Skyrim and WoW very poor performance, out of the blue.

[Skilly225]

Hi Tom's community! I know there are innumerable threads about this on here, but after searching through these and many other forums I am stuck.

Recently, I stopped playing WoW due to real life time issues, and have began dabbling when I can in Skyrim. Everything was going fine, until I started getting odd framerate drops (from solid 60 on full ultra settings) to a 60 with almost constant fluctuations to the low to mid 40s.

WoW, which I logged into to just take a look was running very poorly as well, not just in pandaria, but all over my frames dropped from what I remember as a pretty smooth 60 (everywhere but a packed major city) to mid 30s and at best low 40s) and I am at a loss.

My main concern is with Skyrim at the moment, because it has also done something else odd, the game now auto-detects to medium quality, where before it was ultra.

I've tried disabling Skyrims vsync, and forcing through nvidia, as with the AA and such. Nothing seems to help.

My basic specs:

CPU: Intel 2500k @4.3
GPU: Two EVGA GTX 560ti 2gb (that's 2gb a piece) in SLI
RAM: 8gb Corsair Vengeance
OS: Windows 7 Home 64bit
PSU: Cooler Master GX-750w
HDD: 500g WD caviar Blue

As far as I can tell, I should be able to kick Skyrim's butt, but the weird framerate drops have made it recently unplayable (and thats with over 115 hours played, all of them recently).

And insights would be great. Thanks.

EDIT: My nvidia drivers are the current non-beta build.

Also, I forgot to mention that I think my PSU may be the issue for some reason.

 

[weaselman]

I think you should have a check to see if you have some sort of Malware on the system taking up Cpu cycles, There is a horrible one that chokes the cpu like mad.
Open up task manager and have a look to see if stdrd.exe is running anyware, or mediacentre.exe. In the process's tab, check its cpu usage if running. you can get rid of it will malwarebytes.

 

[Skilly225]

I've ran Malwarebytes (full scan) since the problem started occurring, but I will check again. I don't see either of those things in my task manager at the moment.

 

[HEXiT]

out of the blue can mean a few things. sometimes the hsf can work loose if its a standard clip down 1. make sure its on properly and the paste is good.
remove the dust... you can get a sudden drop in performance due to throttling.
check the hdd isnt fragmented.
make sure your free of infections.
make sure you havent had a drive by installer mucking around with your system and installed crapware while you were out... things like itunes or quick time.
use hijack this to look and see if you have any anomalous files.

 

[wrathofdragon]

did you by any chance update your skyrim and/or get Dawnguard/Hearthfire?

on the new updates they have updated the textures, and other graphics. i used to run it on full settings on max resolution, but after the update, my fps dropped to mid 40's.
i thought that it was my computer too, but when I re-installed Skyrim without the DLCs or updates, it ran PERFECT!

 

[Skilly225]

out of the blue can mean a few things. sometimes the hsf can work loose if its a standard clip down 1. make sure its on properly and the paste is good.
remove the dust... you can get a sudden drop in performance due to throttling.
check the hdd isnt fragmented.
make sure your free of infections.
make sure you havent had a drive by installer mucking around with your system and installed crapware while you were out... things like itunes or quick time.
use hijack this to look and see if you have any anomalous files.

I don't think it's my HSF as I have an after market fan held on by very solid brackets, and the after market fan is relatively new ~3 months old.

HDD is fine, only has games on atm and i defrag once every month (and just did it again haha)

I am very sure I am infection free, and I dont really seem to be throttling at all, CPU-wise.

No itunes or quicktime. Just Silverlight for netflix, that and pandora and the only non-gaming media I consume on this machine.

did you by any chance update your skyrim and/or get Dawnguard/Hearthfire?

on the new updates they have updated the textures, and other graphics. i used to run it on full settings on max resolution, but after the update, my fps dropped to mid 40's.
i thought that it was my computer too, but when I re-installed Skyrim without the DLCs or updates, it ran PERFECT!

I do, in fact, update my stuff, as I like to use updated versions of the very few mods I use (glowing nodes, skyui, and dragon falls manor).

I know after updating to v1.8 I wasn't having these problems, even so, I did dabble with the HD texture packs (have since disabled because I didn't notice THAT much of an improvement) and didn't have any problems.

One of the things that is really bugging me is the sudden auto-detect to medium. I know my computer isn't "god-like" but I still dont believe it should be detecting it in the bottom 50th percentile of their performance expectations. It shouldn't go from "HOLY COW MAX EVERYTHING" to "Looks like you're running on a laptop from '07"

 

[wrathofdragon]

I don't think it's my HSF as I have an after market fan held on by very solid brackets, and the after market fan is relatively new ~3 months old.

HDD is fine, only has games on atm and i defrag once every month (and just did it again haha)

I am very sure I am infection free, and I dont really seem to be throttling at all, CPU-wise.

No itunes or quicktime. Just Silverlight for netflix, that and pandora and the only non-gaming media I consume on this machine.



I do, in fact, update my stuff, as I like to use updated versions of the very few mods I use (glowing nodes, skyui, and dragon falls manor).

I know after updating to v1.8 I wasn't having these problems, even so, I did dabble with the HD texture packs (have since disabled because I didn't notice THAT much of an improvement) and didn't have any problems.

One of the things that is really bugging me is the sudden auto-detect to medium. I know my computer isn't "god-like" but I still dont believe it should be detecting it in the bottom 50th percentile of their performance expectations. It shouldn't go from "HOLY COW MAX EVERYTHING" to "Looks like you're running on a laptop from '07"

After the new updates and the re-textures they changed the PC requirments
(What you need to run on low/med/high settings)

 

[Skilly225]

Would you by chance have a link? I just can't believe I would have a tough time running the base game (no graphics mods) on mostly ultra settings and not maintain a solid 60fps.