Skyrim Performance Observations - Possibly Crash Related.

[Kunaak]

I want to avoid your typical gamer forums on this one, cause I dont think your average PC gamer really tends to know what they are talking about.
but I been seeing some odd things in skyrims performance lately, and it may be worth hearing from other people.

first my PC, 4.2 ghz, quadcore, OCZ 80 gig Revo SSD, 2 x GTX 580s, 12 gigs of corsair.
very nice PC, very solid.
runs everythings pretty solid.
but theres a weirdness in Skyrim specifically that I cant quite track down.

I run on a 2010 dell 24, 1920 x 1200, on ultra settings.
the game will be absolutly solid at 60 FPS, even under the most demanding lighting conditions, and objects around.
then, outta no where, it just turns to a slide show.

now I usually know what this is - the videocards are getting hot and swapping to 2D mode.
but the tempetures and speeds showing in both rivatuner, and evga precision, show no such thing happening, temps are well below 70c, and speeds never change.

then another odd thing happens from time to time.

that game just randomly, instantly crashs. goes from mid game, to desktop in the blink of an eye, without warning, and no error message.

hmm.... now I have a theory on that one.
see watching the performance of the game, and how the game uses my PC I came across a few things.

this game makes almost no use of my PCs actual ram, theres almost no difference in system ram at start up, and ram used when the game is running.
it might go from 2.75 gigs used at start up, to 2.90 with the game on, but that really could be from anything, the game just seems to use almost nothing for ram.
you can easily see this with a second monitor, and run system properties.

the game makes little to no use of CPU speed, or more then 2 cores, and zero use of hyperthreading.
in system properties, with the game runnning, I will typically see 2 cores active at about 20% use, and everything else flatline, with no use.

but the real interesting part is in EVGA precision, and Rivatuner, and the videocard itself.

see, when you start the game, you will see the game using about 60% of the GPU, and the longer you run around in the game, the higher the GPU use gets, till it finally maxs at 100% and will never drop below that till it finally crashs.

the good news about this kinda performance is, as long as your videocard is good, you should be able to run the game well, as the vast majority of the work is handled by the videocard, and thats about it.
the bad news is.... any crashing or weird performance issue is probably related to the fact that the videocard will eventually be running at 100% use.
atleast, thats my theory.

I suspect a old PCB (purge cell buffer) command may fix this, but I havent tried it just yet.

have you see anything like this? have you been able to fix it so you didnt get the random slide show, or instant crash?
I am just curious what other PC gamers that actually know whats going on in thier PC, have come up with.
not the usual "lulz, your PC sucks dude, get a alienware".

[Zayras]

LoL, I also got a random crash and slow stuttering (about 4 FPS). It only crashed once on me though, and I have it uninstalled right now because I couldn't stop playing it but I don't remember it using 100% GPU, my 580 only got to 48 C on air and never went any higher than that. Maybe it's an SLI issue? <- complete speculation.

You should note that I did mod the .ini file and had a few other mods as well. I think the time it stuttered was because I had set some of the settings in the .ini file way too high and the GPU probably did revert to 2D mode, but went back to 3D mode after loading my previous save from the game menu.

Maybe you'll have to wait for the WHQL drivers from Nvidia
The crash probably is a bug though.

[nullface]

I had the same instant crashes but it seemed it was my OC, after setting everything to stock settings all is good and fine.

BTW: My OC ran everything else fine and did Prime95 24hr, guess Skyrim is the new stability test.

[Dainas]

It's a Nvidia driver issue. Once in a blue moon i was getting these slowdowns both indoors and out in Skyrim. I run a single 580.

Seeing if it was an engine issue (Skyrim is based off a heavily modified Gamebryo) I went back to Oblivion, and sure enough the exact same slowdowns happen at times indoors. Funny though it rarely happens outdoors in Oblivion, just in Skyrim. However considering Skyrims outdoor render method it makes sense. Oblivion is still very stable though, but the similarities in stutter occurrence indoors, when such things never happened to Oblivion in its 5 year history, is hard to ignore. I ran an Athlon X2 at 2.4ghz and 7800GTX SLI back when Oblivion launched, outside it would puke at times but indoors was always smooth.

[Andrew LB]

I'm running a GTX570 and have not experienced any stuttering or massively reduced frame rates regardless of where in Skyrim I am. Now I have had the occasional random crash to desktop problem which actually repeated itself at the identical spot after reloading. I had the exact same thing happen in Mass Effect 2 in Nos Astra in the hallway that runs from the trading floor to the shipping area (right where the advertisement for "blasto the hannar spectre".. hehe. I always laughed when i heard that.



Soo.... does anyone have an ETA for Qarl's High Resolution Texture Pack? Yea, i know the game just came out and such things take time... but I need an excuse to buy another GTX570.

