Skyrim just broke itself, and my smithing skill isn't high enough to fix it :(

Not sure what happened here, but I'm posting this for the dear wifey. She's been getting in touch with her inner dragon warrior over the last couple days (yay Steam sale!), and everything has been running fine on her desktop in my signature at a near constant 60 fps on high settings. She went into some cave, and her performance became progressively worse - by the time she left the cave, she was getting 20 fps standing still doing nothing, and teens or less in combat/action. Even going into a store and buying/selling stuff has become impossible.

We've tried the usual things - lowering settings, saving/loading, quitting to desktop, and restarting the PC. Even starting a new game, which runs like crap right from the start. Nothing has helped significantly, and for what it's worth, there's no unusually high CPU/GPU usage. I made a couple of .ini tweaks when I installed the game, namely enabling the multithreading options and increasing the preload cache or whatnot. It is also my understanding that the latest version of the game has the LAA patch built-in, so I haven't applied that. The only mod she's using is the one that makes lockpicking easier. I tried restoring the original SkyrimPrefs.ini (made a backup before changing anything) and the terrible performance persists.

I'm running out of ideas, but this must be something Skyrim-specific, as Mass Effect 3 still runs perfectly. Drivers are the latest non-beta version from nVidia.

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The save file might have been corrupted and started to bloat because of the mod. You can check for that by looking at the size of the file in documents>my games>skyrim>saves. If it's bloating, the file size will be abnormally larger than other, younger saves. It can be a difference of 5MB, or smaller, or larger between one save and the next. Each new save, on average, should only be in the tens to hundreds of kilobytes larger or smaller than the one which preceded it depending on how often you save. A difference of size in megabytes is what you want to look for.

(edit: I missed that you tried this on a new game and it still slowed down. Still try disabling any mods from loading at startup, then try a new game.)

Then try disabling the mod and load one of your wife's earlier saves to see if the problem's fixed. If it is, continue on from there and delete the corrupted saves.

Also link the mod that is installed, if you can. That might help pinpoint a solution.

Other things to consider might be a background program (antivirus?) starting while Skyrim is running, or maybe Windows is parking your cores, slowing down performance. Doesn't sound like either of these are likely, but worth a mention.

Another edit: Also try verifying your game install with Steam. Might resolve any file corruption issues.

 

This is the only mod that's installed. It's tiny and insignificant, and it's been installed since she started playing.

I installed Skyrim on my own PC and, using her save, can play it just fine. I wonder if she needs to reinstall the game...

 

Yeah that mod won't/shouldn't cause any trouble. I added in an edit to my last post to give verifying the game install a shot.

You could also check skyrimprefs.ini in the main skyrim folder to make sure it's okay (steamapps>common>skyrim>skyrim), but I don't think it would cause any problems.

If nothing else works a fresh install is what I'd try. Or maybe you can copy your Skyrim folder from your computer over to your wife's, then run the verify wizard to save some downloading time.

 

I've got it backed up to a USB drive, along with all my other Steam games, so reinstalling from scratch won't take too long. Strange that performance would all the sudden take an arrow to the knee like that, though.

 

That is awesome.

 

Well, I still have no idea what went wrong, but reinstalling the game has fixed it. Same save, same SkyrimPrefs.ini as before, but no more lag.

 

Glad you got it working again. Maybe just a corrupt/fragmented file got in there. At least you got the bugs out and got it working again.