Skyrim lags horribly.

[Ecnelis]

Hey guys, I've been playing Skyrim on Medium for the past 23~ hours of gametime and have had horrible lag, my PC is recommended default to High settings.

If i'm lucky outside and sometimes inside I get 30-60 FPS. But even in lowest settings I often drop below 30 FPS.

I don't understand why, help, please?

Summary specs:
CPU: Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition (3.2 GHz x6)
RAM: 8GB DDR3 Team Elite (1333, CL9)
GPU: HIS HD6850 Radeon (ATI Cata 11.11 Drivers)
PSU: Aerocool 600w (http://www.aerocool.com.tw/index.php/products/power-supply/38-eco-friendly-series/52-e80-600)
HDD: Primary: 7200 RPM, 500gb. Secondary: 1TB, 5200 RPM.
Mobo: Asus M4N68T-M V2 (HT 1.0)

Is it the HT 1.0 that's bottle-necking my PC (I've read that it shouldn't) or am I doing something really wrong?

PS I'm not Over-clocking anything, I tried to increase performance by doing so and it made almost no difference.
Using MSI Afterburner, CPU-Z I seen that neither were under heavy load.

I've also tried the DLL floating around (dxd9.dll)

Again, please help.

Spoiler

--------[ AIDA64 Extreme Edition ]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Version AIDA64 v1.80.1450
Benchmark Module 2.7.380-x64
Homepage http://www.aida64.com/
Report Type Report Wizard
Computer -
Generator Owner
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 6.1.7601 (Win7 RTM)
Date 2011-11-20
Time 20:52


--------[ Summary ]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Computer:
Computer Type ACPI x64-based PC
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
OS Service Pack Service Pack 1
Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421 (IE 9.0)
DirectX DirectX 11.0
Computer Name -
User Name Owner
Logon Domain -
Date / Time 2011-11-20 / 20:52

Motherboard:
CPU Type HexaCore AMD Phenom II X6 Black Edition 1090T, 3616 MHz (18 x 201)
Motherboard Name Asus M4N68T-M V2 (2 PCI, 1 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI-E x16, 2 DDR3 DIMM, Audio, Video, Gigabit LAN)
Motherboard Chipset nVIDIA nForce 7025-630a, AMD K10
System Memory 8192 MB (DDR3-1333 DDR3 SDRAM)
DIMM1: Team Group Team--Elite-1333 4 GB DDR3-1333 DDR3 SDRAM (8-8-8-22 @ 609 MHz) (7-7-7-20 @ 533 MHz) (6-6-6-17 @ 457 MHz)
DIMM2: Team Group Team--Elite-1333 4 GB DDR3-1333 DDR3 SDRAM (8-8-8-22 @ 609 MHz) (7-7-7-20 @ 533 MHz) (6-6-6-17 @ 457 MHz)
BIOS Type AMI (01/26/11)
Communication Port Communications Port (COM1)
Communication Port Printer Port (LPT1)

Display:
Video Adapter AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (1024 MB)
Video Adapter AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (1024 MB)
Video Adapter AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series (1024 MB)
3D Accelerator AMD Radeon HD 6850 (Barts)
Monitor Sony TV (200116843009)
Monitor ViewSonic VX2262wm [22" LCD] (QYY083950823)

Multimedia:
Audio Adapter ATI Radeon HDMI @ AMD Barts - High Definition Audio Controller
Audio Adapter VIA VT1708S @ nVIDIA nForce 7025-630a (MCP68SE) - High Definition Audio Controller

Storage:
IDE Controller Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
Storage Controller NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller
Storage Controller NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller
Disk Drive ST310005 28AS SCSI Disk Device (1000 GB, 7200 RPM, SATA-II)
Disk Drive WDC WD50 00AAKX-001CA SCSI Disk Device (465 GB)
Optical Drive ASUS DRW-24B3ST SCSI CdRom Device (DVD+R9:12x, DVD-R9:12x, DVD+RW:24x/8x, DVD-RW:24x/6x, DVD-RAM:12x, DVD-ROM:16x, CD:48x/24x/48x DVD+RW/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM)
SMART Hard Disks Status Unknown

Partitions:
C: (NTFS) 465.8 GB (93.7 GB free)
D: (NTFS) 931.5 GB (590.7 GB free)
Total Size 1397.3 GB (684.4 GB free)

Input:
Keyboard HID Keyboard Device
Mouse HID-compliant mouse
Mouse HID-compliant mouse

Network:
Primary IP Address 192.168.0.116
Primary MAC Address BC-AE-C5-99-70-BC
Network Adapter NVIDIA nForce 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet (192.168.0.116)
Network Adapter TeamViewer VPN Adapter
Network Adapter VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1 (192.168.208.1)
Network Adapter VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet8 (192.168.47.1)

 

[13thmonkey]

in device manager how many video cards do you have, as above you are listing 4 in total, 3 of which are generic. you should have 1.

the fps you are listing are not that suprising, what are the symptoms, lagging should refer to the time between you doing something and the action appearing on the screen, that is usually due to an interaction with a server. This is not the case in skyrim. If the symptoms are to do with the gap with action and result on screen then this is not about hardware power.