[xarot]

I'm gaming with one GTX 580 only enabled. When using 3-way SLI, I experience some water/mountains flickering, slow downs and actually even some mammoths and animals fly in the air. Just weird. I don't use vsync, maybe my FPS goes too high at times? In dungeons where I have high FPS, mouse vertical speed is also way faster than horizontal speed.

I use the most recent beta drivers. 3-way SLI gpu scaling is only around 25-50 % per card, and causes some problems..

[Ket]

Sudden slow performance: Could be caused by a bug in nvidias drivers, or depending on the engine the suddenly slow FPS might be caused by a very high level of bloom effect and/or Global Illumination. Failing that there might be a bug in the game code itself where data isn't being flushed properly.

Random crash to desktop: Oblivion suffered with this as well. Never did get fixed.

Overall, glad I didn't buy Skyrim out the gates like I was going to.

[One_Hertz]

I am running a 6990 and I don't get any sudden slow performance issues although it does crash to desktop once every few hours. I think that is a bug in the game as it happens to a lot of people with different hardware.

There are definitely bugs here and there due to CF though.

[Tao~]

Since there is discussion about nvidia gpu's in Skyrim, i'll contribute in with my little info. Game runs smoother than previous Bethesda titles - i get a constant 22-25 fps @ 1366*768,4xAF,4xAA,FXAA on my GT525M w/ R285 WHQL drivers. This is much better than Oblivion, where I experience stutters and lags although fps stays pretty high.

But, the game does hang sometimes, it does not crash, i have to manually kill the application.

I am using Skyrim with Update 1.

[Kunaak]

seems memory is definatly a issue with the game.

the games unmodded max used ram is 800 megs, and is limited and checked within steam.
any file that doesnt fit the specified limits that steam looks for, gives a error 51, and files are replaced with unmodded files.

some clever guy came up with a 4 gig fix, this doesnt mean the game will by default fill up that much ram, it just means the game has more ram available to it, to avoid the crashing.
been using this all day, not a single crash.

for me, previously, crashing to desktop would happen randomly, anywhere from 10 min into the game, to 2-3 hours in. but was always happening.
today, I played all day, with this file as my EXE, and not a single crash or anything.

strangely, the game still doesnt use much more then 1.1 gigs of ram still.
but the game is definatly more stable.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1013

[NEOAethyr]

I'm wondering if it's:
Needs more then 6gigs of ram total (inc. swap).
Sound drivers.
Bad vga cards or drivers.


I was visiting over a buddies 2 days ago and he said he's been playing everyday since it came out, and he's not had one prob like I had...
Mine plays fine for a while, note I got everything on lowest detail, res is at 1080p though..., then the audio chugs, a latency type of prob.
Then the video goes right along with it producing missing textures and such.
Every time I've ran across this prob, I could turn the char away from it and it would be fine, audio still glitchy though.
But the more I look into the video glitch the worse it gets until it completely hard locks my system.

I cannot even start then game at 192k set in the audio playback pref's in windows.

That's what makes me think it's a timing issue.
I suppose it could be overloading something say the gpu and causing a latency prob over time, once the latency reaches a certain point the entier system can't respond, at least my asus can't with the bios it's got.
I haven't looked at anything to see how it loads up my system, nor my protected mode irq thingy latency err., oh dpc latency.

This isn't the only game to screw up on me though either.
My system I never got 100% stable.
I mean I can pass any "test", but using say opera, explorer..., and some games cause random probs, they each have they own way of crashing, most of the time not with games, but once in a great while some games crash and I'm left wondering wtf...
What else is odd is that I can't even install steam period, I already tried a brand spanking new windows install, no drivers and I got the same error.
Last time I knew I had gotten it to pass 8hrs of gameplay with mafia2 mostly maxed (physics not maxed), the last game I had major probs with on random.
But then explorer still crashes at random when files get copies TO my drive, can be from a plain right click->copy->paste->explorer crash, or from opera, as soon as it finishes a dl -> explorer crash -> explorer restart.
Happens 1-2 times everyday, or seems like it, the explorer crash, never happened on pre-sp1 though :\ or win2003.

I noticed that mw3 crashed when you didn't have enough mem, it took a while on some level's so it was confusing.
Right now I have a 4gig swap and 2gigs of ram.
Seems to be enough for everything as far as I can tell but I could be wrong.

One other issue I have is that my dvd burner died, and I haven't even wrote that many discs with it, maybe 20 max, if that.
Check the psu again a while back,seemed ok'ish..not great but.., 0.02v fluctuation.

Even if running everything around 22c, note that my nb is around 32c at these times.
And the darned thing is still goofy even at those temps.

I have no idea if my computer is at fault with this game or it's the game it's self.
Figured lowering everything down to nothing would fix up any sort of timing prob, nope.
I don't know much about it other the my system screws up on it.
I would be interested in figuring it out, plus the performance is somewhat of an issue too, gotta figure out what is hogging the performance up so I don't have to worry about max'ing it back out, 'cause sometimes when it was maxed it was pretty slow :\.
Have a fealing it's a stupid audio driver prob or something like that.