I've been getting pretty huge FPS drops in areas I used to have no problems with, I haven't played Skyrim for well over a year so there have been a lot of patches and driver updates and I'm thinking something has changed. Riften's forests in particular are chugging terribly even without AA enabled, last year I could ride all over that place and barely drop a frame (Ultra, Supersample AA) but now it's bringing my GPU to it's knees, anyone know what's going on?

i7 4ghz, 6gb ram, ssd, 580 GTX, latest Forceware and fresh Win7 x64 install.

Somebody posted earlier about the latest Nvidia drivers having poor performance, maybe drop back a release or two. I don't use Nvidia, so I am not sure what the last stable driver package was. Also, some video cards, even with the same chipsets do not like certain driver packages.

Your system is super fast...so...

It wonders me because i see people over the net with those problems like you. (i mean it plays wonderful for about one year, and then first time playing again and boom huge frame drops.)

A reason could be the many mod's you have, have been probably updated until now.

Another reason could be that the latest patch may not have probably updated your older patch one year ago. (for example 1.9 patch over 1.4 patch)

I assume you have the latest unofficial patches installed, but i don't know really if that explains the huge frame-rate drops.

------------

Actually there is one workaround to see what's going on....restart with an new character !!!!! (first with all mod's disabled and then with all mod's on.)

------------

The above are general talking....but if you changed you graphics drivers to the latest one, and sure you did, perhaps it's a drivers fault as my friend CCNA said above.

Me speaking, i haven't encounter any strange behavior with the latest Nvidia drivers (331.65), considering i play on Windows 8.1.

But again, i haven't any mod(s) installed !!!!!!

Also, if this is a Fresh Install, you could have the Rumble and Gamepad enabled. Disable those.

Unless the person uses a gamepad and likes the Rumble. There are some PC users that like using a gamepad or at least from time to time such as me due to my arthritis. If you do not use a gamepad than it is a good idea to disable those.