Hi, i have a weird performance problem. Normally i play the game at 60 fps without any problems. (There are some annoying micro stutters, but not game breaking.) There are two things that drop my fps:

1. Embers. At first i thought the problem was smoke rising from embers but no, it's only embers. If i look at embers my fps drops from 60 to 30-35. Even if i face embers from a very long distance fps still drops.

2. Town centers. For example when i face the large well in the middle of Riften marketplace, my fps drops to 35-40. And most of the towns have similar problems. It's not npcs or embers or something else. My fps is high when i'm not facing the marketplace.

So my pc handles everything Skyrim and tons of mods throw at it, but not embers and town centers! Some useful info:

FX 8350 - HD 7950 - 16 GB DDR3 1600 MHZ

Windows 7 64 bit

All drivers and programs are up to date

Skyrim up to date

I tried with or without mods (completely removing everything non-vanilla and then starting a new game), i tried with custom or vanilla ini files (with very low settings), i tried with custom RadeonPro profile or vanilla, i tried everything... No difference, my fps always drops. I know that town fps drop is a very common problem, i can live with it. But embers ruin my game, please help me.

I have similar behaviour when I look at fires; I've never noticed anything about centres of towns though. I must admit that I don't bother; I don't think it's possible to have always 60 fps and mine vary from 0 to 64.

It would be a problem if this is a recent behaviour. Have you always have this or is it recent?

It has been always like this from the start. It's not related to something i installed or a setting i changed.

Same thing for me as my computer is brand new (ten days). Maybe it's normal after all. I suppose people will answer this better than me.

Thanks for trying to help me.

Embers tax me hard too. Never had big dips in towns. Lower average but nothing noticeable without an fps monitor.

It's good to hear that i'm not the only one with embers fps drop. But what's the solution? Towns are full of embers and my fps goes from 60 to 30 and 30 to 60 constantly depending on where i'm facing. It's very annoying.