Skyrim 10 fps in travel scenes, help!

[iwantitall]

Hello,
I am getting 5 to 10 frames/ sec while traveling through skyrim. Loading screens takes ~30 seconds. When a sreen loads it takes 10 sec to be able to start. Do I need to upgrade from my LG775 system? Would a quad core help?

asus striker II mb (lg 775)
E8400 dual core cpu ocd to 3.51 ghz
Nvidia gtx 560 graphics card ocd to 950
latest nvidia driver 290.53
used the skyrim 3d mange program and set it to performance
intel 320 ssd
win 7, closed all unneccessary progams
Ran 3d mark 11 and got 8 fps during cpu test and 24 fps during graphics test.
DSL connection at 8 kps

 

[HEXiT]

go to the skyrim nexus and get the game patches and optimization mods
http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/forum/420-skyrim-mod-talk/

the game is badly optimized for dual cores and wil bottleneck the cpu quite badly. 1s the mods are installed and working your performance should improve...

also 8KBps or 8kbps on a dsl line? where you at, the middle of africa cos thats very poor speed by todays standards in most eu countries.

 

[iwantitall]

So I should look into a quad core? or will this fix get me most of the way.
Are the scenes downloaded from steam or did they come on the disc?
My bad, 8mbps for my dsl speed.
i think i can assume 4 gb of ddr2 ram is not limiting.

 

[HEXiT]

a quad 2.6 or better would bring your gfx card to life.. and at least you will be sure its not bottlenecking anything you throw at it...
also its possible you have your gfx set up to high. make sure your no using more than 4xfsaa and maybe turn off or turn down some of the draw distances... it may just be that the game is auto detecting the gfx and not considering the cpu...
some mods to get... if your patched to 1.4 you wont need the LAA patch (large address aware allwos you to use upto and more than 4 gigs of ram but only brings a slight boost in performance) the d3d9.dll for nvidia (there is 2 of em 1 for each manufacturer so make sure you get the right 1) from the nexus to replace the 1 the game uses. this 1 does bring a good bump in performance.
and of corse the tesv patch/mod which on some lower end cpus has bumped about 20% gains on some systems....

 

[Nashsafc]

Take off ultra settings, it's not worth it, it just adds unnecessary detail to mountains and trees in the very far distance that just makes the scene look a little bit different, not noticeably better. Keep all water reflections on though, those effects do look nice and are somewhat noticeable. Enable the FXAA option in Skyrim Launcher Settings, turn of Anti-aliasing, as FXAA does a nice job, keep your Aniso-tropic filtering though.

make sure no scans or processes are happening in the background, as in the ones that are using your processor and memory. On windows 7 download a "All CPU meter" gadget to put onto sidebar, that will show you how much memory is being used, it's percentage and each core of your processor and it's percentage. You should be starting your game with memory bellow or around 2GB being used up depending on how much ram you have, and CPU usage around 2-5% for all cores.

SkyBoost
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=6058

Skyrim Script Extender
http://skse.silverlock.org/

Please tell me if i helped.

 

[bystander]

go to the skyrim nexus and get the game patches and optimization mods
http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/forum/420-skyrim-mod-talk/

the game is badly optimized for dual cores and wil bottleneck the cpu quite badly. 1s the mods are installed and working your performance should improve...

also 8KBps or 8kbps on a dsl line? where you at, the middle of africa cos thats very poor speed by todays standards in most eu countries.

Did one of the new patches change Skyrim? Originally it was badly coded for anything more than 2 cores. The game only liked 2 cores when it was released, and only cared about the speed of those 2 cores: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

Look at the last benchmarks, notice there is very little improvement from going from 2 cores to 3, and no difference after 3.

 

[HEXiT]

the patches spread the load across the cores more effectively. if you only have 2 cores then your likely to see them both max out to 100% and thats when the cpu will bog down and drop fps. im not absolutely sure about the official patches as i just used the 1s form the nexus as they sorted it quicker than the games manufacturer did. i know the 1.3 patch introduced LAA but other than that im not entirley sure... the patches that were offered on nexus actualy changed the code paths to make the game run more efficiently but your cpu must support them code paths for it to be of any use... most newer cpus do though so it shouldnt be an issue...

 

[Gothams Finest]

go to the skyrim nexus and get the game patches and optimization mods
http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/forum/420-skyrim-mod-talk/

the game is badly optimized for dual cores and wil bottleneck the cpu quite badly. 1s the mods are installed and working your performance should improve...

