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:
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.
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!