Unplayable FPS

[chopain]

What in the world am I screwing up?

 

specs:

 

2  GeForce GTX 980 TI Hybrid in SL

Intel i7-5930k OC@4GHZ

16 GB Ram

Skyrim Resolution:  6880 x 2880 also trying 3440 x 1440

Hard drive 1TB SSD

 

My frames per second in exterior settings averages around 2.5.  Obviously my rig should be running this game just fine.  Tried messing around with settings in case it is a VRAM issue.  Tried reserving more memory.  Tried turning off Skyrim Flora Overhaul.  Tried windowed mode.

 

What is happening is that the textures are changing with each frame.  For example.  Dirt.  One frame it is cobblestone the next it is dirt.  Trees.  One frame it is a huge pretty tree the next it is just the trunk.  Lighting.  One frame it is bright the next it is shadowed.  Grass.  One frame it is nice looking the next it looks almost plain.  etc etc etc.  When I point my view down so I am only looking at the floor my FPS can reach a high of about 25 but averages about 15 fps.

 

Interior settings seem fine when starting game with Alternate life EXCEPT for the Thief guild.  When looking at the beautiful water graphics at the guild will bring me down to 2.5 fps pretty quickly.

 

I have installed this guide before on this rig and have not had issues.  That was in December of '15.  Before I cry and give up can I have some suggestions on what to do please?

[Rebel47]

Skryim, if your refering to the 32 bit version and not Special Edition does not work well with (if at all) SLI or X-Fire setups and depending on your windows version will ultimately determine exactly how much memory you can use in your game, that being said, trying to run the base game without mods on the resolutions you mentioned is going to be slow, but running it with SFO and any other mods you may or may not have in your game will just exacerbate this issue ten fold, basically if you want to mod Skyrim 32bit then reduce your screen resolution by a good chunk, maybe try 2560 x 1440 and see if that increases your fps, you may if you run heavy mods need to drop down to 1920 x 1080, but that's the limitations of Skyrim.

[chopain]

You are right.  Tried 1920 x 1080 and it works just fine.  I'm happy and sad at the same time.  Guess I'll up the rez in small increments to see what I can get away with.  Thank you

 

 

Skyrim 32 bit btw

Edited February 6, 2017 by chopain

[Mator]

You may also want to check to make sure your drivers are up to date. 

[RonHiler]

Skyrim 32 bit btw

There's your problem. If you are running 32 bit Skyrim in combination with Win8, 8.1, or 10, then you are hitting your VRAM limit, which maxes out at 3.2 GB (regardless of what is actually on your card). It's a limitation of DirectX 9 (not really Skyrim's fault). With your huge resolution, you are asking skyrim to render more textures than will fit in that space, and it's running those textures across the video buss every frame (a very slow process). Thus your low frame rates.

 

Fix: downgrade to Win7 (doesn't have the VRAM limitation), or upgrade Skyrim to 64 bit (used DirectX 10+, which also doesn't impose that limit). The latter sounds good, but be aware, many mods still don't work with the Special Edition version of Skyrim. Last I heard SKSE was coming to the SE in March, which may end up getting us a whole new batch of compatible mods. Though I suspect there will end up being a whole trove of mods that will never be converted for the SE edition.

[TheChemist]

You can Dual Boot Windows 7 specifically for Skyrim. It's not that hard, there are tutorials online on how you do it and you can get Windows 7 licenses very cheap on ebay.

 

At least that's what I did. Skyrim simply runs better on Win7, for the reasons RonHiler mentioned.

[paul666root]

or you can just wait until March when skse for SSE gets released 

[RonHiler]

Last I heard, Paul, there were no plans afoot to update SkyUI to the SSE, which is going to be a big problem for mod compatibility. Do you know of any news on that front?

 

We got about 30-40% compatibility (depending on the particular mod package) right off the bat with SSE. I predict once we get skse we'll get another third of the remaining mods (some will "just work", others will need tweaking, so maybe figure by April/May), binging us up to around 2/3rds of the entire set. That leaves the remaining 1/3rd of mods that will either have to be replaced with something else or just dropped altogether.

 

Someday I really want to try the Requim or YASH packages with SSE, and I hope that will become possible. Not holding my breath though :)

[Nozzer66]

Actually I believe the SKSE guys are now also working on a version of SkyUi as well.

[darkside]

You are right. Tried 1920 x 1080 and it works just fine. I'm happy and sad at the same time. Guess I'll up the rez in small increments to see what I can get away with. Thank you

 

 

Skyrim 32 bit btw

ENB is really performance heavy when playing with higher resolution than 1080p. SLI doesn't scale well with Skyrim. I never seen any report that SLI on SSE works any better???

[RonHiler]

Actually I believe the SKSE guys are now also working on a version of SkyUi as well.

Awesome! That's encouraging.

 

ENB is really performance heavy when playing with higher resolution than 1080p. SLI doesn't scale well with Skyrim. I never seen any report that SLI on SSE works any better???

Yeah, I suspect, like many games, the second GPU would go more or less unused (some games use that second GPU for physics, I don't know if that's the case for SSE or not). However, SSE should be able to use the VRAM off of both cards, so you should get more textures on the cards rather than on RAM. That being said, if you have overflow of textures onto the second card's VRAM, it would still have to be transferred across the SLI to the primary card to be rendered on a per-frame basis. I don't have any experience with that kind of setup myself (in a programing sense, I did have a pair of 970s SLI'd at one point, but strictly as a user, not a coder), so I don't know what the transfer rate is compared to transfer from RAM to VRAM. I'd expect it to be faster, but that's just a wild guess on my part.