It seems that after i play for a hour + (it varies) my fps completely dies in any outdoor area, before it dies it's 60 FPS in most areas.

maybe you have a background program running...

Would steam Cause this?

No.

Well, it depends - in my case if a play with or without steam enabled it makes no different. !!!!!!

Try to go offline. (Steam -> Go offline -> [ RESTART IN OFFLINE MODE ])

Ahh...we got the answer. Thanks to deaths_souls.

Steam is required for Skyrim to run. It automatically stops all downloads when you load a game unless you tell it otherwise. The only thing that would cause Steam to slow games down would be if it's downloading something in the background, which it doesn't do by default. Unless you tell it to do that, it wouldn't be causing it.

Ok thanks i'm going to mess about with a few settings to see if i can find the cause.

Just put shadow quality to high and it's fixed.

I'm having this problem in FNV. Think its overheating. Usually around 65-70*c.

Your GPU or CPU ????

if it's the GPU it's pretty okay !!!!!!!

If you have the i series Intel CPU those can go until 73C tops. (depends which one actually you have)

If you have FX series those can go until 70C tops. (and again it depends on the CPU)

Hmm, I'm using Core Temp which is measuring the temperature of the 4 cores in my last gen i7. 2630QM Sandy Bridge if that helps.

I googled a little and found that other with those CPU have stated tempepatures 70C-93C.

The thing is that this processor can go until 100C. !!!!! (Yes, that's right...)

So you are actually pretty good at those temperatures.

You could try Speed fan 4.49 too. http://www.filehippo.com/download_speedfan

I'm guessing you will get other temperatures instead.

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So i wouldn't bother about that because at the worst scenario if you hit the threshold you CPU will be underclocked automatically. !!!!!

Thank you Mark41!