Mods: I put this in general, not tech issues because this is not due to a glitch or bug and is about general performance.

I have an i7 6700, gtx 970, 24gb ddr4 ram. On the orignal Skyrim I was running on ultra with no AA, 2160p with heavy graphics mods (except no enb shaders) and I was getting a stable 60fps.

With special edition, on ultra at 2160p I get 35-45fps that is so inconsistent, it is almost unplayable. It will go from 35fps, to 45fps, to 40fps, and back down to 35 fps, all within the time span of 5 seconds. This creates a large amount of stuttering. Right now I settled on playing at 1440p on ultra, and up scaling it on my 4ktv.

So I have two questions, does anyone know how to get the game to perform closer to the original? Are there certain settings that effect performance more so than others? I messed with shadows and it barely did a thing to help my FPS.

My second question is, how can I cap my FPS to 30? I could handle 30fps because I use a tv and sit on my couch with the controller. It'd basically be a 4k version of the console games. As long as it is a stable 30fps, that is fine. It's when the fps changes so much that I get the stuttering.

Thanks!

I have the same problem so i think to stick to the LE.

Eh, I'm still gonna play SE. The game and modding seem much much more stable in general and the old skyrim is 32bit which pretty much caps your mods at 4gb because limited ram.

So I was able to cap SE at 4k, 30fps but something weird happens. Before I capped it, the lowest FPS I ever got was 34fps. After I capped it, I get dips to 29fps sometimes.

I was having the same issue (I have GTX960M) and couldn't figure out why I was having such terrible performance. In my case, the game was trying to use my integrated graphics card instead of the Nvidia one. I went to the Nvidia control panel and changed it to use Nvidia and now it runs fine. Just thought I'd post this here in case anyone else might have an integrated card and suffers the same issue.

Typical Bethesda game performance, really.

I've locked the game at 30 fps using RivaTuner and used the iFPSClamp setting in the .ini file to strip out microstutter -- the same microstutter trick we've been using since Fallout 3, FFS -- and it performs fine now. It's not optimal, I'd rather play it at a higher frame rate, but without the lock/clamp the FPS jumps around all over the place so much that it gives me motion sickness.

What specifically did you click on in the control center to check which GPU it's using?

This is propably irrelevant, but SSE didn't seem to like running in borderless window on my system. Performance was unacceptable. The moment I set it to fullscreen, it sorted itself out.

Are you not able to go into BIOS to disable your onboard video card, or do you use it for other stuff?

I have AMD HD 7800 and it works fine on ultra.

Not on laptops with Nvidia cards and Intel systems. The Nvidia cards need the Intel card to handle some of the graphics especially 2d and other lower graphical tasks. Bethesda's game likes to start up with 2d graphics and so the Intel card handles that and does not switch to the Nvidia card correctly. This is likely done for power and heat since laptops have a tough time with managing heat and to an extent power.

Somewhat good news, nvidia came out with a driver and GeForce experience update, you can now optimize skyrim se with GeForce. I was able to get 48-60fps with the optimal settings. I decided to just play on ultra in 4K caped at 30fps. If console users can do it, so can I. I even get 4K and they don't hahaha

Turn off/lower God Rays, shadow distance etc, God Rays is a real fps killer on FO4 it'll bring my 1080 to it's knees on Ultra.

the gtx970 isn't really a good card, if you want to run modern games at 2160p, is it?

I guess even my new 1070 will struggle to get close to 60fps on newer games with a resolution like this.

SSE has got some pretty heavy light effects, so the performance hunger is expected ^^

NVIDIA Inspector is a great tool to cap your framerate.

You can even decide whether you want exactly 30 or 35, 40, 45 etc.