Forums » General Gaming

Skyrim stutter

    • 18 posts
    June 15, 2014 10:27 AM EDT

    I could really use some advice. When I built this PC, Skyrim played while recording with Dxtory at a constant 60fps, even with over 100 mods running it was perfect. Now FPS is dropping lower and lower the longer I play. In my current game it's dropping as low at 17fps at times with major microstutter as well.

    System specs:

    Intel i5-3570k @3.8GHz
    Patriot Viper Xtreme 16GB 1600MHz RAM
    Gigabyte GA-H77-DS3H Motherboard
    2x XFX RADEON DOUBLE D R9 270X 2GB Video Cards
    Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" SATA III SSD
    Western Digital Cavier 1TB 7200rpm HDD
    Windows 7 Pro 64bit

    Windows and Skyrim are installed on the SSD, and I record to the HDD.

    Things I've tried:

    1. Running Skyrim in Windowed Mode
    2. Disabling CrossFireX
    3. Limiting and unlimiting framerate while recording
    4. Reinstalling Skyrim
    5. Reinstalling Windows
    6. Every INI tweak idea I could find online
    7. Probably more, drawing a blank right now
    • 1483 posts
    June 15, 2014 10:34 AM EDT

    Does FPS continue to decline without mods? How much free space do you have on hard drive? How many saves do you have? 

    • 18 posts
    June 15, 2014 11:15 AM EDT

    Yeah even without the mods it doesn't run as well as it did. The SSD has 40gb free and the HDD has 700gb free. Currently have 32 saves.

    • 1483 posts
    June 15, 2014 2:21 PM EDT
    Hmm, can't see why it should happen. Your save amount is low, you have formatted PC so it's not a virus or some lagging software, you have a bunch of space so it's not pagefile getting filled... Could have connection to the Windows Update. You may've installed something that runs in the background impacting performance. I know .NET optimization service sometimes does that
    • 249 posts
    June 15, 2014 2:48 PM EDT
    Same. The longer my save files are and the more I have, the more the game has these little hiccups. I've only done it once so far but I deleted my entire Skyrim cache and started fresh and it was tons better. May have to do that again soon :p
    • 18 posts
    June 15, 2014 4:54 PM EDT

    Ben, deleting the extra saves seems to have helped a little.

    • 8 posts
    June 15, 2014 5:07 PM EDT

    Hi, this is something that I've seen a lot of people complain about, regardless of platform. It seems to happen most later on in the playthrough, the apparent reason is that after a while all of the extra npc corpses and loose items scattered around puts extra pressure on the game that wasn't there at level one. An easy fix is to wait for 30 days in-game, this causes all NPCs to respawn, as well as making all corpses and their items disappear. This alone helps stabilize the game for a lot of people.

    Also, as Ben already mentioned, save files can sometimes be a problem. I don't know if you're in the habit of overwriting old saves rather than making new ones, but every once in a while you should make a new save and delete the old ones, rather than overwriting. Saves sometimes get slightly corrupted after multiple rewrites, causing instability and other problems. This goes for autosaves and quicksaves as well, people tend to overlook those.

    • 249 posts
    June 15, 2014 5:56 PM EDT
    Lol cool shameless bump, Ben.

    ...(you should LP the Illithid ;))
    • 18 posts
    June 15, 2014 6:34 PM EDT

    I regularly delete the the quicksave and autosave files because I had lots of crashes when I first started playing Skyrim. I think it happened in Oblivion too. I also tend to create a new save for every level up or so, especially for the lets become series, just in case I have something really bad happen.

    There is a save game cleaner that deletes a lot of those items laying around the world, I know Gopher uses it to reduce savegame bloat.

    Thanks for the tips!

    • 18 posts
    June 16, 2014 12:04 AM EDT

    LOL, with all build suggestions it's too bad I can't do LP full-time :)