yes but alt tab makes the game unstable

I guess ..for some...I can ALT/TAB every hour during a 15 hour session to take a screenshot of Process manager...never gets unstable.

unstable like fires becoming invisible, waters becoming invisible, chance for a random crash perhaps.. 15 hour session? damn..

Damn indeed!

Bump. Performance problem still persists with newest patch.

I found out that alt+tabbing flushes the gpu memory the moment the game is maximised /brought to foreground again. The gpu memory usage drops to almost zero and quickly fills when going back to the game (which is fine). The game runs smoothly afterwards. gpu memory usage is about 850MB. I'm playing on fullscreen.

Before alt+tabbing the memory usage is exactly the same but the game hangs / stutters when I turn around, go to 3rd person or just run around in the same location.

Any intention to implent a console command that does this in game (flush gpu memory)?

PCB works for me & i use MSI Afterburner's on screen display to confirm it, The memory management is better in Skyrim than the fallout's/oblivion but it's still a bit lazy, PCB works well for me & i'm patiently waiting for a mod similar to the one's used in Bethesda's other games.

I'm not sure if PCB clears the system ram though, However i'm sure it's linked by the fact that if the vram is running out system ram will be used so i suppose it does both.

Then again i could be completely wrong & talking out of my backside, I blame lack of sleep.

System Ram is not the problem. I have checked it and usage stays the same even with PCB and alt-tab.

@MoggyW
If you alt+tab the gpu memory jump in Afterburn is from alt-tabbing not from PCB. You would have to run them on seperate displays to check correctly.
Windowmode of Skyrim probably influences the result too.