Unstable fps in Skyrim what is going on

[chrisafp07]

Well I've been running some higher end games on my system as I recently upgraded and decided it was time to move on from a console to a gaming rig, expandable, better visuals, better interfaces, more games etc. Long story short, I've been playing games like Far Cry 3, GTA 4, at 50fps or so around high settings. Also, I play other RTS's SC2, Empire Total War, all ultra settings, 50-60fps. All of the games I mention (besides GTA4 which experiences very minor stutters but not frequently) run stable fps in an area that looks comfortable. Skyrim is another story, I can go from 60fps to 15 with a turn, in outdoor environments, almost randomly I will go from 40fps down to 18, I'll keep following the road, go back to 40, I'll turn around and go back through the area I experienced low fps and the same happens, also these areas seem to not differ at all from their surroundings as far as being intense action, alot of grass or lighting... stuttering also seems to randomly occur. Which is a serious immersion killer.

These instabilities seemingly only occur in outdoor areas, indoors, especially dungeons, I run easy 50-60fps steady and never experience stutter or slowdown even in intense combat or extreme lighting. I've poked around Nexus Mods for optimization and disabled mouse acceleration, I'm not sure what to do, shouldn't my specs be able to run this game in higher settings with at least a steady 35fps? I mean 30fps at least feels nice. Thanks guys!

My specs:
AMD Phenomx4 965 BE oc'd to 3.8ghz Hyper212 Evo
Gigabyte 78mlt 760g mbo
8GB HyperX Blue Kingston 1600mhz
XFX R7750 1gb ddr5 800mhz

 

[necrokamios]

For starters can you make any difference between medium and higher framerates? generally in terms of if the FPS fluctuates a lot still.

Try playing without overclocking your processor, try to roll back driver on the graphics card.

and what OS are you running?

 

[chrisafp07]

Windows 7, and I will try playing w/o oc'd cpu and see if it helps.

 

[chrisafp07]

Removed overclock but it had no effect except for a minor fps drop actually. Nothing positive. Where would I want to roll back my drivers to? A time when a Skyrim patch was released or after?

 

[blackmancer]

Turn down the textures from High to Med to Low and run the game, dont bother adjusting any other setting. If you notice the game suddenly improves when you lower the texture quality, you know that the video card just doesn't have enough video memory, which is why you get choppiness due the files being swapped in and out of the video memory. those dungeons are as big as some games. Download a program called MSI Afterburner. It is an overclocking program, but it has good monitoring tools that you can use to check how much video memory is being consumed so that is another way to check exactly. I think you may have to tell it to show video memory usage in the settings.

 

[chrisafp07]

Ok, I'll check out MSI afterburner and see where to go from there. If my GPU is bottlenecking maybe its time to upgrade, I actually bought this card under the impression it would have no issues with Skyrim sadly though.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

They're fixing it!
- http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times/2

 

[chrisafp07]

They're fixing it!
- http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times/2

Wow. Reading that was such an eye opener and made me feel alot better about my card, maybe once we see 13.2 I won't have these issues and can wait another 6months or so to upgrade. Thanks for this article man.

 

[chrisafp07]

So, I downloaded the Catalyst 13.2 BETA drivers, solved almost all of the stuttering, except occasionally during very fast turns in open areas with alot of vegetation. Flawless 60fps no stutters in all dungeons, and around 30-40fps outdoors with no stutters mounted. What an improvement, havent seen any issues yet either considering its a beta but drivers are always in beta even when they're called official releases.

 

[Scott_D_Bowen]

Yeah, it's the best Beta from AMD/ATI in b****y ages!