kind of a start and a lot of things, but to me it's a process of elimination and doing the standard trouble-shooting routine.
 
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