Overclocking or lowering core number for Skyrim?

Rig specs in sig. I have heard Skyrim is more CPU bound for certain graphical effects and it shows. My gpu only is being used at like 50%, while the game chugs in towns as low as 25 fps. While other outdoor areas run at 60 fps, no matter what resolution or graphical settings i use, it's always the same.

Since my cpu is a quad core i7 2630qm...i figured i should either try overclocking it...or reducing the amount of cores used from 4 to 2.

I know turboboost on the i7 2630qm is automatic, but is there a program i can use to reduce the amount of cores used or overclock it to temporarily fix this Skyrim issue while Bethesda gets off their to fix this horrible programming?

 

There is no overclocking.

 

As you mentioned the problem is not your hardware itself, but more of a game engine problem.
Remember that there are people's with desktop gtx580 that still have heavy fps drops in some towns such dragonsreach into 30's.
Your best bet will be tweaking the game a bit:

- use the direct3d9.dll to gain performance (skyrim nexus)
- set your options as ultra in the launcher, then disable AA/AF, check Fxaa and put shadows/object detail distance to high (this after you applied the dll fix above)
- oc your gpu a bit (I'm running 720/1800)

That's all. You don't need to further gimp the visual quality as the gtx485m is powerful enough, but you may want to set bTreesReceiveShadows and bDrawLandShadows in SkyrimPrefs.ini (documents\my games\skyrim) to further increase the load on the gpu with additional eyecandy.
Hope it helps.

 

Ughhh yea i'm not liking the cpu bound effects in this game, as my gtx 485m is only being used at 69% at most. I hope Bethesda plans to patch this.

Here's the settings i settled on...



Only setting here that seemed to affect anything was of course shadow detail...ultra loses about 10 fps, while high looks no different.



Then here, i tested with all the sliders at the low setting, then increasing each one to max one at a time. The only ones that made a difference were actor fade (2 fps) and object fade (about the same, 2 fps from low to high) and distant object detail from ultra to high helped.

I now get 28 fps at the worst possible areas (such as the corner of a city looking inwards) and constant 45-60 fps almost everywhere else. So i'll stick to that until Bethesda issues a performance patch.

I haven't tried the ini file fixes yet but i might. I also tried overclocking my gpu and it didnt change a thing.

Even when i enable Ambient Occlusion or 8x AA+FXAA it doesn't affect the gpu performance at all, the gpu runs at 50-68% all the time.

Even increasing to 1080p at these settings barely affects the framerate. CPU is a huuuuuge bottleneck with this game which is unfortunate.

 

Wow really surprised. I would think a quad core would handle the game with no issues. Too busy with work now, but later I need to buy the game from steam just to see how it runs. I mean the conventional wisdom has been that most gaming is all GPU bound, unless we're talking about something really physics intensive.

 

The game is basically not optimized for more than 1 or 2 cores. Seems pretty silly and hopefully they will patch it later. For the moment though, we're all kinda boned...

 

From what ive read it only uses 3 cores which is what the 360 uses. Figures they optimized it for 360 and not pc.

 

Assassins Creed Revelations does this too and it works great if you have a great processor. My CPU usage across 8 threads is 80-100% consistently throughout the game but FPS never drops under 45 even in the most dense city areas.

 

45 fps isnt considered ideal though, especially when a gpu like the 485m should be running games like Skyrim and AC:R which are built around dx9 effects at 60 fps constant.

This whole cpu bound crap is due to the games being developed for consoles first, which have weak gpus and need tasks offloaded to the cpu just to maintain 30 fps, while us pc players who want 60 fps are being bottlenecked by these stupid design choices.

Especially considering our gpus are powerful enough to push every dx9 quality game past 60 fps.

 

true, I hope more companies like cdprojeckt red (witcher team) develops games for pc market exclusive or least first preference! its sounds foolish that they make games for consoles that are like 6 years old hardware and make us play it on pc!

 

Probably what's helping here is my cpu compared to yours. Its used alot in Skyrim and Ac Revelations, but also with some overclock on my gpu, things gets smoother.

As an example AC Revelations runs 60fps vsynched, maxed out with 2xAA, while Skyrim is 60fps everywhere (dll fix+added shadows objects+FXAA+shadows/obj to high). It drops to 40-45 in towns, and around 52-55 when alot of paticles are on screen (fog, flames etc).

AC Revelations sometimes drops to 55-56.5 for a split second but i guess its because of the streaming of the data than anything else.