SkyBoost
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=6058

Skyrim Script Extender
http://skse.silverlock.org/

Please tell me if i helped.

Patch 1.4 has improved optimization on Skyrim. It has doubled my FPS in places.

SkyBoost and the other performance mods from nexusmods are no longer needed.

To download patch 1.4: Open steam, click on steam in the top left corner of the screen, scroll down to settings, then under beta participation select Skyrim beta.

 

[Nashsafc]

hey thanks for telling me about the update. OP should also take note of monitoring his CPU usage and memory usage, and HDD usage perhaps before he starts the game to make sure the hardware is at minimal usage. Because 10 FPS doesn't sound like it is a CPU problem but more like something else is going on. My phenom ii x3 just doesn't get 10 FPS for a game and i regard it as having low performance, and i don't even trust updates to give me that much more of an FPS increase.

 

[Spoony]

for a start dont overclock your card while playing this game, it WILL kill game play.

2nd of all turn off MSAA thats another killer in game in skyrim.

i have tri-crosfire 6970's and i STILL get that issue and i have 32gb or ram and the new 3930K, its a game fault and there is a new patch due out VERY VERY VERY SOON i think before end of this or next week

 

[Gothams Finest]

for a start dont overclock your card while playing this game, it WILL kill game play.

2nd of all turn off MSAA thats another killer in game in skyrim.

i have tri-crosfire 6970's and i STILL get that issue and i have 32gb or ram and the new 3930K, its a game fault and there is a new patch due out VERY VERY VERY SOON i think before end of this or next week

Overclocking does not "kill" gameplay in Skyrim.

The patch (1.4) is already out my friend. It doubled my FPS in places.

 

[Nashsafc]

i don't understand, Spoony is suggesting overclocking decreases performance? Why is that so, apart from the CPU being unstable.

 

[Gothams Finest]

i don't understand, Spoony is suggesting overclocking decreases performance? Why is that so, apart from the CPU being unstable.

It dosen't. He is misinformed.

 

[HEXiT]

in some cases it has been shown that an oc'd gfx card starts artifact and corrupting the gfx. but its often down to a bad or unstable oc or not enough power to the gfx when switching from 2d to 3d gfx... i think what he is referring to is that some cards that were sold as oc versions tend to be unstable with skyrim... personally i have no issues with the game. i run a slight oc but im well within the power requirements for it.

 

[Gothams Finest]

in some cases it has been shown that an oc'd gfx card starts artifact and corrupting the gfx. but its often down to a bad or unstable oc or not enough power to the gfx

Sure, but an overclock that is 100% stable is not going to decrease performance at all.

 

[Gothams Finest]

Patch 1.4 should solve your problem iwantitall, or at least greatly improve it.

Patch 1.4 has improved optimization on Skyrim. It has doubled my FPS in places.

It is still in beta so to download it you will need to follow these steps:

Open steam, click on steam in the top left corner of the screen, scroll down to settings, then under beta participation select Skyrim beta.

 

[iwantitall]

Thanks for the support. I loaded the latest beta fix for skyrim. Set the AA and the AF to 2x. It works better, but traveling is still not smooth. Does everyone have to wait a few seconds after the scene loads to play? Is a scene load time of 30 seconds typical? What limits the loading of a scene?

don't think my ocd graphics card is an issue, temp doesn't exceed 60 C

I also used the IOBIT program to turn off the unneeded programs running in the back ground. ( I did have an instance, where the game was unplayable while win 7 was updating).

 

[Gothams Finest]

Glad it works better now for you now.

Specifically what do you mean by traveling? do you mean fast traveling? or traveling on foot/horse?

Hard drive speed determines loading speed. Do you have Skyrim installed on your SSD?

 

[iwantitall]

traveling by foot is erratic with all the scene changes.

skyrim is loaded on the ssd.

 

[Gothams Finest]

What graphics settings are you using?

 

[iwantitall]

The game picked high quality, but I lowered the AA and AF from 8x to 2x.

 

[Gothams Finest]

Could try defragging the cache files and verifying the integrity of the game cache in Steam.

It should not be loading that slow on an SSD, the files may be missing or in the wrong place.

Right click on Skyrim in Steam, click on properties, click local files tab.

 

[iwantitall]

I thought ssd's were not to be defraggged.

 

[Gothams Finest]

Correct but you're not defragging the SSD you're defragging the cache files.

Right click on Skyrim in Steam, click on properties, click local files tab.

 

[iwantitall]

verified and defragged, no change