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".
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