Hey guys,

I'm playing Skyrim on my laptop with the following specs:

Intel i7 2670qm @ 2.2 ghz

Nvidia GTX 570m

4GB RAM

Win 7

I am suffering a decrease in framerate over times in certain areas, particularly (it would seem, and I am led to believe) where there is a large distance out ahead of me. I limit my framerate to 30 to prevent wild fluctuations, but if I stand still and look at the view of Bleak Falls Barrow from the cave where you exit the tutorial I see my framerate decrease after about 30 seconds from 30 to around 20 over a period of about another 30 seconds, but I can not work out why. This I find strange for the following reasons:

• The game by default sets my graphics at Ultra, but I have anti aliasing disabled for performance boost, and shadows and distant detail set to "high" rather than ultra.
• Although I usually play with Skyrim HD (Lite) and other graphics-intensive mods such as Static Mesh Improvement, disabling these has no impact on my performance, and the decline continues in an identical fashion. When all mods are disabled, this continues to be the trend.
• I have butchered some things in the skyrimprefs/skyrim.ini file, such as thinning out grass, removing shadows from them and from trees but to no avail.

Can anyone tell me why this may be happening, and what I can do?

Although not game-crippling in all circumstances, as there are places this doesn't happen, it is frustrating that I can't go somewhere and not be able to predict the performance my game runs at. Additionally, people elsewhere with lower powered laptop graphics cards seem to be able to run Skyrim on ultra settings better than my laptop does, though I can't see why this is.

I can post more details if required

Cheers

Chris

Mobile chips these days are designed to underclock themselves dynamically under heavy number crunching situations (throttling under load is the correct terminology). They do this for two reasons:

1. Prevent overheating
2. To conserve battery power.

Try monitoring the temperatures of your GPU and CPU using EVGA Precision/MSI Afterburner (for GPU's) and RealTemp (for CPU's). The solution to number two is to set the power settings in Windows to a more desktop like environment. You'll need to be plugged into an electric outlet too.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that you should also set the power management setting in the Skyrim profile of the Nvidia control panel to "High Performance".

Hi, thanks for your reply.

I have nVidia inspector which can monitor GPU temp. What temperature would you say is too high and besides being in a well ventilated place, what could I do to keep the temperature down?

I've already got "high-performance" checked in the nVidia control panel, but thanks for the suggestion.