This lag is a mystery...

[nick12345]

I recently spent £250 on a new graphics card and Im a little frustrated with the lag Im getting when playing Skyrim...

My specs are

Powercolor 6970 2GB oc to 920mhz
AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" overclocked to 3.75ghz
Asus M4A78T-E AMD 790GX (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10600C7 1333MHz Triple Channel (my mobo dosent support triple channel)
OCZ ModXStream 780W SLI Ready Modular Power Supply
Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM

the thing that is making be wonder is this benchmark...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

I have my settings LOWER than this (the shadows are on LOW and the AA is 2x and AF is 8x) and with my CPU overclock which is higher than the one in the bench I should be getting above 29 fps min right? Also looking on benchmarks the HD 6970 has about 2 fps on the GTX 570 so it can't be that.

The thing is Im getting like 26 fps in some places (usually cities), but when out in the open I am getting like 59fps.

I dont understand what is causing this massive dip in lag? I would REALLY appreciate any help...

 

[rolli59]

It is normal to get lower in cities (more detail). Which drivers?

 

[bwrlane]

I'd say your experience is normal. My setup is 560Ti SLI, i7 920 at 4GHz and get the same experience as you.

This game is CPU bound (as well as not being very well optimised). In cities I see almost 100 utilisation on one core, with around 50% on the others, while the CPU is only about 60% utilised.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

i get the same thing in cities/towns. Its just the game. It is very frustrating, i hope they release a patch to fix the low fps in towns.