Latest drivers? did you do a clean install? wired or wireless mouse (fresh batteries?) is windows recognising all CPU cores (check task manager). I've heard that alt-tabbing out and setting the priority on TESIV process to high helps (I never saw it).

 

[Ecnelis]

Sorry, single graphics card - and I meant lag as in screen stuttering, no server-client lag obv. FPS drops shouldn't happen as much as they do imo.

I can play Crysis 2 on max settings with steady 60fps dx9 until i get into a huge battle (can't max on dx11, but can still play with good) Rage I can max out with 60fps no lag, fear 3, dragon age ii on high settings as well with minimal screen stuttering.

On skyrim I'd expect a lot less stuttering, people with very similar rigs (gfx, cpu) are experiencing 60fps (more with ini edit to disable vsync) on high settings.

Wired mouse, clean install, all cpu cores are recognized - skyrim utilises 2 cores more than the rest of them, set the priority to high and helps increase fps slightly.

Any more ideas?

Thank you for your time

 

[13thmonkey]

I agree that you should not be having these problems, i'm running a GTX470 on ultra at 2048x1152 and getting steady 30-40's, which isn't brilliant but is steady and perfectly playable. AA off?

Is it regular? I had a problem with a service (ipod) that would restart and fail every 60 or 90s and kick me out of a game. Have a look at the log and see if there are any warnings? (i'm not convinvced there'll be anything there)

I'm out of ideas right now, do the AMD forums show anything? could be an amd driver issue, you know there is a new driver out don't you?

 

[Ecnelis]

Yeah, AA off. I read about that. Even turned Anisotropy off. Everything on lowest possible settings I still get unstable FPS.

It is consistent - I don't get bursts of good FPS

In certain area's I may get 60 FPS, but others i'll drop below 30 (in lower settings) for example I was walking around in Winterhold and then walked onto the bridge into the school, fps dropped.

I've disabled unnecessary services - no crashes.

Latest driver. Catalyst is updated to 11.11 as well.

I've tried playing my normal resolutions (1920x1080 on 55", or 1680x1050 on 22", only one screen enabled / plugged at either instance).

And lower resolutions (which are unbearable).

CPU is near idle unless I'm doing something. All processes are known. I'm running out of ideas and think I've got something set wrong, somewhere.


I keep reading HT 1.0 can bottleneck PC's with a good graphics card, but if that were the case, I'd assume other games would have issues too.

 

[tekmage]

I've found that 11.11 performs poorly for my gf's Radeon so I downgraded to 11.10 and now it runs great. There must be something else going on though, because your system should be able to run this on high with AA and AF turned on.

try these and see if they help.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=91

or

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=123

My girlfriend runs the game at 1920x1080, everything on high, except blur on medium , decals ultra 2XAA, 8XAF and gets 30+ outdoors, a lot higher indoors.
her specs: AMD Athlon II Regor 2.7ghz, AMD Radeon 5670 1 gig, 3 gig DDR2(it's actually 4 gigs but Windows XP only uses 3.2 gigs of it.).

Oh, and try this too on top of the above files. This helped me quite a bit as well.

Large address aware:
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556

 

[Ecnelis]

ENB was the winner for me out of the first two links. Still stutters a small amount - but I'll tweak around till I can get a little bit better performance.

Large Address Aware hasn't made any difference but I'll definitely keep it on my desktop just-in-case.

Thank you very much for your help! I came across ENB's DLL yesterday and was about to post that as my solution.

I'll post back here if I encounter any problems.

 

[tekmage]

I'm actually using the FXAA Post Process injector which has the ENB in it, but it has some added effects to it. It makes things a bit sharper and brighter. I did try ENB series patch and it made the game extremely smooth but the colors seem duller. I think both are good solutions to stutter and lockup issues, well as overall improvement in the way game looks and performs.

 

[13thmonkey]

Does this apply to you?
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/115232-25-battlefield-6950
I know its BF3, but its an ATI specific problem.

 

[Ecnelis]

No, morphological filtering is always disabled in my CCC.

 

[Ecnelis]

Best answer selected by Ecnelis.